Leadership Journal

I had been wrestling with the question of how our church could effect meaningful change in our community. The hopelessness and despair around us was suffocating, and I knew through Christ there had to be a way to bring light and hope to inner city Chicago.

That's when I picked up a book written by David Yonggi Cho, the pastor of the world's largest church. His church of 700,000 is huge, but the impact it has on its community is even bigger.

Now while my church is nowhere near the size of his, and neither is yours, I was really challenged by how Pastor Yonggi Cho envisioned a church that dreamed big dreams and accomplished big things. The ministry of that church moves way beyond its walls to impact its city, its nation, and the world. What could we do that would have that kind impact on the people around us?

We had undertaken big projects before. In 1998 we led the largest vote drive in Chicago's history to make the sale of alcohol in our community illegal. On Good Friday this year we distributed 30,000 Bibles, one to every address in our Zip code.

But I was growing in the conviction that our church has a powerful means of bringing people into contact with God—prayer—that we were keeping locked up inside the doors. The people around us need to touch the living God, and they need Him to touch their lives. So this summer we launched a big-dreaming plan to bring prayer to every corner of our Zip code.

60628—the largest Zip code on the south side of Chicago. The U.S. Census Bureau broke our Zip code down into 818 blocks. Our vision was to have prayer gatherings going on simultaneously once a week on every one of those blocks. We wanted open prayer meetings, where anyone could come and share their needs. We wanted anyone who needed prayer to find it, right there on their own block.

I was convinced by the principles in Cho's book that the only way to reach a community of 30,000 homes is by actually going to where the people are. We'd never reach them all by just waiting for them to become a part of our fellowship. So we trained our church to go knock on doors, invite people to come to the prayer gatherings, and ask them for prayer requests.

We put up signs and passed out flyers with the time, date, and place of each meeting that read "Salem Summer Nights. Your Prayers. God's Answers." We printed red signs indicating which homes were hosting the meetings. We produced red T-shirts for every prayer team captain. Two weeks later, we cancelled all other Thursday night ministries to begin the eight-week, Thursday-night prayer drive.

...

During the two weeks leading up to the kickoff, we started finding backyards and front porches where we could hold these prayer gatherings outside. We put up the signs in the windows. But after two weeks of backyard prayer, we had only 249 blocks covered, well short of our goal of all 818.

As I walked around to the different gatherings. I was wondering, Why only 249? Why are all these people out walking ...