Praying in Three Colors: 70 Days of Prayer for the Health of your Local Church Based on the Teachings of Natural Church Development

By Curtis Peters

This is a daily prayer and devotional tool for church members, along with some brief teachings that focus their daily prayers.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634135351

Book preview

reserved.

Introduction: A User’s Guide

This guide is intended to lead you on a journey of prayer for the health of your local church. It has been designed for churches that are working through Natural Church Development (NCD) in order to help their members engage more fully with the principles of NCD on a personal level. The health of a local church is largely dependent upon the health of its members, and so inevitably, any successful attempt to improve the overall health of a church will require that the members of the church become healthier through the process.

In order for that to happen, everyone needs to engage the process and seek to put into practice the NCD principles for themselves. The members cannot simply sit back and wait for their church leadership to get the church back on track, develop a strategy to increase attendance or to become healthier; they must get personally involved. Certainly the leadership of a church has a critical responsibility in charting the course towards greater church heath. No amount of individual effort on behalf of the members can turn around a church that is stuck in unhealthy patterns that the leadership is unwilling to address.

Nonetheless, church health is intricately linked to the health of those who make up the body of Christ in any given place. NCD is based on solid research from around the world, but its ability to help a church become healthier depends on whether or not the members of a church truly embrace the principles. Everyone needs to choose to live differently, to learn from one another, and to do their part in helping the church grow towards health. All parts of the body need to be healthy because they are interconnected.

As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 12:21-22: The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable (NIV). Every member of the body of Christ is indispensable to the health of the whole. As such, any church health initiative must extend to everyone in the body if it is truly going to be successful. That is the purpose of this guide – to help all of your indispensable members get personally involved in the health of your church.

This guide can be used in several ways. Ideally it will be used in conjunction with an NCD initiative in your local church, although this does not have to be the case. Anyone can benefit from working through these principles on their own, regardless of whether or not their church is working through NCD. However, church health is always best developed in the context of community, so whenever possible I do recommend that you work through these principles with as many people from your church as possible. It is designed to be part of a 10 week campaign. There is something powerful about a whole church praying and reflecting about the same things at the same time, seeking God together for the health and well-being of their church. Whether your church is new to NCD or a seasoned veteran in the process, this guide can help your members to gain a sense of unity and collaboration as they work through this together.

The guide has been designed for use by individuals because the goal is to help each member of a church to engage the NCD principles for themselves. Nevertheless, I encourage you to look for creative ways to use this guide in the context of community. Smaller groups may want to work through it with each person going through it individually, and then discussing together what they learned and experienced. It is highly important to share what you are learning with others in your community of faith, and to learn together with them, and smaller groups are a great setting in which to do so. Your learning will be greatly enhanced by processing these principles with others in your church family, especially those who may be quite different than you are.

Much of this guide is based upon the Trinitarian Compass, a powerful NCD teaching that helps each member of the body of Christ to learn from those who are different than they are. It will be addressed in more detail throughout this guide, but for those of you who may not be familiar with it, allow me to give you a brief explanation.

The Trinitarian Compass uses 3 colors (green, red and blue) to express how Christians relate to the triune God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The colors come from the metaphor of light, based on 1 John 1:5 where it says: God is light. Light is comprised of 3 primary colors (green, red and blue), and this has become a helpful metaphor within the NCD framework for understanding how we can relate to God in his 3 Persons. Some of us might naturally relate more to God the Father, our Creator (green), others might naturally relate more to Jesus (red), and still others might naturally relate more to the Holy Spirit (blue). It is natural for us to be drawn to one member of the Trinity more than the others, along with all the corresponding emphases of that particular Person in the Godhead (as we will see throughout this guide). Nonetheless, we do ourselves a disservice when we focus exclusively on certain aspects of the character of God and neglect others.

The purpose of a compass is to show us where we are currently in relation to our desired destination. The purpose of the Trinitarian Compass, therefore, is to show us which Person(s) of the Trinity we currently relate to best, and which direction we need to go in order to get closer to God in his fullness, symbolized by the white light at the center of the compass where the three colors converge in perfect unity. In order to get from one part of the compass to the center, we need to walk towards the color(s) on the opposite side. In other words, we need to learn from those who are most different from us – those who are strong where we are weak – in order to become more like God in all 3 of his colors.

The goal is not to diminish our own strengths, the ways that we relate to God in powerful ways. Rather, the goal is to become even stronger by not only knowing God in one color, but in all three. The best way to do this is to humbly seek to learn from those who are different than us. This is not to say that we need to accept everything about them; in fact, we shouldn’t because those who are different than us undoubtedly are weak in areas where we are strong – and we don’t want to fall into their weakness! However, too often we look at other people’s weaknesses and fail to learn from their strengths. The tragedy of this is that we fail to learn from them about the very nature of God. It is my hope that as you pray through this guide you will recognize your own natural tendencies, as well as the ways that you can learn from others on the other side of the Compass. I believe that this will help you to come to a greater experience of God in his glorious light, comprised of his three radiant colors.

There are four components to each day of prayer in this guide, each designed to help you better understand and put