Let’s Get “Off The Grid”
October 10th we kick off our fall spiritual growth campaign entitled “Off The Grid.” Because this will create some big changes in the way we communicate with you I wanted to remind you of some ways you can participate in the campaign and also stay engaged with what’s going on in the life of the church.
The tagline of the campaign is
“Unplug from the Noise. Plug into the Word.”
While “the noise” could mean anything, in this case we are referring particularly to the noise of social media. Starting October 10th and ending November 21st we are challenging every member of our church to go “off the grid” and “get off social media.”
I know several folks in our church don’t use social media so you might consider fasting from something else. (food, television, news, streaming services, video games, etc)
Unplug From The Noise
The more distractions we have in our life the more diligent we must be in staying close to the Lord. For many of us, the distractions of life have pulled us away from a meaningful relationship with God and something needs to change if we’re going to get back to a place of communion and intimacy with Christ.
But it’s not enough to just fast from something that’s pulling you away from Jesus. You also need to press into those things that will draw you close.
Obviously, not everybody connects to God in the same way. Some best connect to God through His creation (nature walks, hunting/fishing, star-gazing). Others connect to God through compelling artwork or sensory experiences. Maybe you’re wired to connect to God through service or caring for people.
Plug Into The Word
Regardless of your unique wiring, there’s one universal way of connecting with God that cannot be dismissed. In fact, it is God’s chosen vehicle for revealing himself to man. That vehicle is His Word.
The heart cannot love what the mind does not know. The best way to know God is through his Word: the Bible.
That’s why in addition to a 6-week fast we are also including a 6-week Bible reading plan to engage God in his Word. It will consist of 30 chapters in the New Testament for 30 days. (1 chapter a day, 5 days a week for 6 weeks)
We hand selected these passages to maximize your time.
- First, you will get an overarching overview of the life of Christ from the Gospel of Mark.
- Next you will look at the practical outworking of the Gospel in our day to day life through the letters of Ephesians and James.
- Finally, we will conclude with 2nd Thessalonians and how to wait on the Lord with joyful anticipation of his second coming.
Download the reading plan here.
Pray For Revival
The third pillar of this 6-week campaign is community prayer. Each Monday for the six weeks of the campaign we’re going to open the Sanctuary for community prayer. We will have prayer sheets available for particular prayer requests in the life of our church.
At some point in the day, each Monday, we encourage you to come by the church and pray. I know many of you have jobs and perhaps cannot make it until later in the day but we will leave the Sanctuary open from 6:30AM to 8:30PM every Monday to try and accommodate everybody’s schedule.
If possible, bring some people with you and pray corporately. Consider banding together as a small group and come at the same time. You could bring your whole family or coordinate with 2-3 other families and all come at the same time. If you come alone and randomly run into somebody else up here at the same time then consider partnering together to pray.
On November 1st we will have a special corporate prayer gathering at 6PM.
This is the mid-point of the campaign and will give us an opportunity to pray into the good things God is doing through this spiritual effort. I really hope we can leverage this 6 weeks so that as many people as possible pray for a fresh move of God in our church.
What I Pray God Will Do
Hopefully you can see that this spiritual growth campaign is more than just a six-week hiatus from social media. I’m praying for God to use this season to draw us closer to him and closer to one another. We are at an important moment in the life of our church.
Churches all around us are shutting their doors. Denominations are dying a slow death of cultural irrelevancy and spiritual indifference. In many respects, it feels like “God has left the building.”
Many Christians feel a general need for more of God but they don’t know what to do to make that happen. The absence of God in their life just pushes them deeper and deeper into things that never satisfy their deepest longing.
We need revival. We need more of God.
We need a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
The good news is the Lord wants to give us all of those things. But we have to put our ourselves in a position to receive them. That’s what this campaign is all about.
It’s not enough for just one or two people to “catch that vision.” It not just a “me-thing” or a “you-thing.” It’s an “all-of-us” thing. Imagine if we all ran after God TOGETHER with a renewed passion and heart for more. What would he be able to accomplish in us and through us if that were the case?
The answer to that question is the heart of my prayer for what God will do these next six weeks.
Staying Connected
Even though we are asking you to go “off the grid” we don’t want you to totally disconnect from the life of the church. Our social media channels will be “going dark” on Monday, October 11th.
We will stream our services on Facebook and YouTube this coming Sunday but after that, we will only stream to our website and our church app. We will still email our weekly updates but will not be posting them online for the next six week period.
Church announcements, prayer requests and other general information that usually gets posted in our Facebook group or other social media channels will no longer be posted on those platforms. Instead, everything is moving to our website and our church app.
The Church App
That means if you haven’t downloaded the church app, now is the time to do so! You can do a search in the App Store of your current device or just click here. It’s also important once you have the app to create an account. If you’re not sure how to do that click here.
One of the things we added to our church app and to our website is a feature called “Messages.” It’s essentially a replacement for our Broadview Facebook group for the 6 weeks of this campaign.
With “Messages” there are many “public groups” to which you can belong. You’ll find them under the “Discover” tab.
- Off The Grid
- Church Announcements
- Prayer Requests
- Men’s Ministry/Women’s Ministry
- Etc. Etc
Here is a screenshot of what my messages account looks like. You can see the groups to which I belong on the left and the content of the conversations going on to the right.
Better than the public groups are the private groups.
These are not visible under the discover tab but these kind of groups allow our small groups, age graded ministries and other community gatherings to have a medium of communication that is private, in house and separate from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or other like companies.
So you get all of the benefits of a social media platform with none of the toxic culture or violations of privacy. Your data is never snew and there are no algorithms to determine what you can and cannot say/see.
So, if you haven’t already, please download the app and join “Off The Grid” using Broadview Messages. You can access the feature using the icon in the upper right hand corner of the app or the lower right hand corner of the website.