Today in the Mission Yearbook - Praying intimately, with expectation and power

8 Habits of Evangelism author says prayer is the only way we can live like Jesus

February 22, 2023

Photo by Jon Tyson via Unsplash

As he began to talk exclusively with unchurched people, Dr. Tom Bagley heard the same thing again and again from people who were spiritually curious about God and faith: They wanted nothing to do with the church because of its hypocrisy, judgmentalism and exclusivity.

“People spoke about the brokenness they’d feel after dealing with church,” Bagley said. “Which is about us, our lifestyle and how we’re [not] living out what we are talking about.”

During that time, Bagley, who was starting a new worshiping community after leading an established PC(USA) congregation for 18 years, realized churches could no longer wait for people to come to them.

“If we’re ever going to bring perspective to the Christian church and its message, we need to go where people are,” he said. “With an alternative, distinct way of living that is all about our habits and practices.”

This is why Bagley, who is now a church revitalization and evangelism consultant and pastor of a small Presbyterian congregation in Normandy, Tennessee, chose to write about prayer in the 8 Habits of Evangelism resource produced by Theology, Formation & Evangelism ministries.

During an online discussion recently, Bagley said that a work by Alan Kreider, which focused on the distinctive habits of Christians in the early church, changed his life.

“The early Christian communities grew by leaps and bounds,” Bagley said. “There was a radical welcome for diversity of people.  They were not just teaching beliefs about Jesus but practicing the things Jesus taught.”

As he reflected on the Book of Acts and its stories of the early Christians loving their enemies and showing generosity by taking care of everyone including the poor, Bagley made observations about their prayer habits.

“I saw intimacy, how they related to God as Jesus did,” Bagley said. “Concerned about everyone and everything, they prayed for courage to stand up to systemic persecution.”

They also had expectations that they were going to see God’s activity, which gave him pause. “How often do we pray and forget about it, with expectation that God would do something?” he asked.

The Rev. Dr. Tom Bagley

The early church also prayed with power, which Bagley said was the Holy Spirit magnified when they prayed.

The congregation Bagley serves as a part-time pastor had no online presence until the pandemic, which he says helped the church to begin to look outward. Members and friends began to see new ways of God’s activity through people yearning for justice and dignity.

Now every Sunday, people who live even a block from the church join them for online worship.

“We had no idea they had spiritual yearnings, or that they were hungry for God,” Bagley said. “They’ll probably never come inside to church. But now, people who drive in and out of this neighborhood for church have an incredible connection.”

And once churches start talking about outward presence in the community, Bagley says, prayer becomes incredibly important.

“Because how can you and I live like Jesus?” he asked. “The only way is through prayer. That’s when you begin to see where God is at work, active in our neighbors, our coworkers, our communities — in the world.”

Normandy Presbyterian Church has started the practice of prayer walking in the neighborhood around the church. One day Bagley and a congregant met someone suffering from neck pain.  They asked if they could pray for him, which they did. Calling it a good thing, Bagley said they came back later to see how he was doing.

The man’s physical situation hadn’t changed, but here’s what he said to them: “I haven’t known people in the church in a really long time.  But it means so much to me that you care and are interested enough in me to check on me.”

“I believe that’s how it happens, how people get cured,” Bagley said.

Bagley hopes Presbyterians will take these practices of prayer, along with other the habits of evangelism, and begin to practice them in a regular and disciplined way, with more intentionality.

For if we pray with intimacy, expectation and power, Bagley said he’s convinced the world will notice and be drawn to Jesus, and to the communities that follow Jesus.

Paul Seebeck, Retired Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Manuel Silva-Esterrich, Manager, Call Process Support, Ordered Ministry & Certification, Office of the General Assembly
T. Clark Simmons, Senior Church consultant, Atlanta GA, Church Engagement, Board of Pensions

Let us pray

Lord, thank you for making us participants in your work. Please allow us to come together to share in your plans for Creation and to place your plans above our own. Keep us in your love and grace. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Praying intimately, with expectation and power

8 Habits of Evangelism author says prayer is the only way we can live like Jesus

March 2, 2022

Dr. Tom Bagley, Jr.

