| By
Michael Wacht
PALM BAY — More than a year ago, the Rev.
Debbie Mak and the members of Fellowship United Methodist Church here
started two prayer journals on a trip around Florida. Although the
plan was for the two respective journeys to take about a year, the
journals have taken on a life of their own and are now only about
halfway home.
Mak said the plan was for each church to keep a
journal for two weeks. Members were to spend that time celebrating and
praying for what previous churches had put in the journal and add
their own prayers. Each church had a third week to carry the journal
to its next destination.
One journal passed through the Broward Palm
Beach District (formerly the West Palm Beach District) during last
year’s Celebrate Jesus Mission and became the focus of meditation
for one church. Last November it was at Hyde Park United Methodist
Church when a staff member was killed in a car accident.
“Maybe the journal is…going where it needs
to go,” Mak said.
The idea for the journals originated during a
Sunday night Bible study group at the church in February 2001, Mak
said. The group was reading a book by the Rev. Dr. Terry Teykl, a
United Methodist elder from Texas and full-time prayer evangelist.
Teykl wrote about a group of pastors in Arizona who drove around the
state praying for awakening.
The idea of driving around Florida was not
practical, so church members decided to let a prayer journal make the
trip instead. To make the journey easier, two journals were created.
One was sent north and the other south.
The journals were consecrated on Easter 2001 and
sent on their way. The southbound journal got lost at its first stop,
and when it arrived at the second church, it was so damaged members
had to make another one, Mak said. Since then, it has been as far
south as Marathon Key and traveled up the west coast. It was in
Lakeland for the Florida Annual Conference Event in May.
The northbound journal traveled through Daytona
Beach before going inland to Gainesville and up to Lake City near the
Florida/Georgia border. After annual conference, it headed to Palatka.
Mak had a chance to look at the journals when
they were reunited in Lakeland during the annual conference event. She
said they had become like scrapbooks, with pictures and mementos from
some of the churches. Some prayers were hand-written on colored paper
and some were typed on church stationery.
The Rev. Jay Goforth, pastor of Carlson Memorial
United Methodist Church in LaBelle, is the one pastor who has
experienced both journals. He was pastor at Community United Methodist
Church in Daytona Beach when the northbound journal passed through,
and the southbound one met him at his current church.
Goforth said the journals are a microcosm of the
current situation in the United Methodist Church. “We are in that
struggling stage between fighting the sacred cows of the 20th century
and looking forward to God’s seeds of opportunity for the 21st
century,” he said.
“As I went through the journals…, I was
struck by the extreme diversity of what people wanted to express,”
he said. “It was feast or famine. Churches were either mourning the
absence of God’s presence or celebrating the presence of God.
“It was a heart-wrenching experience to read
the prayer needs of some of the churches. Other churches included
pictures of church people…youth groups and were celebrating the fact
that these folks were coming and the groups were growing. Their prayer
was, ‘Keep going.’ ”
Mak said she noticed a profound change in the
tenor of the prayers after Sept. 11, 2001. “When they were first
sent out, the intention was for them to be an opportunity to pray for
the state, conference and renewal in our church,” she said. “They
were designed to be intercessory prayer journals on behalf of an
evangelistic effort…but a lot of the prayers were personal, ‘Pray
for my cousin,’ ‘Pray that I find a job.’ ”
Mak said even those who wanted prayer for other
people were praying for people who impacted their own lives.
“Then I hit the ones for Sept. 11…Instead of
self-serving prayers, they became other-serving prayers…prayers for
our nation, New York, the firefighters who died, the people on the
planes and in the buildings. The prayers were more outwardly focused,
instead of inwardly focused.”
Mak said what she read made her think more
deeply about the meaning of prayer. “God is calling us to look
beyond ourselves and pray for the sake of our world,” she said. “Tragedies
shake us and make us realize we’re part of something bigger than
ourselves in the Body of Christ.”
Goforth sees the journals’ value in their
ability to connect diverse churches. “For some churches, if they did
go through and pray for the prayer concerns and express joy for the
joys…it was an experience of ‘Wow! We’re not alone.’ ” |
