One of the core values of Catalyst is engaging with the leadership of the Holy Spirit in our prayer time. The fundamental premise of our time at Catalyst may be captured in two points:
- Our labor is necessarily spiritual in nature; we are contending with spiritual beings in order to carry salvation to the people groups we work with. If we move presumptuously without God’s covering, we will not be effective and risk our people’s wellbeing.
- We do not necessarily know what the key issues and problems are in our context, but God knows exactly what needs to be moved and changed through prayer.
These points highlight our need to be led by the Spirit of God in prayer. Practically, it means listening to God before we pray. To borrow an illustration from another brother in Christ, we often think of prayer in the following order: I see a problem, I notify God of the problem (sometimes causing Him to notice it for the first time) through prayer, and then God sends influence. We might not outright say these things, but our behavior proves them out in many cases. The updated model is as follows: God sees the problems, then he tells us what to pray, then we pray that back to Him.
There are two outcomes that excite us at Catalyst Gathering that spring from this approach to prayer:
- It means that every attendee has an active role in bringing forth what the group prays about. This engagement takes us in unexpected directions and gives us revelation about our fields and our work.
- It means that once God has led us to pray for a certain issue, there is an authority available to us in bringing heaven’s energy to the issue. We can speak and pray with boldness when the Holy Spirit has initiated.
A final note: as you might have noticed, this approach to prayer also means that having more people gathered together brings not just more voices to bear on an issue but also more clarity of what God is saying. Put simply, we trust that the Holy Spirit can speak more clearly through a body of believers than he can through just one or two people constructing a prayer itinerary for the duration of the meeting. It does mean that there will be a lot of different perspectives to work through. If you want to know more about our approach to this, check out the post.
We hope you get to experience this new information flow with us at Catalyst, but even if you can’t, we can’t recommend it enough as fuel for your personal time with God.