An article from www.saltlight.org/magazine | © Salt and Light Ministries 2003 | http://europe.saltlight.org/mag/isaacs0309

 

City: Friend or Foe?

Transcribed from a talk at Oxford Community Church, June 2003.
John Isaacs joined the pastoral staff of South Bay Covenant Church, San Jose, California in 1981 and became the senior pastor in 1990. He is the founder and president of Pray The Bay (a ministry that is uniting pastors from the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area). John is married to Leighton and they have four children: Carrie, Andrew, Katie and Christopher.

To talk about this topic is my passion, what God is doing in terms of turning the heart of his church, the heart of his people toward the city that he has planted the church in, and for us to begin to see ourselves as his church in a different light than we have seen ourselves in the past.

The good, the bad and the ugly!

I want to give a brief history lesson of the last 50 years of church life in America, it identifies where we are presently, some of the challenges we are facing as the church in America, and if there is an application for you, looking at the church in England I’m sure you can make that application.

About 10 years ago, a book came out by John Dawson entitled ‘Taking our Cities for Christ’. That was a revolutionary book for the American church to look at. I don’t agree with some of the terminology and the title because I think it’s a little presumptuous for us to say we are going to take our cities for Christ, sounds a little militaristic and triumphant. But in that book, I believe he spoke a prophetic word to the church that God was saying it was time for the church to turn and face the city that the church is in, and engage the city differently than it has in the past. Since that book came out 10 years ago in the US, there has been a significant move that at different times has been called different things, a prayer movement and a unity movement more recently a city reaching movement; but it speaks of this trend that has been moving through the body of Christ in the US that is calling the church to take its place in the city in a different way and to view the city differently and to view itself as a redemptive community differently, and its history.

I want to turn back and give a brief thumbnail sketch of the history of the US.

About half a century ago the church abandoned the cities in the US and moved out to the suburbs; and it wasn’t a bad idea for the church to move out to the suburbs, it’s where the people were living; but as the church went out to the suburbs it began to abandon not just the geography, but the political and social institutions of the city, the economical, educational institutions of the city, the church began to withdraw from. This was a reaction to what has been called the social gospel which was taking Christ out of the picture and placing good works in the picture for the church. As a reaction to that, the church starting pulling out of the city and the institutions of the city as they moved out to the suburbs.

It wasn’t long before the church lost its vision for the city. The church soon began to develop a hostile position for the city. The city was viewed as the enemy of the church, first with the university and the media, the Christian people in the states just kind of gave up on the universities, and Christian colleges and universities sprang up all over America and have been thriving for the last 40-50 years because Christians do not want to put their children in an educational system that is on its way to hell. We abandoned the universities and the media, before long the whole public educational system was abandoned because they had an agenda different to the church, so before long we pulled out of school boards, all the political structures in the city were abandoned by the church, we just turned our back on them, because we didn’t like the direction that the society was moving in so we isolated ourselves from them, trying to protect ourselves.

A fellow by the name of Hal Lindsay came along, who became a great spokesman for dispensational theology and he gave the evangelical church a biblical justification for its reaction to the city. After all, the city was this evil world system that was controlled and dominated by Satan himself, he was out to destroy Christians and the Christian family. It was just going to get worse and worse because this evil world system was going to be the womb that would give birth to the anti-Christ and then would be demanding that we all would get stamped with the mark of the beast. Then there were all those things about what that mark was. Most of the Christians in the US were convinced that the European Common Market was the ten headed beast that was going to give birth to the anti-Christ - you may believe that too, I don’t know! We had this wonderful theology presented to the church that actually gave us justification to further isolate and react to the city that God had put us in.

