This Thursday was the National Day of Prayer, and we’re honored to feature a blog written by the coordinator of the inaugural UB School of Prayer! Anne Freeman lives in Roslindale and works as a free-lance American Sign Language interpreter. She also serves as Coordinator of New England Deaf & Hard of Hearing Ministry under the umbrella of The American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts. Anne is married and has a teenage daughter. Read below to hear about how prayer can be a powerful tool for nurturing spiritual unity across Christians.

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Prayer is a uniting practice that we as Christians participate in, but due to COVID 19, we’ve had limited opportunities to pray together in person. I was feeling a bit frustrated over the lack of places for us to go deeper in prayer, both in learning about it as well as praying together.  To my knowledge, there were no initiatives that provided both learning and praying with others, so I sensed an invitation from God to take the initiative and see what might be done to go deeper in prayer with Christians throughout the city.

After some conversations and prayer with leaders from my house church, I checked with Rev. Kelly Fassett, team leader for UniteBoston, to see if I could serve under that umbrella to offer both teaching on prayer and prayer itself. She agreed to give me a chance to try something new, and the UniteBoston School of Prayer was born!

Ideas came to mind for what this might look like: sessions that offered teachings on a variety of topics related to prayer from a variety of places in the Body of Christ in the greater Boston area. An opportunity for both lay people and professional clergy to do the teachings.  A format for the participants to pray together, using what they had just learned and in so doing, maturing in their understanding, experience and expression of prayer.  

I also strongly value the mission of UniteBoston, which encourages unity by encouraging us to focus on what we all have in common.  I think praying together and sharing what we’ve learned with each other is a way to pursue God’s dream for unity as we “major on the majors.” Above all, I recognized that the way we grow in prayer is by praying!

I created a flyer and was able to line up six great teachers from a broad spectrum of Christian backgrounds to lead the first six meetings: Joy Niemiera, Doreen Bennett, Pastor Dave Hill, Lorienne Schwenk, Pastor Kathleen Verna, and myself.  We covered our own personal prayer histories, intercessory and contemplative prayer, Lectio Divina, going from duty to delight, praying the Word, and the ACTS acronym.

 In the survey that I sent after the sessions were over, I learned that many appreciated the chance to be part of the meetings and thought it made for greater learning to move out of the circles they normally fellowship in.  They felt enriched in their understanding of the aspects of prayer that were covered, and found what we were doing to be refreshing.  These are exactly the things I was hoping for!

It was truly a pleasure for me to see teachers in action. They told me it was an honor and blessing to get the invitation to lead.  I felt like a producer, getting to use my administrative and networking skills to plan and organize these meetings. Zoom proved to be a useful tool because we could not have done this in person.  I suppose I can consider it a pandemic “silver lining”!  

Because all participants were interested in prayer in the first place, they brought a lot to the table regarding knowledge and experience.  These were not rookies! Most of them serve as leaders either in their home churches or in a parachurch organization, however, their humility in realizing that they still have more to learn was evident. 

The first woman to register told me that she felt this was an answer to prayer.  She was just telling God her prayer life was weak and then got the flier about the School of Prayer! 

John Bumyan said “You can do more than pray after you pray, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.” I am convinced that prayer is a primary component of God’s kingdom coming to our city. I was inspired by how God worked through this initiative and am looking forward to hosting another School of Prayer soon!

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We are grateful for Anne taking the initiative to launch and organize the School of Prayer! You can read a summary Powerpoint from each of the sessions here. If you’re interested in being notified for future opportunities such as these, you can contact Anne Freeman at annefreeman14@gmail.com

Today, we’re featuring a reflective piece by UniteBoston’s Team Leader, Rev. Kelly Fassett. Here, Kelly shares a reflection on the jury results this week of the murder of George Floyd, from her perspective as a White person and a mother.

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This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about justice lately and what it means for justice to be served. I recently found a moving poem and painting created by people of color and I wanted to highlight them here.

While a jury in Minneapolis found Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts, this is not the end but a beginning. Attorney General Keith Ellison described that “I would not call today’s verdict justice, however, because justice implies restoration. But it is accountability, which is the first step toward justice.”

Derek Chauvin being held accountable for the murder of George Floyd is just a small drop in the bucket; the racism that people of color face on a day-to-day basis continue to endure, and the struggles remain. It seems like every morning, I wake up and there is another story on the news about a black or brown brother or sister getting shot, or another story about violence towards Asian-Americans. I lament this reality and long for God’s kingdom of holistic peace and justice to come forth in our world: “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream…” (Amos 5:24).

