The Daily Text: We band together.

Dear Rick, If you are around us for any length of time, you will hear people talking about bands. Not like rock bands or hair-bands but Discipleship Bands. Remember, awakening begins with our own lives. We Read Together. We Pray Together. We Band Together. We Sow Together. For our money, banding is the lynchpin commitment of the Awakening Life. It is also the least understood and practiced. A band is not a small group, not an "accountability" group, not a bible study, not a "fellowship" group. It involves those things but is not properly any of them. A band is a group of 3-5 men or women who read together, pray together, and meet together to become the love of God for each other and the world. It is all at once the smallest and greatest possibility to experience the power of God and the essence of church. It is a place where our lives become the curriculum. For the past five years, every Friday morning at 8am I get on a conference call with two other men, both of whom live in other parts of the country. After a minute or two of small-talk, someone says, "Wake up O sleeper and rise from the dead!" The others respond, "And Christ will shine on you!" Then someone prays the most powerful prayer in the Bible from Ephesians 3:16-19. Then each of us take a turn sharing around five questions about our souls, struggles, successes and how the Scripture and the Spirit are speaking in our lives. One prays for another and the process repeats until we are done. Less than an hour later, we speak aloud Ephesians 3:20 and that's it. It's that simple. This simple, straightforward process has become a powerful source of grace in each of our lives. There is no other place in my life where I am more known and more loved than in my band. As a result, I have grown more in the past five years than in the prior fifteen. Nothing will accelerate awakening in your life like banding. My sadness is it took me so long to learn about banded discipleship. This is not advanced Christianity. It is basic, entry level stuff. We don't have a content problem in the church today. We have a connection problem. In fact, the research is clear. We are stuck in an arrested state of development in our character and faith. It is not for lack of information. It is because we do not have the kinds of relationships it takes to sustain what we call "Second Half of the Gospel" transformation. I want to encourage you to give this a try. Start by asking God to lead you to two others to invite. Download our Discipleship Bands app on your phone's app store. It will be clear from there. If you want to learn more about it, visit discipleshipbands.com. You can download the Discipleship Bands Field Guide here. I'd like to know one of two things from you in reply: 1. When will you start a discipleship band? 2. If not, what's holding you back? And as always, how can I help? For the Awakening, J.D. Walt Sower-in-Chief seedbed.com P.S. And as a bonus, here's a picture of my band on a retreat we took last winter.

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