By the end of the 1960’s evangelical church had become so isolated that it had virtually lost all influence on the life of the city it was in. Then in 1980’s a fellow called Frank Perreti sold well over a million copies of a book called ‘This present darkness’, I don’t know whether you are familiar with this book, it’s a real popular book in the united states. It just further convinced the church that Satan was in control, he was running this world system and it had an agenda that the primary goal of this political, judicial and every social agency in our city was to destroy the life of Christians, that in every agency existed therefore the threat of taking children away from Christians because they may spank them or want to raise them up a certain way. This paranoia just permeated the evangelical church in the United States. The city continued to become a larger enemy in our eyes.

Without being intentional, I think the church put itself in a place where it actually began to curse the city which God had placed us in. Now we curse things in a lot of different ways, sometimes just in our mumbling and grumbling and complaining and I was guilty of that.

We have a city in the bay area, a well known city, San Francisco, and it is an easy city to react to and the church there in the bay area reacted to the city of San Francisco, to the politics of the city, its one of the most liberal cities in the US. We reacted to the lifestyle of the people who lived in San Francisco, to the traffic in San Francisco, the people on the street; if you wore a mink stole you would have a bucket of blood thrown on you, for being cruel to animals. It was an easy city to react to, so that every time I would go to San Francisco I would leave the city saying how much I hated that city. I didn’t like going there, I got lost every time I went there, and I got lost coming out. Our relationship in San Jose was the same as in San Francisco. We had a very liberal mayor who declared San Jose would be the feminist capital of the world, she had a very strong, homosexual agenda in the city and she was very hostile towards the Christian church, which she probably has some justification to be, but we were very reactionary towards the city of San Jose, the church there was just as isolated as San Francisco.

Our relationship with the city became reaction based, every time we engaged the city it was to complain about some legislation we disagreed with or some immorality in a City official. It was always reactionary. We reacted because the city planning commission wouldn’t let us build our churches where we wanted to build them or wouldn’t let us use our church buildings the way we wanted to use them; they further convinced us that they were the enemy, the tool of Satan that we were to come against. We were basically reduced to doing marches for Jesus in the city and we did lots of them and I don’t want to be critical of Marches for Jesus, but the picture to the city was that we were just another reactionary group carrying posters, shouting slogans and walking through the city in a protestant posture.

By the early 90’s the church was being portrayed by the media as being narrow minded, homophobic, intolerant, reactionary and the worst thing imaginable, irrelevant to American Society. A survey was published right about that time that linked all the various vocational callings in the US and rated them in order of trust, how the American people viewed those professions in terms of trust. A pastor came out next to the very bottom of the list in terms of trust of the American people. In fact we only beat the barely used car dealers. That is no reflection on used car dealers but they have a certain stereotype in the US, a certain way we think of used car salesmen.

Introversion

What was it Jesus said in Matthew 5:13 ‘You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its flavour how shall it be seasoned? It’s then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by man. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a lamp stand and it gives light to all of those that are in the house. Let your light so shine before man that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in Heaven’.

I don’t think the church was being Salt and Light any longer in American society. The church wasn’t good for much except to be trampled underfoot.

How did this affect the church’s vision, the vision that the church of America carried. I believe it narrowed vision to such a point that it included ourselves and that was it. We had a vision for our church; we didn’t have a vision for our society. Our vision was for not only the church of Jesus Christ, the vision was for our local church and that was about as far as it went. Our biggest concern was for church growth and how big our church was in comparison to the other churches in the city. We turned inward; we started to compete with one another for all the other Christian s in town.

We found out in San Jose about 15 years ago when we did a survey and collected information; demographics of the Christian community in our city. At the time we had 10 mega churches that were over a couple of thousand members, one of 12,000, and then there were about 700 other churches under 150 people in number and these 10 mega churches were talking about something happening in the city of San Jose; that these churches were growing, their numbers were growing. They found out that by doing these demographics that over a period of ten years, growth of the church had declined in San Jose, and that there had been absolutely no measurable conversion growth in the city. Those 10 mega churches became mega churches on the backs of those 700 small churches that were just fighting to exist. When they became aware of that, all of the small church pastors had a bit of resentment, which was now justified. We had always been a little upset because people were leaving and going to the big mega churches because of all they were offering and now we were justified. We found out these big churches were transfer growth, they were taking people out of our churches. But the beautiful thing was these 10 pastors got down on their knees and repented and asked forgiveness of the pastors in the city, for building their churches at the expense of the other pastors. A real healing began to take place in the pastors of the city.

