Hill Country Bible Church

Gathering Refocus

Posted: Feb 09, 2011 by Josh Tullis

Ever since we have started Hill Country Bible Church UT, God has given us the vision and mission to reach the University of Texas with the life transforming power of Jesus Christ.  This sounds very focused- and it is!  We have done virtually everything under the sun driven by this vision, and God has been moving and has blessed. 

About a year ago, the elders and staff began a study in the book of Acts, and during this time, the Spirit was starting to stir and begin challenging us on something we observed over and over again as the early Church took root.  One of the biggest truths we walked away from in our study of Acts was that the early church prayed!  They didn’t just pray for their meals and when the preacher got up to preach.  They earnestly prayed.  In fact, before the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost the 120 “were devoting themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:14).   And they prayed and worshiped for 40 days until the Holy Spirit came.  The early church was launched, not while someone was preaching but while people were praying!  We as a church realized that the vision and mission of the church that God gave us could not become reality if God did not intervene.  Though God is pleased with our work ethic and everything good thing we do, we realized that we were not a praying church.

When you read Mark 11:15-18, Jesus does not say that His house, His church, should be called a house of preaching or a house of music.  Jesus said that it should be called a house of prayer.  It is not only God’s desire, but God’s will that if we call ourselves a church, we need to pray.  In fact, prayer needs to be the center of everything we do.  When you look at the apostles their instinct was: when in trouble, pray.  When intimidated, pray.

When you look at past revivals, there is one common denominator to those revivals.  Can you guess what it was?  Good guess…prayer!  Jim Cymbala says “whether you study the Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, the Welsh Revival, the 1906 outpouring on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, or any other period of revival, you always find men and women who first inwardly groan, longing to see the status quo changed-in themselves and in their church.”  This is where we are at as a church.  We want to see ourselves move from just “doing church” to truly, authentically, and passionately experiencing God in a fresh new way.  We want to not just put on a good service and do some nice events on the campus, but we want this campus to change.  So, the question is, what are we doing about it?

To cultivate prayer and change our church culture to being a praying church so that we can truly see this transformation in us and on the campus, we have changed our mid-week service, The Gathering, to being a Prayer Gathering.  This is the new focus of Wednesday nights.  At the Prayer Gathering, we seek the face of God through adoring him through our words, through songs, and through just reflecting on who he is.  As Denny has said, we don’t just want the blessings of God, we want to love God for who He is.  That is what we do on Wednesday nights.  We adore God for who He is.  We have a plan, but it is very loose.  This is very New Testament!  We gather and wherever the Spirit is leading, we go.  We pray for each other, we pray for others, and we pray for the campus that God will do what only He can do.

I want to encourage our entire church, literally every single person, to come to The Gathering on Wednesday nights at 8.  God is glorified, and our lives are really changing because God is answering us!  It is awesome, and you don’t want to miss it.  I believe that God is doing something new in the life of this church and is bringing an awakening to us and to this campus.  Come be apart of what God is doing.