We hope and pray that God has richly blessed your summers! Since our last prayer time together, the Abide Project Prayer Team has stepped back to discuss our plans moving forward. We are now writing to inform you of those plans.
We are inviting you to join us at our usual time (each Tuesday at noon ET) each week during the month of October. These prayer times will follow the same format that we’ve enjoyed together over these past years; however, we are sensing that the focus of our prayers ought to take a particular turn.
The Abide Project more broadly is in a season of discerning what the future holds. As a reminder, the mission of Abide has been “for the sake of the true Gospel, the faithfulness of Christ’s Church, the glory of God, and the good of His people, we strive for the Christian Reformed Church to uphold the beautiful, Biblical, confessional, and historic understanding of human sexuality.” Under this mission, and in light of past decisions and current direction of the CRCNA, the Abide Project is discerning what this mission looks like going forward.
We see our prayer times as a necessary component to that discernment!
Thus, the first thing we want to do in our meetings next month is offer gratitude to God for how He has answered so many of our prayers. To a significant extent, the mission of Abide Project has been a success! For that, we need to give our sovereign Lord thanks.
But second, we want to use our time together to ask for direction about the future. On one hand, some sense that Abide has perhaps served its stated purpose. But on the other, our team senses that praying together has provided a significant blessing, not only related to the subject of our prayers, but in the relationships built. In addition, though Synod has established the position of the CRCNA, there remains some important work regarding the follow-through of those decisions (i.e. Calvin University, ecumenical relationships).
So, what ought our prayers look like going forward? Our team would like to pray through the many questions with our entire praying community in the hopes that this will help us gauge what the plan ought to be moving ahead.
We hope you’ll join us, and we look forward to seeing you all again!