But we had turned inward; we were competing against one another. Christian literature that was being published was about how to have a bigger church, how to have a better marriage, how to have healthier family or how to get into a recovery programme for your own unique dysfunction. If you went into a Christian bookstore the shelves were just lined with books on marriage, family life and then Christian self-help books, you know how to be set free from whatever your obsessive behaviour was. In fact there were people who were saying there was a virtual reformation taking place about 10 years ago in America bringing the church back to a healing model, and sure it was very good and a lot of people were getting healed. But, everything was turned inward upon ourselves in the church.

Then after a period of time, we started turning upon ourselves and the books that were being published were all criticisms about what others in the church were experiencing. If you had a mega church, there were books about the problems of being a seeker sensitive mega church in America. If you were offering recovery groups in your church there were books criticising that. Then in Toronto, there were plenty of books about what was wrong with the Toronto experience.

So we were turning upon ourselves and the books that were popular to read were attacking different doctrines and experiences. So forget about our cities, we had a new enemy to pick on, one another, which is what happens when you turn inwards and your vision becomes yourself. One of the latest developments in American Christianity was the Toronto Blessing, and as good as it is for a lot of different reasons the end result was people began to approach church as going to get a blessing, it was, all about me! I want God to bless me! We would talk to people who had been to these meetings and they were comparing notes about how much carpet time they were having; how much time they were out in the spirit, how they had had to be driven home because they were so drunk in the Holy Spirit. It was like a badge of honour how many times you had been to Toronto and then laid out and how many hours you were beside yourself! You know, “Come on Lord, bless me”. After all the Church deserved it; after all we had been labouring under this evil world system and dominated by Satan and beat up for years, so we deserve to be blessed. “Me, Me, me come on bless me, lift us up out of this thing, if you not going to rapture us and take us home, at least bless us and make us happy and dumb while we’re here.”

Then a book came out a couple of years ago, a book that sold multiple millions of copies, came out called ‘The Prayer of Jabez’. Now the church was given a theology again to justify its self-interest; now we have a Biblical theology that it’s ok to say “just bless me”. Because after all Jabez did, and look what happened to him! All of a sudden everyone is praying the prayer of Jabez for themselves. We became a church that was totally self-absorbed.

So, when you talk to Christians about having a vision for their city, its swimming upstream against the current that has been taking the church further and further away from the city it has been placed in. That was the condition of the church in America and it’s what we are facing today.

Pray for the peace of the city

But, I believe God has been saying something prophetic about the church re-engaging the city. Proverbs 11: 11 says ‘By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted.’ We aren’t called to be an isolated, reactionary, self interested church; we are called to be salt and light. We are called to be God’s blessing to the city he has put us in, his redemptive people carrying a redemptive message. I believe God wants us to begin to view ourselves as his provision of blessing in the city where he has planted us. I believe it is God’s heart to see cities exalted. I don’t know that God views our city as a demonic world system that Satan is ruling. I think we have a long way to go before we see our cities exalted. It’s because we have a long way to go to get our hearts right so that we can be the blessing that does exalt the city. Another passage in Jeremiah 29:4-7

‘Thus says the Lord of host the God of Israel, to all who were carried away captive, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses and dwell in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit, take wives and beget sons and daughters and take wives to your sons and give your daughters to husbands that they may bear sons and daughters, that you may be increased there and not diminished and seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it because in its peace you will have peace.’