Here is a poem by Chicago-based poet Leslé Honoré that describes raising her Black son in our world today. This hit me deeply as a new mother, recognizing the injustice of how differently my daughter’s experience in life will be, purely based on the color of her skin.

Today we want to highlight the “Hope Rising Gallery” that was installed this weekend in the Boston Common as part of the Embody Conference 2021. Coordinated by the Ministry of City Engagement at Park Street Church, there were 13 different neighborhoods and 39 “neighbors” within a 1-mile radius of Park Street Church featured in the art installation. The conference website describes: “The Son of God put on flesh and moved into our neighborhood. This is called incarnation. Christianity can become an intellectualized set of ideas rather than a way of life. This is called excarnation. Jesus of Nazareth invites us to embody his life in the world.”

The purpose of this gallery is to highlight the stories of the variety of “neighbors” who live within a 1-mile radius of Park Street Church in order to spotlight the “courage and resilience of our community to rise beyond the effects of COVID-19 and to have hope to see justice persist within our city.” Participants could scan the QR codes to hear stories told in their own voices. Whether or not you were able to attend the art installation, we wanted to share with the UniteBoston community a few of the stories that were featured, in hopes that you, too, might see how “hope is rising” in our city.

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This week, our featured blogger is Ellie Wiener, who lives in Beverly and is a member of North Shore Community Baptist Church. Ellie is is a full-time student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. As many are growing weary with dynamics relating to the COVID-19 public health crisis, Ellie shares a powerful reflection and call to action to cling to the resurrection hope found in Jesus Christ because He is our End.

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The end. These sweet words of closure place the period on the best stories, celebrated with a satisfied exhale. How is it that this common phrase of finality has frayed into elusiveness and uncertainty so abruptly? Often when I stop to probe the restlessness I register stirring within my soul, it is this devolution of my sense of “the end” I find churning at the core. I discover that once again, my fickle self sends out grasping hands to latch onto any hopeful statistic, any felicitous daydream of when and how this pandemic will come to an end so life can return to the normalcy we did not know we should have treasured so much.

But then projections prove to be a double-edged sword, for I rarely find congenial the assessments of how long it may take for society to open back up (haltingly, guardedly) to work and gathering, for distribution of vaccines to quell this unwieldy virus. Our best number-crunching and prudent proactivity are a meager match for this invisible yet formidable foe of a virus that keeps demanding more of our calendar, resources, bodies…

And then if I press on still further into the labyrinth of my heart, the dim pathways become only more grim. I encounter what I scarcely dare admit: that I most often, most strongly desire “the end” for myself first. Even though my situation is far less dire—in fact, rather pleasant on the whole—in comparison with the grieving and/or vulnerable millions worldwide who are anxious over lost jobs, pushed to the brink of starvation, mourning a loved one, physically compromised, etc., still I somehow retain the selfishness to wish first for the alleviation of what feels most unideal in my own life. Perhaps you resonate, whatever your situation may be. Yet is not the way of the cross to carry the death of Jesus around in our bodies so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our lives and the lives of those around us (2 Cor 4)? Rather than looking for the quickest escape route from suffering, should we not purposefully ally ourselves with those most likely to linger in suffering long after many have recovered and forgotten? O God, have mercy.

And in God’s mercy, may I—and we, together as the church—absorb and lament the pain of the world through tears of faithful intercession. In God’s mercy, may we enter the specific griefs of our hurting neighbors, with no hurry to exit and no agenda to accomplish other than to bear the presence of Christ in love. In God’s mercy, may we run to the sufferer with the winsome, hope-filled comforts of a tender Savior.

How may this be done? Only if our Lord is our End. We are no longer lost, for we have been found at the End, in the End; we are no longer blind, for we have beheld the End; we are no longer thirsty, for we have drunk to the End. In our God we have encountered all that is substantial and lasting, wholly satisfying truth. No longer must we linger in limbo as we restlessly pine for circumstances to emerge as we would ordain; rather, we are invited to acquiesce delightedly to life and time as God has masterfully ordained them.

