Spiritual Mapping and Prophetic Intercession
1.) If you were to get a call from Rand McNally and they were commissioning you to draw up a map for your city, what kind of things would you need to place on that map?
Natural MappingSpiritual
Longitude latitudelocation/proximity to other places
City limitsboundaries & history behind boundaries
Streets and avenuesgateways and thoroughfares
Water ways
Rail Ways
Public transit centers
Historical siteshistorical sites…bloodshed? Oppression? Broken
Covenant? Sexual sin?Transition? Spiritual
Connection? What impact today?
Sites of interestplaces of mass gathering…why do they gather
There? Sexual?Drugs?Alcohol?Food?
Entertainment?Sports?
Hospitals places of physical and spiritual healing?
Schoolsplaces of relied upon learning?
Malls/Industry/Big Businessplaces of employment and finance? Media?
2.) Lance Wallnau…Morning Star (Rick Joyner)…
Seven Mountains of Influence taken from visions by: Bill Bright (Campus Crusade)…Loren Cunningham (YWAM)…Francis Schaeffer
business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, the family, and religion
Where are the seven mountains/spheres of influence in your city? Who are their leaders? Are you praying for them? Do they know you are praying for them? Are you praying with them?
3.) Discovering the redemptive gift of your city…Arthur Burk
Prophet, Servant, Teacher, Exhorter, Giver, Ruler, Mercy
4.) You have your map…where are the strategic prayer locations?
Highgrounds?City center/heart figurative and literal?
Lowlands?Four corners?Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern most?
Entry ways?Spiritual hot spots?Criminal activity? Demographic centers?
If you can’t pray on/in the strategic locations, pray through them and/or around them.
Compare These Two Prophetic Words
Isaiah 54
1“Sing, O barren,Youwhohave not borne!
Break forth into singing, and cry aloud,
Youwhohave not labored with child!
For morearethe children of the desolate
Than the children of the married woman,” says the LORD.
2“ Enlarge the place of your tent,And let them stretch out the curtains of your dwellings;Do not spare;Lengthen your cords,And strengthen your stakes.
3For you shall expand to the right and to the left,And your descendants will inherit the nations,And make the desolate cities inhabited.
Jeremiah 10
18For thus says the LORD:“ Behold, I will throw out at this timeThe inhabitants of the land,And will distress them,That they may findit so.”
19Woe is me for my hurt!My wound is severe.But I say, “Truly thisisan infirmity,
And I must bear it.”
20My tent is plundered,And all my cords are broken;My children have gone from me,And theyareno more.There isno one to pitch my tent anymore,Or set up my curtains.
21For the shepherds have become dull-hearted,And have not sought the LORD;
Therefore they shall not prosper,And all their flocks shall be scattered.
Enlarge…widen…make wide and roomy…make large
Tent…tabernacle…home…but Isaiah and Jeremiah are not referring to literal tents, but Israel and Judah respectively…a covering over their people, their families, their businesses, their interests, their lands…
Jeremiah said the one thing that would cause the covering over a region to disappear was:
Dull hearted shepherds who have not sought the Lord…in a modern day Western-minded church system, the pastors may not always be the prayer shepherds
Average pastoral tenure in America, and church closure statistics
1992…Barna said 5 years 1998…Barna said 4 years
2007…18 months to 3 years2011…average is about 2.5 years
LifeWay Research indicates that 1500 pastors are currently leaving the ministry each month
In 1992 the US was closing churches at a rate of 3200 a year…now it is over 4000
Only 1% of new churches survive longer than one year
So we need shepherds of prayer, hearing from God and leading the people under their tent in an ever growing expansion project…the Kingdom. Not just satisfied with 5 acres, 50 or 500 but setting their sights on the cities around them.
Where does it say that the Kingdom will shrink in the end? When Christ came to tabernacle among us, it was supposed to be Christ tabernacling over us, our families, our neighborhoods and our cities…He is coming back for those under His covering, His tent, and we need to enlarge that Tent over our people.
5.) You have your map. You have your sites. Now you ask God to enlarge your territory just like Jabez…Determine your boundaries, pray a blood line, a circumference of God’s glory and a establish a bulls eye for God’s ground zero.