I believe this passage (Jeremiah 29:4-7) should be the church’s vision for the city; I believe this is the heart of God in terms of how the church should relate to the city and the communities that we’re in. Just to put it into context, God’s people had been carried away into captivity. Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon; I mean those words bring up pretty negative connotations for us. The world system has actually been compared to Babylon, it was a tremendously evil place for God’s people to have been carried off to, it was an ungodly city, the leadership was arrogant, boastful and corrupt and the prophets were speaking against the Babylonian oppressors that God would judge them, the false prophets were saying to the children of Israel, “don’t worry, God’s going to get us out of this place, he is going to return us to the land we have been taken from”. The people liked to hear that message, they were in an escapism mentality, they didn’t want to be part of the culture they had been captivated by, they didn’t want to be in Babylon, and their place was Israel, Jerusalem that was where they wanted to be. Actually, the false prophets during the Babylonian captivity, were not a lot different from the Hal Lindsay’s of the 21st century, they were promoting an escapism theology and mentality for the children of Israel. Jeremiah calls them on the carpet; he says these are false prophets. He comes in with a completely different word for the children of Israel. He prophesies something radical. We read that passage and you may not have felt there was a radical message, but this was a radical message for the children of Israel who were in Babylon, to receive this prophetic word from Jeremiah. We have to look at what he was saying to them. This is not what they were hearing; this was totally opposite to what the prophets were saying to them.

His message to them was:

You are not going anywhere for a while. You are not going to be delivered from this city. You’re not going to be raptured out of this captivity, so build houses, put some roots down, plant gardens and eat their fruit, start investing yourself in the economy of this city. You’re going to be here for a while. Take wives, beget sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands. In other words, just plant yourselves in this city of Babylon and start giving increase and looking forward to the future generations and the fruitfulness that is going to be coming in Babylon for you. This was absolutely different from ‘Don’t worry about how bad it is, God’s going to rescue you and get you out of here.’

Jeremiah took it to a different level in verse 7. ‘Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be taken away captive and pray to the Lord for it, and you will have your peace. The word is Shalom, a word so pregnant with meaning for the Jewish people, so Jeremiah is saying to them, because they were praying for the peace of Israel, they were praying for Shalom to be returned to Israel, they were praying for deliverance from their captivity under Nebuchadnezzar, and that they would be restored as the nation where Shalom ruled and reigned in the atmosphere, their vision was back in Israel. And Jeremiah says, wait a minute start seeking the Shalom of Babylon. That is radical! That didn’t fit in their thinking, to believe that Shalom could exist in Babylon. But that was what Jeremiah said to them. Shalom is more than just peace, it’s about God’s blessing, it’s about God’s presence, it’s a word that means wholeness, justice, wellbeing, prosperity, fruitfulness, spiritual health. I mean, Shalom was dwelling in the goodness of God, and where God reigns is where His Shalom is established. So the implication of what Jeremiah is saying is, “Stop having your vision about being the Shalom of Israel. Start seeking the Shalom of Babylon.” That was a radical message! Start seeking the Shalom of Babylon. And then he throws this in ‘Where I have caused you to be carried away’. This isn’t some evil ruler who has taken you out of Israel and you are here because you are being punished, (although there was a certain element of judgement and punishment that was in it, because of their disobedience). I believe God had a heart for Babylon, he wanted to see Babylon exalted, and he wanted to see his Shalom established in Babylon. He took the people out of Israel and put them in captivity; it was a very different way for them to think of their captivity. Jeremiah was saying, ‘Seek the Shalom for the city, before you seek your own Shalom. Before looking after your own well-being seek the well-being of Babylon. Then he says ‘Pray for the City. You can almost seek the Shalom of the city. You could almost interpret it as while we’re here as God’s people, we need to seek an atmosphere of Shalom around our community’. But Jeremiah made it real clear what he was saying, ‘Pray for the city’, in other words this was about the city of Babylon, it wasn’t about the community of God’s people. Pray for the city of Babylon he says, pray to the Lord for this city, pray God’s blessing on this city, pray for the well being of the citizens, and the leadership, pray for the prosperity, the economy and the needs of the city. That was inherent in what Jeremiah was saying, the message is that.