As he began to talk exclusively with unchurched people, Dr. Tom Bagley heard the same thing again and again from people who were spiritually curious about God and faith: They wanted nothing to do with the church because of its hypocrisy, judgmentalism and exclusivity.

“People spoke about the brokenness they’d feel after dealing with church,” Bagley said. “Which is about us, our lifestyle and how we’re [not] living out what we are talking about.”

During that time, Bagley, who was starting a new worshiping community after leading an established PC(USA) congregation for 18 years, realized churches could no longer wait for people to come to them.

“If we’re ever going to bring perspective to the Christian church and its message, we need to go where people are,” he said. “With an alternative, distinct way of living that is all about our habits and practices.”

This is why Bagley, who is now a church revitalization and evangelism consultant and pastor of a small Presbyterian congregation in Normandy, Tennessee, chose to write about prayer in the 8 Habits of Evangelism resource produced by Theology, Formation & Evangelism ministries.

During an online discussion recently, Bagley said that a work by Alan Kreider, which focused on the distinctive habits of Christians in the early church, changed his life.

“The early Christian communities grew by leaps and bounds,” Bagley said. “There was a radical welcome for diversity of people.  They were not just teaching beliefs about Jesus but practicing the things Jesus taught.”

As he reflected on the Book of Acts and its stories of the early Christians loving their enemies and showing generosity by taking care of everyone including the poor, Bagley made observations about their prayer habits.

“I saw intimacy, how they related to God as Jesus did,” Bagley said. “Concerned about everyone and everything, they prayed for courage to stand up to systemic persecution.”

They also had expectations that they were going to see God’s activity, which gave him pause. “How often do we pray and forget about it, with expectation that God would do something?” he asked.

The early church also prayed with power, which Bagley said was the Holy Spirit magnified when they prayed.

The congregation Bagley serves as a part-time pastor had no online presence until the pandemic, which he says helped the church to begin to look outward. Members and friends began to see new ways of God’s activity through people yearning for justice and dignity.

Now every Sunday, people who live even a block from the church join them for online worship.

“We had no idea they had spiritual yearnings, or that they were hungry for God,” Bagley said. “They’ll probably never come inside to church. But now, people who drive in and out of this neighborhood for church have an incredible connection.”

And once churches start talking about outward presence in the community, Bagley says, prayer becomes incredibly important.

“Because how can you and I live like Jesus?” he asked. “The only way is through prayer. That’s when you begin to see where God is at work, active in our neighbors, our coworkers, our communities — in the world.”

Normandy Presbyterian Church has started the practice of prayer walking in the neighborhood around the church. One day Bagley and a congregant met someone suffering from neck pain.  They asked if they could pray for him, which they did. Calling it a good thing, Bagley said they came back later to see how he was doing.

The man’s physical situation hadn’t changed, but here’s what he said to them: “I haven’t known people in the church in a really long time.  But it means so much to me that you care and are interested enough in me to check on me.”

“I believe that’s how it happens, how people get cured,” Bagley said.

Bagley hopes Presbyterians will take these practices of prayer, along with other the habits of evangelism, and begin to practice them in a regular and disciplined way, with more intentionality.

For if we pray with intimacy, expectation and power, Bagley said he’s convinced the world will notice and be drawn to Jesus, and to the communities that follow Jesus.

Paul Seebeck, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Shelly Lewis, Administrative Manager, Controller’s Office, Administrative Services Group (A Corp)
Tony Lewis, Operations & Accounting Associate, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation

Let us pray

Lord, thank you for making us participants in your work. Please allow us to come together to share in your plans for Creation and to place your plans above our own. Keep us in your love and grace. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Mother knows best

Mom gives 8 Habits of Evangelism author a lifetime of lessons about the practice of justice

February 21, 2022

The Rev. Dr. Ralph B. Watkins

Saying that “love leads to justice,” the Rev. Dr. Ralph B. Watkins said his mother always told him that “God is on the side of justice.”

