Mt. Zion United Methodist Church

The Week of April 4 – Easter Sunday and Easter Week

Lord Jesus.

Risen from the dead and alive for evermore;

Stand in our midst tonight as in your upper room;

Show us your hands and your side;

Speak your peace to our hearts and minds;

And then send us forth into your world as your witnesses for the glory of your name.

Amen.

This prayer was adapted from a prayer by John Stott, a 20^th century British leader in the Anglican Church and one of the more influential people in the evangelical movement. Stott is considered the primary author of the Lausanne Covenant, written in 1974, which resulted from a meeting of 150 evangelical leaders called together by Billy Graham. John Stott chaired the committee that drafted the covenant. The introduction read as follows: “We, members of the Church of Jesus Christ, from more than 150 nations, participants in the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne, praise God for his great salvation and rejoice in the fellowship he has given us with himself and with each other. We are deeply stirred by what God is doing in our day, moved to penitence by our failures and challenged by the unfinished task of evangelization. We believe the Gospel is God’s good news for the whole world, and we are determined by his grace to obey Christ’s commission to proclaim it to all mankind and to make disciples of every nation. We desire, therefore, to affirm our faith and our resolve, and to make public our covenant.” It is from this covenant that the modern evangelical movement began.