His Shalom

Listen, this is what I want to share with you this morning. This is the vision that God has given us for our city. It’s from Jeremiah 29. It’s the responsibility of God’s people to establish his Shalom in the city. It’s the responsibility of the redeemed community to establish the city as an exalted place. To pray for the blessing of God to be upon the city, that’s our responsibility. If we’re not doing the job, his Shalom will not be upon the city, do you hear what I’m saying this morning. This is not revivalist theology that says pray and wait for a visitation. Jeremiah says seek the shalom of your city. There’s action involved in that, there’s ‘doing something’ involved in that. It’s somehow engaging the city in such a way, that your presence in the city is making a difference. That your presence in the city is making it a more blessed city for people to live in. It’s not revivalist, you know ‘Come Lord Jesus, and bring revival and break down the evil that exists in our city’. It’s saying ‘Get out into the city and be God’s blessing, be Salt and Light’. And, ‘its Shalom is where you will find your Shalom,’ says Jeremiah. It’s a radical agenda for the church. Pray for God’s blessing to be upon your city. Start asking God to bless your city, before you ask God to bless me. Before you pray the Jabez prayer (and I’m not against the Jabez prayer, I think he does a good job in the book justifying that it is just not a selfish agenda), but before you pray the Jabez prayer, ask God to bless Oxford, to increase the city of Oxford. To prosper the city of Oxford, then pray, ‘God bless me and my family, or bless us as a church community in Oxford’. I believe that’s the message of Jeremiah 29 and I believe that’s the vision we should have working in us for the city. To see that God’s provision for his blessing is us. To go into the city everyday with a message of blessing, to look for ways to bless the leaders of the city. To look for ways to bless our next door neighbours, the people who live around us, wouldn’t it be awesome if the whole Christian community in Oxford got up each morning and they stood before the Lord and said ‘Lord I’ve got this day unfolding before me, how can I be your blessing to every person I encounter.’ That would change the way you’re reacting in a long queue in the grocery store. It would change how you react to the people in traffic around you.

One of the elders in our church, his wife, just flipped someone off (gave someone the middle finger) in traffic the other day, because they had cut in front of them. (I’m not going to mention who the elder was, because someday you might meet them). So she did this obscene gesture, out of the window of her car, this sweet little old lady who leads our women’s ministry! The guy in the pick up truck slammed on his brakes in the middle of the intersection, got out of his car and came back to beat up my elder who was driving the car, and he had to apologise for his wife. They came and talked to me about it and I said ‘Maybe the Lord is saying you could have responded differently in that situation. Maybe the Lord wants you to see yourselves as blessing those who cut you off in traffic rather than cursing them with the middle finger out of the window.’

Now that’s a pretty radical example, I trust most of you aren’t out there giving the middle finger to people in the streets. But I think it captures what we’ve done as a church, it justifies our reaction to the unbelievers. We don’t leap over the lost in our city, we react to the lost in the city, and they’ve become our enemy, instead of our mission.

Lord, how do you want me to bless the school teachers today? How can I bless the waitress who is serving me, how can I bless the neighbour whose dog just took a dump in my front yard; instead of scooping it up and throwing it on his front porch! When will we start seeing ourselves as God’s blessing and looking for creative ways every day that we can bless those around us? I believe that as we start doing that, God will begin to change our heart towards the city. When we start seeing ourselves as God’s blessing to the city, and when we start looking for ways to bless the city that we live in, we start seeking it’s Shalom, it starts changing our heart towards the city, and we find ourselves looking for opportunities to engage and get involved in the city. You know what happens, it changes the way the city views the church. Because I believe the city is justified in the way it sees us. We have been intolerant, homophobic, narrow minded, bigoted reactionaries in our cities. I think we need to change that reputation, that’s not being salt and light, and God has called us to be salt and light.