With that, Watkins, professor of Evangelism and Church Growth at Columbia Theological Seminary, explained why he chose to write about justice for the new 8 Habits of Evangelism resource produced by Theology, Formation & Evangelism.

“My mother said, ‘Boy, you got to write that lesson,’” Watkins said.

“That’s why I got involved,” Watkins told a digital audience gathered for the first of eight weekly webinars, which featured the authors of each of the eight identified habits of evangelism — justice, radical welcome, worship, sacraments, prayer, fellowship, teaching and generosity.

Watkins said his mother taught him a valuable lesson when he was a young Sunday school student about the importance of hearing and then responding to the church’s call to justice and equality.

In Sunday school, he was the star pupil. But his classmate Debra was much smarter than he was. On Fridays they would do the lesson together but on Sunday, Watkins was the interpreter.

One day his mother pulled him aside and asked him, “Why is it that Debra tells you everything on Friday, but you won’t tell about Debra on Sunday?”

And then she “left it,” Watkins said.

Eventually one Sunday Watkins told his teacher, Miss Thomas, that everything he knew was because Debra taught him. It’s the first time he remembers his mom saying she was “proud of him.”

“She taught me to see the injustice of sexism in the Black church,” Watkins said. “She showed me how it happened and that if you see something, you should say something. And I called it out. Debra was the brilliant one, not me.”

But for Watkins it’s not enough just to say something. One must do something for justice because Jesus showed us that justice is what love looks like publicly. In his writing about the practice of justice, Watkins says:

“The people knew something was different about the ministry of Jesus and they responded, they followed because as trite as it sounds, Jesus was a person of his word. He didn’t just preach the Gospel, he brought good news in word and deed.”

“Justice rights the wrongs, challenges systems of oppression, assaults systems of stratification and meets the needs of all. Jesus challenges the traditional order of things, the hierarchy and the staunchness of stale ministry that is locked in a building and rarely hits the streets.”

Watkins’ mother just had cancer surgery in Orlando, Florida. She’d had a blood clot. She couldn’t get an intensive care unit bed because all beds were being used by COVID-19 patients. One day, as Watkins sat with his mother at the floor of the hospital she was on, there were six blue calls. Coronavirus patients in their 30s and 40s had been moved to the floor, and they were dying.

When Watkins told his mother what the blue calls were about, she said to him, “You know you always wanted to be born in the 1930s and 1940s so you could have been part of the civil rights movement? Well, guess what? Now is your time.”

As they reflected together on what happens when a pandemic gets politicized — people losing their lives, more and more children contracting the virus, and a disproportionate number of people of color being affected — Watkins’ mother made lists of poverty and justice issues and how to organize to make the world a better place.

Telling him she didn’t have long to live, his mother said, “But I’ve got hope in you and those people you teach in that school in Atlanta that you will all make a difference.”

“We are in the midst of the greatest crisis of power in our lifetime,” Watkins said, calling it “an issue of justice.”

“But we’re going to be all right because we’re under the Word,” he said. “We’re going to complete the race. And prepare to hand the baton off to those coming along beside us and behind us. Because every generation has the struggle to fight. And my mother will smile on us here and when she goes up to glory.”

Paul Seebeck, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Rebecca Kueber, Desktop Publisher & Formatter, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
Katherine Kupar, Communications Specialist, Presbyterian Association of Musicians

Let us pray

Great God, bless the hearts and hands of those who work in your name. Bless those they help, those with whom they travel, those who host them and those who hear their stories. Give us heart to live as witnesses in all the places where the presence of faith shouts hope, despite all the chaos of our world and its disasters! Amen.