A MINISTRY OF GATHERING

By James Wilson, Coordinator

PrayNorthstate

PrayNorthstate is a ministry of gathering the Body of Christ. Founded in 2001, based and focused in Northern California, our vision has roots in the worldwide Transformation movement. Our full-time staff consists of my wife, Diana, and me; we are entirely donation supported. We partner with any group of Christians who are ministering beyond denominational boxes, seeking reconciliation and healing in their communities, and accepting no substitutes for God’s Kingdom on earth. We draw from the charismatic, evangelical, and liturgical streams of the Kingdom without prejudice and we love to see miracles that don’t look like traditional signs and wonders but which display God’s overwhelming love all the more for that. When the vision is given to someone else we offer help; when the vision is given to us we ask for help.

In recent months we have come alongside ministries creating a festival to honor single parents, making a night to honor Israel, and holding a prayer summit for regional pastors. With the help of many congregations we led our fifth annual speaking of the entire Word of God over our city from the breezeway of our local city hall. We accepted leadership of our city’s National Day of Prayer observance and provided support and encouragement to leaders in other regional cities for their NDP celebration. Several of these included Bible reading marathons for the first time; we offered training and support.

We just launched the third annual edition of Paah-ho-ammi, a project of targeted prayer in which teams pray daily for assigned topics of community – and thus Kingdom – concern. We document baseline statistics for issues such as violent crime, unemployment, traffic fatalities, and cancer admissions to our local hospital. We then proclaim the difference between the time of prayer and the same period a year earlier. Our first foray into this arena recruited one hundred and thirty-five Christians from many churches; we saw God reduce crime in the county sheriff patrolled areas by more than 20% and He gave similar fruit in the areas of traffic deaths and cancer admissions. In 2006 more than two hundred Christians joined us for daily prayer. Traffic fatalities were cut by 40% while cancer admissions went down by a whopping 58%. A dozen churches spent time in Sunday services each week praying all seven of the Paah-ho-ammi prayer topics.

The needed gifts for a ministry such as ours are Kingdom vision, persistence, and a willingness to look foolish in the Name of Jesus. A talk show on secular radio was in the background of the original vision God gave for PrayNorthState; the intention was to interview a couple of Christians who were ministering outside of the box and share their relationship to Jesus and how it led into a particular manifestation of servanthood for them. I was advised by some Christian leaders that I would run out of guests to interview in three months; to date we have been on the air in Redding for six years and we are booked three months in advance with servants to showcase. We’ve had a television program on Fox of Northern California since 2005 and this year the Lord has opened up two more radio stations to double and then double again the coverage area. In the next few months we hope to launch a new effort focused entirely on celebrating the leadership and initiative God has birthed in the younger generation. We call it Genesis Generation Radio.

The willingness to be foolish may be the most essential gift of all. When the Lord blessed us with permission to begin a prayer project in 2004 that was first conducted under another name and in another region he stipulated that we call it Paah-ho-ammi. He did not tell us what the words meant – or even in what language they were found – but He did tell us to solicit support from the churches and go for it. Many leaders questioned my sanity when I brought them the vision. Eventually He led me to check the Hebrew dictionary in the back of my concordance and I discovered perfectly good biblical Hebrew meaning “Cry alas, My People.”

This year we launched the project with more than three hundred people committed to team membership and daily prayer; between fifteen and eighteen churches committed to corporately support the project through a one-to-two minute focus time in their services. Diana and I will be teaching the principles of Paah-ho-ammi – or any of the other prophetic acts with impact in which the Lord has demonstrated His delight to us – in Scotland, Sweden and Norway later this year. We are willing to share in any American communities that hunger for God the way we hunger for Him.

PrayNorthstate can be reached at 530-941-3470, or at praynorthstate@charter.net