[This post is part of the Start Something New series. Read the other posts here!]

Alex spent her childhood in Romania, and then moved with her parents to Los Angeles, CA where she developed a love for Hip-Hop.  When she was old enough to go to college, she chose Long Beach State because of a renowned dance team on campus.  She auditioned and made the team.

During her first year, Alex met Sarah, who was planting a campus ministry.  “She was extremely missional”, recalls Sarah.  “I reached out to her and invited her to get involved in our ministry.”  When Alex told Sarah that she had always wanted to be a missionary to another country, Sarah said, “Maybe you’re here for a reason—maybe this is your mission field right now”.  They started to meet every week to pray after that.  “When we prayed, I got this growing sense that I was sent to [the dance team]—but I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do.  I started to develop such a love for people on that team”, says Alex.

A guide to help students start new things on campus!

In Start Something New, a handbook for people who want to start missional communities on college campuses, I point out that this is where all genuine Kingdom initiatives find their beginnings—someone begins to sense that God has a role for them among a community of people—and they begin to pray.  Those prayers seem ordinary, but they’re very potent.  God begins to feed our imagination with images and words and faces and visions for what He wants to see happen.  Sarah knew this.  She skillfully guided Alex into a mosaic of expressions of prayer—interceeding for friends by name, praying biblical promises and blessings on the team, asking for opportunities to share the gospel, sitting in silence, allowing God to give her images, words or impressions regarding the dance team, and then debriefing the prayers to interpret and clarify what God seems to be saying.  In this way, Sarah played an incredibly crucial role in Alex becoming an apostle to an unreached, and highly influential community on her campus.

 

Are you sensing that God is sending you to a community of people?

Are you mentoring someone who feels this sense of calling?

The idea of starting a ministry by prayer seems so fundamental and obvious that you’d think everyone would understand how crucial it is.  But a lot of sincere, enthusiastic apostles want to move quickly on their instincts and feel an intense need to figure out what to do next. Others have so much confidence in a strategy or method they’ve learned, that prayer is treated like a formality, a nice benediction on their well made plans.  Enthusiasm, action and strategy are all good things, but they’re no substitute for a God-given vision and sense of calling to lay down one’s life for the sake of others.  I’ve seen a lot of passionate, apostolic people flame out after a few weeks, and I believe the main reason is because they laid a thin, inadequate foundation of prayer.

The message of the Gospel rarely goes forward without some form of suffering and sacrifice on the part of the messenger.  Alex would experience this many times in witnessing to her team.  She often felt misunderstood by both her dance-team and other Christians who didn’t think she should be spending so much time with “those hard-core party-ers”.  Sometimes she was lonely.  She wondered if it was really worth it.  She went through times when she was struggling in her own faith.  And for what?  After two years of reaching out to this community, there didn’t seem to be much to show for it.

And then it happened.

Alex says, “We were performing at an event on campus and there were hundreds of people there.  Just as it was about to end, some random person—I guess she knew I was a Christian—yelled, “Tell Alex to pray for us!”  I looked around, and people started nodding their heads and pointing for me to go up on stage.  It was so weird.  I was totally nervous.  So I went up to the mic and I felt like God was telling me, “This is your chance to show this whole community what’s in your heart”.  So I just started praying from my heart.”

“I don’t even remember what I said.  But when I was done, I opened my eyes and lots of people were crying.  Just tears running down their faces.  And then people were coming up to me and saying, “I don’t know why I’m crying, but thank you for praying like that.”  “I’ve never heard anyone pray like that”.

The leaders asked Alex to pray for the whole team before every performance since then.  All those times of praying for her friends had actually prepared Alex’s heart for that moment when she would be able to pray publicly, and passionately for them in a way that profoundly affected the whole community.  Prayer had been the foundation, and now prayer was becoming a vital part of her witnessing method.

Right now at least a handful of her teammates have decided to follow Jesus and Alex feels that “God isn’t finished yet!”  I believe there is only one explanation for how she was able to hang in there for two years before it was time for this small revival to break out—her sense of calling was clarified, renewed and deepened through prayer.  She and Sarah are both examples for us to follow.

If you would like to buy the “Start Something New” guide you can do so here

[This post is part of the Start Something New series. Read the other posts here!]

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