Once a month ECPC is contacted by her grandma (Christ Covenant Church) simply to ask, “How can we be praying for you?” In case you weren’t aware, ECPC’s mom is Uptown Church (Uptown CLT, NC), and our mom’s mom is Christ Covenant Church (Matthews, NC). I always enjoy receiving this inquiry from grandma because it is an invitation to rummage anew in the well-stocked pantry of God’s Word. I want our grandmother to feast upon Scripture as she exercises her privilege to pray for us, and I desperately want her to intercede on our behalf by pleading with God to make what’s revealed in His Word manifest and substantially true in our local and particular church and ECLT community.

Here’s what I asked grandma to pray for in November:

  1. Pray that dozens of ECPC members would have God hijack their business meetings and entertainment endeavors with EVANGELISTIC conversations. Pray that their clients, co-workers, employees, neighbors, etc. would ask ECPC members about Isaiah 53 saying, “How can I understand this unless someone guides me?” …whereupon these non-Christians would invite the ECPC members to sit with them and explain the passage that reads, “Like a sheep He was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so He opens not His mouth. In His humiliation justice was denied Him. Who can describe His generation. For His life is taken away from the earth.”
  2. Pray that the ECPC elders and deacons would strive for what is described in prayer request #1 and thereby faithfully fulfill their vow in BCO 8.3  (Set a worthy example to the flock entrusted to their care by their zeal to evangelize the unconverted and make disciples).
  3. Pray that the leaders of ECPC – followed by the flock – would become like children, and truly enter the kingdom of heaven …humbling ourselves like a child and thus becoming “the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
  4. Pray that God would give the old Fever Night Club to Project 658 and that God would thoroughly, robustly, excellently, and beautifully use that building 7 days a week to bring radical and manifest pleasure and glory to Himself …and pray that ECPC would be involved in the ministry of Christ in and around that place as a worshiping at the feet of Jesus community – in a way similar to Lazarus’s sister Mary (see Luke 10:42 and Mark 14:8-9).
  5. Finally, pray that if any adopted sibling in Christ sins against another adopted sibling – that they would clearly, confidently, and directly go to their sibling (between just the two of them alone) and speak the truth in love (confronting them as one who is truly in Christ/spiritual [see Galatians 6]). If the sibling doesn’t listen, then pray that one or two others would join in the effort – that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the sibling still refuses to listen to them – pray that the church would be appealed to. And if the sibling still refuses to listen even to the church, then pray that we would exercise the courage and the confidence that is ours in the irrevocable union we have with Christ to deliver the sibling to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that their spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.