What Are Your Favorite City Stories? [excerpt]

Brad House, Community Pastor from Mars Hill Church, & Shawn Wood, Experiences Pastor from Seacoast

Brad House, Community Pastor from Mars Hill Church, and Shawn Wood, Experiences Pastor from Seacoast, share their favorite stories that have come out of The City and how people in their church are using it.

"The immediacy of communication is essential and having that tool to be able to get that out whether it is a need or prayer request or topic whatever it is. I was watching election returns on Twitter because Twitter was going to get it far before any of the networks would. It is the same now; the church has a tool like that to be able to quickly get information out when there is a need. It’s great.” ~ Shawn Wood, Experiences Pastor, Seacoast

Conversation Transcript:

Eric:  Do you have any favorite stories you heard that have come out of The City and people in your church using it?

Shawn:  My favorite is a story that rose up that we didn’t even know about it except for The City, the pastors would never heard about it or known it existed. But someone got on and put a need out and the need was they worked with a women’s shelter and were aware that the women’s shelter needed a new computer. So they put out hey does anyone have a computer an old computer they would like to donate?

So someone responded on The City and said yeah we’ve got a computer and it’s an older computer but I think it’s pretty good. The problem is it has a lot of personal data on it and this person said I’m clueless I don’t know how to get that off. If someone would help me get the personal data off it would be great.

So then someone else responded on The City and said I’m a computer guy, I’ll wipe your computer and reset it and freshen it up a bit and make sure everything is running great. So they did that part. Then someone else came on and said I have a printer. What if I were willing to give a printer, could they use a printer? Sure they could use a printer.

All of a sudden, these people were jumping in and it was in this hour of blocked time where everyone is jumping in. What I loved about it is the outreach department of our church was never called and said hey here is this need that’s there. They didn’t have to manage it or track it down. And I was talking with her, Allison our outreach person and said how would this have happened before The City? She said the women’s shelter probably would have called us and asked if we had a computer and we would have said no we don’t. Then I would have sent out an email and tried to track down someone who did and gotten some random responses and would have had to follow up on those.

Then I would have found out that one of them was a Mac and no one wants to use those. So all that would have happened and this was nothing, no work not that we don’t want to work but no work had to be put in, no effort or energy. It was the church being the church and they had the tool and vehicle to do it, which was beautiful.

Brad:  One of the stories we got from our downtown campus was recently in the news last week. I heard the story about this lady who had come out on the courthouse and was looking to jump. We found out afterwards that there was someone across the street in an office building looking at the courthouse and saw her come out.

Eric:  Standing on the roof?

Brad:  Standing on the roof and so before the news covered it or anyone heard about it, one of our members had got on The City and put out a prayer request to the folks at the downtown campus to be praying for this woman who looked like she was about to commit suicide.

So before the news hit or anyone knew about it, our people were able to start praying for this woman. The story at least has a good ending where she didn’t jump and I’m not going to say The City had a big hand in it happening but we know God answers pray and we know that the ability to be able to get prayer requests out like that is definitely a benefit to the church.

Shawn:  Yeah the immediacy of communication is essential and having that tool to be able to get that out whether it is a need or prayer request or topic whatever it is. I was watching election returns on Twitter because Twitter was going to get it far before any of the networks would. It is the same now; the church has a tool like that to be able to quickly get information out when there is a need. It’s great.