Prayer walking…block by block…sensitive to the Spirit as you go.
Prayer driving…(drive by prayers)
Prayer marches…Manchester, KY (Appalachian Dawn…Sentinel Group)
Prayer gatherings at the four corners
Prayer gatherings at the heart
Prayer gatherings at the strategic locations
To help you determine locations of your map, and what type of prayer strategies to employ, Informed Intercession by George Otis, Jr. has some great resources including in-depth “Discovery Questions” and different types of prayer opportunities that you can implement.
Other great resource are John Dawson’s Taking Our Cities for God, Ed Silvoso’sPrayer Evangelism, and Prayer Walking…Praying on Site with Insight by Steve Hawthorne and Graham Kendrick.
Every “transformational” revival taking place in the world today has some level of Informed or Prophetic Intercession as a prime component. Typically it begins with a 2 Chronicles 7:13-14 reminder, followed by a sensitivity for what God is grieving over within your community, and a repentant response that creates a lifestyle attractive to the God’s glory.
The Prayer Movement in Huntington, WV
In 2005, a black non-denominational pastor and I began talking about how we could take back our community from drug dealers and a devastating mindset of murder. We were a part of a much larger prayer movement over our city, but were the only ones involved from the community that disproportionately contained the highest number of violent crimes. We decided to pray about it. We gathered our two congregations together to pray, and announced our plans. From Easter until Pentecost we would alternate back and forth between our churches every Saturday morning. The women, who were mostly elderly, would pray at the church while the men would walk through the community. Block by block we prayed from one end of the Fairfield community of Huntington to the other, but on the last Saturday, we stopped 3 blocks shy of completely covering our community. We came together on Pentecost Sunday for a combined worship service and celebrated the miracles we witnessed on our journey.
One week later, just outside the area we had prayed over, and in the middle of the 3 blocks we missed, four teenagers were senselessly murdered on prom night in a drug deal that went bad. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. All I could do was weep. Then I started getting phone calls, “What are we going to do about this?” played over and over again in the voice mails and in my mind.
The two churches that had taken part in the prayer walk put out a request through our citywide prayer network to open a prayer dialogue for our city. We also invited city leaders, who were being asked the same question that I was “What are we going to do?”
All the big governmental players in the city of Huntington showed up. We prayed and discussed, discussed and prayed…and out of that came the ongoing prayer meetings that take place every month across nearly all spheres of influence.
To ratchet it up, we took on spiritual mapping in a deeper way. We examined the history of our city, our state and our region. What we discoveredwere underlying mindsets that had practically destroyed our fair city over the past 30 years as our population dropped from 100,000 to 40,000.
Pastors gathered to pray and listen, and we began chronicling the direction we sensed the Holy Spirit was giving us for our city. We gathered in the heart of our city, a rundown assembly hall from the old segregated black school, and there our city leaders invited Christ Jesus to be Lord over our city. From there we went to the four corners and staked our territory in prayer and Communion gatherings. We have fasted and prayed together, exchanged pulpits, joined together in corporate worship services and been at the disposal of our city leaders whenever and wherever they call upon us.
In five years violent crimes dropped to an all-time low. Arrests were at an all-time high. Our drug enforcement and re-integration programs have gained the attention of Washington DC and are being promoted by the Department of Justice. Churches integrated a Teen Challenge based discipleship programs as we have seen scores of addicts released from bondage. Even the Obama administration has taken note of the good going on in our city, with the US Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowske, going as far as to say that the involvement of the Faith Community in Huntington is absolutely critical to the success of the programs working to change the drug culture of our city…every part of this process has been prayed over in our churches and in private chambers at city hall.
Every week pastors are still coming together to pray and listen. Every month our churches come together to pray and listen. Every month city and community leaders come together to testify as to what God is doing in their sphere of influence. Every fifth Sunday our churches come together with city leaders to celebrate what God is doing and ask God to keep pouring it on.
Still, 2/3 of our residents are un-churched. The fastest growing religion in our city is Islam. Poverty dominates our landscape, with unemployment within the community being disproportionately high compared to the rest of the region.
So, we pray. We listen. We write it down. We share and discuss. We do. Then we start again, and God is showing up in Huntington, WV.