What is more, Christian faith would come up tragically short if devoid of eschatology, theology of the end. Paul has said that if only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men (1 Cor 15). I am learning to cling to the resurrection of my Lord as I never have before, trusting that even now in the risen Jesus the Spirit has ushered me into the Father’s presence in the heavenly realms, uniting his people to the divine life and securing the life to come (Eph 2). It is indeed fitting that humans should recoil at the brokenness and darkness of the world, refusing to settle for anything other than wholeness and light. We are only able to stare a sin-scarred world in the face without fleeing in terror or collapsing in despair because we stand with our God who once made and declared everything good; has climactically thwarted death in the cross that gave way to life; and promises to make all things new at last. Then—how my heart burns within me—the end will come. And outstripping our wildest imagination, it will be unshakably and unendingly glorious.

Today, we are honored to feature Erika Anderson as a guest blogger, who writes about the significance of our embodied lives. “Embody: Follow. Seek. Take.” is the theme behind an upcoming conference and public display in the Boston Common coordinated by Park Street Church. Erika is a farm girl from South Dakota but has called Massachusetts home for ten years. She is a lawyer and lives with her husband and three daughters in Brookline. Read below to hear the theme behind the conference, about how Jesus beckons each of us to “embody, follow, seek, and take.”

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“Failure to honor God in the material realm cannot be compensated for by religiosity in the spiritual realm.” ~Chris Wright

Jesus’ arrival on Earth forever negated the notion that material does not matter. The entire material universe matters to God – He created it, and He called it good. And He took on flesh and walked and ate and breathed among us. With us. Even Jesus’ miracles cannot be separated from the body. Guests celebrated by drinking new wine; newly whole bodies walked, and leaped and praised God. When Jesus speaks of who will inherit his Father’s kingdom, he speaks of welcoming bodies: “As you have done to the least of these, you have done onto me” (Mt 25:40).

The Son of God put on flesh and moved into our neighborhood. This is called incarnation. Christianity can become an intellectualized set of ideas rather than a way of life.  This is called excarnation. Jesus of Nazareth invites us to embody his life in the world.

To embody is to give a tangible or visible form to. During the past year, we have been instructed to keep our bodies at home, to keep our bodies distanced, to keep our bodies safe. Yet, as Christians, we are still called to continue to embody the presence of Jesus. We are called to give a tangible form to Jesus’ love in a city that is scared, isolated, unmoored from the familiar, and uncertain about the future. As we dreamed about a conference to engage our city, we knew we wanted to tell stories of Jesus still embodied even this year – perhaps especially this year.

We have invited voices from our city to share their stories, and we invite you to a different kind of a conference: “Embody: Follow. Seek. Take.” EMBODY is a week of community happenings about incarnating the Presence of Jesus in the City.

We will consider three of Jesus’ invitations and promises through the lenses of these voices in the city: 

(1) Follow me and I will make you fishers of the human race (Mt 4:19). We will walk through our neighborhoods and pray for our neighbors. We will listen to the voices of city pastors share how they created community and reached people when their doors were closed. We will hear from professionals – teachers, doctors, professional musicians, and entrepreneurs who pivoted their livelihoods and faced a health crisis unlike our city has ever seen and still found purpose, still found the kingdom at work in the midst of crisis.

(2) Seek first my kingdom, and I will add all these things to you (Mt 6:33). We will hear from an author and creator of authentic communities, Hugh Halter, speak about mission as the everyday stuff of life. We will hear voices in our city from those who sewed thousands of masks to keep our communities safe, who distributed groceries to families. We will hear how kingdom seekers fought food insecurity: from writing grants to support food pantries to food banks packing hundreds of pounds of food each week. We will hear children and teens who shared sandwiches and conversation with people experiencing homelessness at warming centers.

(3) Take my yoke, and you will find rest for your souls (Mt 11:29). Church planter and Park Street Church lead pastor, Mark Booker, will share a good word on taking Jesus’ yoke to find Jesus’ rest. We will hear from college students sharing how they have seen the embodied presence of Jesus during disruption on their campuses. And we will close the Embody conference with a special candlelight vigil, of gratitude for Jesus’ invitations and promises, gratitude for his continued embodied presence among us. 

In a special photography exhibit in the Boston Common throughout the weekend, Hope Rising, we will invite the public to view photographs of people who live and work in our city and listen to their voices share their hopes and dreams for our city. We will invite each of you to add your photo and your hopes and dreams, too. These and so many more opportunities await you to follow, seek, and take during the Embody conference, April 11-18.

The kingdom continues. 

Find out more at https://www.parkstreet.org/cityengagement/embody-conference/