January Re-Align: A Month of Prayer and Fasting

12|2025

This past Sunday we announced that in January we will “interrupt” many of our normal rhythms in order to ask God to re-align our hearts with His mission and purpose for our church. This is an exciting opportunity for our church to shake some things up in January in order to spend time in prayer and fasting, asking God to bring greater unity, joy, and flourishing to our Body.

In order to be as intentional as possible with this time we are asking for everyone who considers missio to be their home church to begin even now preparing their hearts for this potentially impactful experience. In order to help with that preparation, here is some important info regarding the vision for this upcoming month:

Audio: If you missed the announcement this Sunday you can listen to it here.

Recap: In recent months the elders have discerned a growing need for our church to spend a season of focused prayer and fasting, asking Jesus to re-align us with His mission for our church. Our desire is that we would see greater unity, joy, and flourishing as we serve those He has called us to minister to. This is not an abandonment of our mission or priorities, but rather a pressing deeper into the key facets of who Jesus has already called us to be.

In order to see this re-alignment happen we want to take the month of January to ask God to “interrupt” our normal ways of doing things so that we can be more attentive to who He is calling us to be as a Body. This will be facilitated through:

• Simplifying our worship gathering for the month of January: We will spend the month sitting in rows instead of at tables, having a scaled down music team, simplifying missio: Kids (including having them join us for a portion of the service), removing non-essentials like coffee/tea, and returning to some more liturgical elements of the service (Apostles’ Creed, prayer of confession, etc.).  
• Creating space for intentional prayer: 5 host homes, Sunday-Thursday, for an hour long prayer meeting. We will encourage each person in the church to attend one of the gatherings each week (whichever one works best for their schedule), but pray through the same outline. Each outline would be short, leaving lots of space for free prayer and response. These prayer gatherings will be the only meetings our church does that month (No DCs, no J-Term, no partners meetings) because we want to demonstrate our commitment to be a unified and praying church, dependent on Jesus to lead us.
  • Week 1: Encounter—Gospel Centered and Scripture Saturated
  • Week 2: Experience—Authentically Loving and Relationally Intentional
  • Week 3: Engage—Missionally Discipling and Kingdom Multiplying
  • Week 4: Values
• Fasting…together: For whoever is able, fast Thursday evening through Friday evening, then gather with a different person each week to break your fast and share what the Lord is showing you. For those in our church whose health does not allow for fasting of food, we encourage you to spend this time fasting from some other medium.
• Listening…together: Part of this is sharing what God has shown us when we break our fasts, but also we want to open channels of communication for people to share what the Spirit is showing them through their times of personal and corporate prayer. We will do a coordinated push for feedback at the end of January, but we don’t want to wait until then as we are expecting God to move throughout the month. Listening is two fold: Us all listening to the Spirit, and leaders listening to what the Spirit reveals to the people.
• Celebrating…together: January 30th we will reserve the school and do a corporate meal for whoever wants to come and break their fast together. Celebrating together what God has done. Perhaps sing a few hymns, definitely pray.
• Do it again next January? A month of intentional prayer could be a theme for us always, since we are all prone to wander, a corporate season of re-alignment will always do us good!  

Request: Would you begin to pray with us even now that Jesus would work powerfully in our church during this season? God in His kindness has already begun to lay the groundwork. Advent is a great season of focusing on Christ and His mission, so as we all begin to “downshift” out of busyness and frenetic energy, lean into whatever Means of Grace Jesus provides to begin to align your heart with His.

If you have any questions about this don’t hesitate to reach out to any of the elders! We are so grateful to be in this as a church family, and we are eager to see what God does in us and through us this January!