Connecting together

I want to share a few experiences we have had in San Jose, as a way to encourage you. I mentioned earlier, how San Francisco was a city that was easy to hate by the Christian community. A few years ago, a group of pastors from around the whole bay, began to meet together. San Francisco Bay area is made up of nine counties that all connect to an inlet bay that comes in under the Golden Gate Bridge from the Pacific Ocean. Nine counties around that bay all touch that bay in some way. In those nine counties are one hundred plus cities, and it’s basically one large megopolis. I mean you don’t just drive from San Jose into the countryside, and end up in San Francisco. You drive from San Jose to Coopertino, to Sunnyville to Pallewell to Redwood City to Merin to Daly City to San Francisco, its all one city, and it’s the same on the other side of the bay. Seven million people live in this area.

God has been bringing the church in the Bay together, in a unique, unprecedented way. Churches are beginning to connect together with a vision of ‘How can we be a blessing to this region and see the Shalom of God established in this region.’ The first thing we began to feel as we compared notes was that every pastor in the room hated San Francisco. We all had been guilty of cursing the city and talking about how much we hated the city. Some of the pastors in the room were from San Francisco; they were saying the same things we were. They hated the city as well and they hated the politics of the city. It was a difficult place to be a pastor. For one thing, God said to us, ‘You need to begin to bring the church of the bay area to the city of San Francisco to bless the city.’ So we put together this event where we brought in. I don’t know how many thousands of Christians from around the bay area. Probably 150-200 churches participated from outside of San Francisco, and then there were those from around the city itself.

Then we did this massive prayer walk round the whole of San Francisco in one day. We had prayer teams that went out and they each had maps of a particular neighbourhood and they each had between a 100 and 150 homes. They stood in front of each home and asked God to bless the people who lived in that home, then went to the next home and asked God to bless the people, then they had a door knob hanger to hang on the doors, which said, ‘If anyone left their heart in San Francisco it was Jesus Christ, He loves this city, he loves you, the church of the city of San Francisco is here to bless you today. If you want to be prayed for today for any specific need in your life, call this number.’ We had people manning phone lines. Every home in San Francisco had a prayer team standing in front of it that day, asking God to bless it. We prayed for, I think, 320,000 individual homes that day and blanketed the city in prayers of blessing.

Now that is pretty radical, to go and ask God to bless a heathen city that was ruled by Satan himself; that we all wanted to get out of, and not be in, and we were there asking God to bless it! Well it was so radical that I believe it began to impact the atmosphere of that city in a significant way. That was just a one day event. What we are calling the church to is a lifestyle of doing this, not just an afternoon of going out and blessing the people, but that their lifestyle would be a lifestyle of carrying God’s blessing wherever they went.

Just a few of the testimonies that came out of the day:

Lunch break?

In that one day event, a policeman who was a Christian in one of the churches said that one of the ways they measure the crime in the city of San Francisco on any given Saturday, is how many officers on duty in the city get to take a lunch break because there would be days when no-one would get their lunch break because there would be so much crime going on. Officers getting called here and there and not getting to take lunch. He said all the officers on that Saturday (September 1^st or 2^nd) were having lunch and they starting calling other precincts, because they couldn’t believe that everyone in their precinct was having lunch, and everyone in that precinct was having lunch and by the end of the day they had realised there was no reported major crimes in the city that day! Pretty significant! Going from a city that has a punch sheet of crimes that occur daily, to having no major crimes in the city on one day.

