Day #3: “Praying Together for a Building”
During 40 Days Praying Together we will be asking you to pray for three things. Today we will look at the first of those three.
(1.)Please commit to praying daily that God would help us and guide us in our search for a building that would help us serve the university and medical community in Oakland.
Here are some background thoughts on that prayer request.
1 Thess. 4:9 -11 Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, 10 for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, 11 and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, 12 so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.
Last Spring our congregation recommitted itself to a ministry that serves the university and medical community in Oakland. That has been core to our identity since our inception 20 years ago, but this was the first time we articulated in the form of a common commitment. Now, to be clear, that does not mean that our church is exclusively for one certain kind of people or that you have to live in a certain area to come. Nor do we think that this kind of ministry is more valuable than any other.
The reason that we specified this commitment is because ministry in Oakland is hard, and unless we stay focused on that calling, we will drift away from it. There are a lot of people that live in and around Oakland, and very few churches that serve them. When we relocated into the heart of Oakland about 17 years ago, the (then) pastor at Bellefield Presbyterian Church offered us a very gracious reception. He said bluntly, “Oakland is an under-churched area, and we are glad that you are here to join in the work.” Since that time, many churches have come and gone. The cost of property is high and the people who live close by are very transient. Both of those factors war against ministry stability. The temptation to slide outward away from this key area is often very strong. Property just a few miles away from Oakland is significantly less expensive.
And yet Oakland offers really unique ministry opportunities. To start with, there is the sheer number of people. There are 22,000 residents in Oakland, plus 30,000 students at Pitt and 16,000 at CMU. The students are at a critical stage in their life and it is essential that they have access to faithful ministry. Among the number of students, there are many international students who travel here for their studies. For some of them this may be the only time in their life that they have freedom to hear religious ideas openly. Beyond that, countless* numbers of people work in the hospital system of Pittsburgh. Some of them rotate into the area for periods of training and are located in regions that surround Oakland. Even as we move into some of the neighborhoods that immediately surround Oakland there are not a lot of Bible-believing churches in those areas.
If we want to maintain our proximity to this fertile mission field, it’ll take work. For the past 20 years God has helped us to keep a toehold in Oakland. This has been a cause of praise to him. But as we look forward at the next 20 years, it seems that the ministry would be far more stable if we could have control over our meeting space. Having our own meeting space would greatly reduce our volunteer time and we would not be at the mercy of the landlord for whether we can continue to meet there.
Which brings me back to our introductory verse. The Apostle Paul told the Ephesians that they were to “walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.” This is an interesting verse. It indicates that there is a wrong kind of dependence. Or at least a type of relationships in which dependency is not helpful. Since the beginning of the paragraph is all about brotherly love, it would seem apparent that he is not warning us to avoid dependence upon other Christians. Love often brings mutual inter-dependence. It seems rather that we are to avoid improper dependence upon outsiders.
However, you look at it right now, we are currently dependent upon outsiders. We would survive if WT closed or stopped renting to us. But it would throw a huge wrench in our plans. It seems to me that the things that Paul lists in this paragraph are aspirational. That is, they are things that we want but can’t fully control. We can’t control whether people see our walk as being “proper.” Sometimes we are forced out of “quiet lives” and not all of us have the choice of working “with our hands.” But these are things we can value and pursue.
Which brings us to our second (and final) observation. After a year of pursuing a building in Oakland, we concluded that there was no immediate path forward that we could take in our own strength. The gap between what a building would cost and what we could afford was just too great. So, we need to ask God to do something. He could… provide a new building we never imagined. He could provide funds that we never dreamt of. He could change us and help us to see that we can fit in an existing space. He could also tell us to keep marching through the wilderness without a building and trust him to sustain us. But right now, our goal is to pause and pray. And then watch for what God might be doing.
Please join us in praying daily that God would help us and guide us in our search for a building that would help us serve the university and medical community in Oakland.
*The number of people who work in the hospital system in/around Oakland is not really “countless”, but it was far harder to find those numbers than for the numbers of Oakland, Pitt and CMU. But you can imagine how many people are tied into those systems – many of you reading this are yourself connected to those systems.