Pastor Louis Rosenthal sits at his desk, praying through a list of one hundred names from his neighbourhood in McKinney, Texas. He had printed the list from Pray4EveryHome.com, a tool his congregation uses to pray specifically — by name — for all their neighbours. Afterward, Pastor Louis makes a lunchtime run to the store. As he stands in the checkout line, he notices a woman nearby is crying softly. Pastor Louis asks if he can help. After a few moments’ earnest conversation, he leads the woman to faith in Christ. As Pastor Louis heads back to his office, he is praising God for the unexpected “divine appointment.”

Along the way, however, the woman’s name keeps bobbing around in his head. Why is it so familiar? When he gets back to his desk, he realises: She was one of the one hundred people for whom he had just been praying. Stories like this are surfacing continually in McKinney, ever since Collin Baptist Association launched the Pray4EveryHome (P4EH) tool two years ago, said Vince Smith, the association’s director of missions.

A database generates neighbourhood maps with householdlevel attributes, including names, addresses, age groups, marital status, presence of children, education level, ethnicity, language spoken in the home, and length of residence. Individual church members can use the lists to pray by name for their neighbours, and promote church outreaches like food drives, block parties, or neighbourhood Bible studies.”Church members may have apprehensions going into a community,” Rosenthal said. “Now we can pray for the people by name before we even knock on the door. This gives people the strong feeling they are going somewhere God is already at work.”

Source: Pray4EveryHome; The Christian Telegraph

Bible Study: Isaiah 45:2

JUNE PRAISE GOD for Pastor Rosenthal and his church who are seeing the results of persevering and purposeful prayer, and God moving in neighbour’s lives as the church prays for them. Pray for P4EH to be adopted by many more churches.