Don’t mention Jesus

At a rally in the centre of the city that night, after everybody had prayer walked, we bought everyone together in a big public gathering and we decided to take an offering from the Christians to give to the city of San Francisco. Now, again that is pretty radical; to give to a godless city, so we took an offering to bless the city and it came to 65,000 dollars. Earlier, (weeks before) we had called the mayor to try to get him to come to that rally and receive this cheque from the church of San Francisco and we said we specifically have a gift to give to the city to go towards those who have suffered through HIV and the AIDS virus. Now, again that goes against the view of the church, because the church says AIDs is a curse from God and the homosexuals deserve it. That sounds pretty bad but that’s what the Christians were saying in San Francisco. So the Mayor’s office said ‘Hum, this is a religious gathering, well it can’t be a religious gathering if the mayor comes, he can’t be there for a religious gathering’, so we said ‘Ok, what does that mean, what are the parameters?’ They said, ‘Well you can’t say Jesus, you can say God, that’s ok, but you can’t say Jesus because that sounds like the mayor is supporting a group of people who are intolerant to other religions, so no mention of Jesus and he can come and receive the cheque.’

So we said, ‘Ok, we won’t mention Jesus, have the mayor come.’

So we told everyone in this big gathering, in a large arena, ‘no-one say Jesus, the mayor is coming in a few minutes, so we can’t have this be a religious gathering, so nobody say the name of Jesus or we’ll be in trouble. We’re here to bless him so curb your urges, don’t jump up and start yelling ‘Praise Jesus!’ Just let’s be cool and be a blessing to the Mayor and the city.

So the Mayor came in and we called him up to the platform, told him why we had come to the city that day to bring the blessing of God to the city of San Francisco, and that we had this cheque for 65,000 dollars. The mayor came to the podium and looked at the cheque and looked out at the people. Now you understand that Mayor Willy Brown is the most liberal politician in the State of California. He ran the state senate for years before he ran for mayor in San Francisco, absolutely the most liberal politician you’ll ever meet. (Maybe other than Tony Blair, but he is very liberal!) (Actually, you know what? Tony Blair is a hero in America right now, but that is another story.) So the Mayor comes to the podium and looked at the cheque and looked out at the people and he says ‘Thank you Jesus!’ He made it a religious gathering, so we starting thanking Jesus and worshipping, and we asked the Mayor if we could  pray for him and bless him, and he reluctantly agreed, so I laid hands on him and asked Jesus to bless the Mayor of the city. He left blessed that night and we weren’t in trouble because he was the one who made it a religious gathering. But what he said was prophetic, even though he may not realise it. He said, ‘Thank you for your prayers for San Francisco; we need your prayers in this city. When I got up this morning, it was a dreary day, it was raining, overcast, by noon the sun had come out the clouds had all rolled away, it was a bright cheery day, people were out in the streets, the city was peaceful, and I recognised something was different in our city today. Now I now it’s because you were here and you came to bless our city and to bring God’s blessing to our city. We welcome that; we need that. I am going to have it written in the annals of the history of San Francisco, that the church of the Bay area came to bless our city and changed the environment in this city. Come back as often as you want to bless our city!

That was unbelievable from this liberal mayor!

Trash ministry

From one of the churches in the city that day, a couple of the guys were prayer walking in a neighbourhood where homosexuals live, and they decided they were going to do more than just prayer walk. They were going to pick up litter as they walked along, so they had a big garbage bag with them. They were picking up litter off the streets and trash that they saw in the yards. This man came out of his house and said ‘What are you guys doing?’ They said, ‘We’re just here to clean up the neighbourhood.’ He said, ‘Why, do you work for the city?’ ‘No, we just want to be a blessing to the people who live here, and clean up the neighbourhood, and while we’re here we are just praying for God’s blessing to be on the people who live here.’

This guy was so impressed by their attitude that he asked to go with them and pick up trash. He was probably one of the most well know homosexuals in the city of San Francisco; he worked in the mayor’s office. He ended up taking these guys to city hall, introducing them to everyone working in City Hall and telling them that they had come through his neighbourhood just to bless the people who lived there and pick up trash. No-one could believe it, so they began to share with people and the last I heard either ten or twelve people working in the mayor’s office have accepted Christ through the ministry of those two young men who started off picking up trash and asking God to bless the people who lived there in the city.

