Going Viral: an Interaction between Strategy and Prayer

And Another Thing . . . Going Viral

This past Sunday, after our service in the awesome Carmel Middle School auditorium, we traveled to Soho Café to learn how to go viral.  Before I became a pastor and community builder at The Gathering, I spent 25 years as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company.  At various times in my career I sold antiviral medicines to treat things as diverse as herpes and flu. The fear with all of these viral conditions though, was that a new strain would emerge that the medicines could not contain. If that were to happen, the whole population would become infected and perhaps die.  In my former life, virality was something to be avoided--so it feels strange that now it has become a goal.

Churches throughout history have periodically hit the viral wave. On the day of Pentecost the church began as a prayer group of about 120 and ended the day with more than 3,000 members. This early church exploded when God’s spirit came on the scene. Christ-followers inside a house were so overcome by the presence of the Holy Spirit that they spilled out into the streets where people passing by began to observe and encounter this move of God. These spectators were soon infected with God’s spirit and the whole thing went viral. God and men were joined together until this holy amalgamation snowballed into a revival. As a church word, revival means that a whole lot of people at almost the same time, choose to change their lives and live for God. When revivals happen, society changes.

Every new church is a prayer for revival. The Gathering is such a prayer.  We want our city to change into a place where people love each other and God.  We want to see hope and light flow into our shuttered neighborhoods and “access-controlled” apartments. We want the children growing up on our streets to fear less and play more.  We pray that resources will flow from our community into the whole world to improve the plight of our neighbors everywhere. We want marriages to be renewed and restored. We want there to be a turning of the hearts of the children to their parents, and the hearts of the parents to their young. We want the people in our community to turn from anger and move towards laughter and joy.  We want Carmel to look less like a city of man and more like a city of God. Most of all, we want the people of our city to find their life in the life of Jesus. The Gathering is a prayer for this kind of change.

We have been asking each of you to pray for the imminent launch of The Gathering into our community.  Each day we have suggested topics to be prayed for, and I know that many are faithfully praying for our emergence into Carmel.  Keep it up.  The secret of virality in the church is not so much strategy as it is prayer.  When God shows up, everything changes.  If God does not show up, what we build is ultimately a vanity. 

We want God to inhabit and multiply our various strategies, just as he did for Gideon and Joshua and all the other people of faith in the Bible. So pray for all of those you will be inviting to come to The Gathering on March 4^th.  Pray before you hit the “send” button.  Pray for your neighborhoods as you drive down the streets.  Pray for the homes and businesses all around you as you move in and out of your daily routines.  Prayer makes strategy look brilliant. 

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.