City Impact Roundtable

Got to Cedar Rapids Iowa in time for the start of the annual meeting of City Impact Roundtable--a gathering of 150 or so city reachers from 36 different states. I saw my good friend Andy Rittenhouse from Knoxville and we chatted a bit before I took him back to the hotel since he has been feeling under the weather for the past week. Also talked with Viju Abraham from Mumbai whom Sam and I will be with in October. Ray Williams from Fellowship Bible in Little Rock, Harvey Anderson from Perimeter and many others showed up. After a keynote address by Tom White, we heard from leaders of three cities in a regional city-reaching model--El Paso, Juarez and Las Cruces. Barney Field has been laboring twelve years in this field and has done a magnificent job. He's written a small booklet on city reaching called Your City For Jesus--3 Easy Steps, which is dowloadable at www.cityreaching.com. His three steps are united prayer, united people and inited programs. In the program category, Barney shared how he was praying a few years ago about all the folks in El Paso that did not know Jesus. God have him one word--"Bible." So to make a long story short, the city was challenged to read the New Testament 5 minutes a day. The local newspaper published the entire NT in the course of the year and people requested 60,000 copies of the New Testament.

Over dinner we saw a DVD on the worldwide day of prayer. This day in June was started around 6 years ago by a south African business man named Graham Powers. In 2006 they expect 500 million believers to gather in stadiums around the world!

This evening Francis Frangipane, from Cedar Rapids is speaking on what is happening in the city. He's a great communicator with a great heart.