NCMI SA Equip (Part One)

 

I remember it just as if it was yesterday.

 

 Every year the announcement would go out at church for leaders to register for “Bloem”. The fact that a city was being referred to in its shortened state as a simile for a 5 day leadership conference was not lost on anyone. As the announcements became more frequent in the lead up to the September school holidays, so too did the increasing rate of the church’s excitement. The 7 hour drive in convoy from Durban on the early Monday morning, the bets being placed on who would “open the batting” in the first session, counting down the times someone said the words “in our togetherness”, Dudley Daniel’s insistence to “avoid fame like the plague”, massive choirs, Mimosa Mall hangouts with our best mates from around the country who we saw only once a year and all the way through to the inevitable and yet heart stirring culmination with “Be thou my vision”, “Bloem” never failed to leave an impression as we all left determined to change the world.

Now years later, the journey continues after many mountain top highs and valley lows. The venue has changed, fresh voices have appeared, new songs have been written and we even have had to become used to new terminology (“Equip”). But the mission and very heart-beat of the motley group of men and women who come together in friendship and mission from all over the globe under the name of NCMI remains the same. For the King and His Kingdom, we still believe that the local church is the hope of the world, the nations are our inheritance and He will not return until every tribe, tongue and people group have heard.

 

This is what courses through our veins!

So once again we gather “in our togetherness” in the third term holidays. But this is no mere conference or inspirational get together. We gather to be scattered afresh with the Gospel at our centre and with the nations in our line of sight.

As Alan Frow year in and year out fearlessly declared all those years ago, “we will go for the sake of the cross, we will go for the sake of the lost”

(NCMI SA Equip 2012 - 3rd -5th October at Cornerstone Church in Joburg)

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"Will we Tarry?" A post by Alan Frow

'Tarry.' Strange word. Forgotten word. The word Jesus used to describe what his disciples should have done with him in the Garden of Gethsemane and didn't.
Essentially, it means to pray watchfully. "Could you not tarry with me for one hour?" was Jesus' rhetorical question to them.

Like most of us, the disciples' spirits were willing but their flesh was weak. In their case it was because they were sleepy. More accurately, they were 'exhausted from sorrow.'Ironic, but so true, that when we are exhausted, discouraged or depressed, the very thing that cures our condition seems so hard to do.

Prayerlessness seems to me to be one of the epidemics of our culture and time. 'I'm too busy to pray!' is the excuse so many give. John Wesley's response to that excuse was, "I'm too busy not to pray."I have found that prayer brings space to my day, and when I neglect it, things seem more frenetic.

I remember another John; John Wimber, speaking about prayerlessness to his congregation not long before he died. They had become a large, high profile church and he felt they had become passive in prayer. "We are charging on someone else's credit card!" he warned. "We are living in the fruit of the prayers of those that have gone before us instead of investing in prayer for the next generation." An extremely sobering statement.

Of course prayer is inconvenient. But being a Christ -follower, means that the full and inconvenient gift of the Cross, calls for a full response from us. And in the inconvenience of it all, we discover the rare privilege of partnering with the Lord of All, fueling the shaping of history one prayer at a time.


For more from Alan Frow (worship leader, song-writer, pastor, pioneer), check out his blog http://alanfrow.blogspot.com/