The safest city in the US

In the bulletin sheet this morning it mentions the crime rate in San Jose. I haven’t the time to go into all that we’ve seen happen, but we have been doing this for a number of years, and just before I left to come here I got a call from the mayor’s office wanting to have lunch with few of the pastors, when I get back, just to see how things are going; to share his heart about some of the needs in the city. We have every social agency, every police and fire department, every governmental agency in the city, now calling us on a monthly basis with prayer requests for the church of San Jose to pray for the city. We have seen the crime rate change from being a really bad area, high in terms of the FBI rating in San Jose. We asked the churches to specifically start targeting the crime rate in the city. In the first year we did that, the crime rate stopped escalating – it had been escalating percentage wise every year, and the mayor actually came and expressed that as a concern. The next year we saw the crime rate begin to decrease. The next year it was down as much as 30% in some counties and then the next year the FBI rated San Jose as the safest large city in the US, with the exception of Honolulu, Hawaii. That was a safer place than us, but the following year we actually beat Honolulu! For the last two years, San Jose is the safest city over 500,000 population in the US. I believe that’s because the church in the city said ‘We need to seek the Shalom of our city.’ It makes a difference when the church starts to see itself the way God sees us in the city.

The power of prayer

We have a city council lady who decided she wanted some help in shutting down gambling card rooms. We have gambling card rooms in the city, and we have a large Vietnamese Community that is addicted to gambling in San Jose. There are suicides and home invasions and alcoholism. The Vietnamese Community is just devastated by gambling. These gambling rooms had all petitioned the city to expand in size and extend their hours of operation. She said ‘I want to prevent that from happening, but unfortunately they are the major contributors to all of the politicians in the city. So basically all the other politicians in the city owes them favours, so I really need help from the church if we are going to be able to do this.’

So we said, ‘What can we do?’

She said, ‘I need about 10,000 dollars; I don’t have the money; I can’t get it from the city, because this is my initiative, just to print up brochures and leaflets, also to get information out to the city by the radio and so on.’

So we took up an offering from our churches and gave her 10,000 dollars to fund her campaign against gambling. Then I said, ‘Pat’ (her names Pat Dando) ‘we can do that. We can go round and deliver pamphlets in neighbourhoods and so on, but the thing that is our greatest weapon is prayer. We can we pray for you that God will bless you and honour you as you present this to the city council and that God will give you favour and that this would pass.’

So she said ‘Ok’. We laid hands on her and we blessed her, we thought of every blessing we could pray for her. She was crying, she felt God really touched her. She left and went to take care of everything. She called about 3 weeks later, she said, ‘You wouldn’t believe what happened. In the history of San Jose politics, when an initiative is presented to the city council,: there are twelve city council members – 13 including the mayor, every council member says if they are for or against that initiative, and they say why, it’s not required. It’s just the culture that’s existed in the city council, and then they take a vote. I presented this initiative about these gambling halls, I don’t understand why, but for the first time in San Jose politics, not one city council member shared their opinion – for or against. The city council chambers were totally silent and the mayor said ‘Doesn’t anyone want to say anything?’, and nobody did, so the mayor said, ‘Ok let’s vote’. So we took a vote and it passed by a majority vote.’

Then she said, ‘Can I come and meet with the pastors just to tell them this. Is this what you meant by the power of prayer?’

I said, ‘Absolutely!’

Now she calls regularly with prayer requests for the city.

Winning the trust

It is a process of engaging the city and winning the trust of the city that we’ve been in for 10 years.

But it began with us determining that we needed to see ourselves in the city differently, and we needed to redefine for the city what the church of Jesus Christ was. That we were there as a redemptive community to bring the very blessing the very goodness of God to the city and that Shalom would be upon the city.

That’s what I offer to you: a vision for your city, to bring the Shalom of God to your city.