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My Thoughts on Day of Prayer and Fasting

Written by admin on . Posted in Day of prayer, Lord's Prayer. No Comments on My Thoughts on Day of Prayer and Fasting

My heart and soul are still overwhelmed by the spirit and presence of God that I experienced this past Monday. Even bad weather and poor parking could not dampen what God had in store for those who gathered for an entire day of prayer. Despite obstacles, GOD WON THE DAY!!

We started and ended the day with worship, and without question, worship sets the tone and prepares our hearts for God’s powerful anointing. Our worship team, led by Michael North, is a team of talented, yet humble, servants that simply allow God to work through them in music and song. Seeing 1000+ people all worshipping and singing at the top of their lungs and with the fullness of their hearts is an experience unlike no other.

Then we prayed. The people prayed. We prayed in small clusters. We prayed at the open mic. We prayed at the wall. We prayed in the parking lot, the offices, the stage, the hall walls and in the FLC.

We prayed standing. We prayed on our knees. We prayed on our face. We prayed with heads bowed and with hands raised.

We prayed for our nation, our city, our state, our governing officials. We prayed for our President, our congress, our Mayor and our Governor.

We prayed for our families, our marriages, our children and our employees.

We prayed for our health, our jobs, our finances and our ministries.

We prayed for our missions, our fellow workers around the world. We prayed for Asia and Africa. We prayed for India and Europe. We prayed for Europe and America. We prayed for the world. Did you see the FLC? The missions department did an incredible job preparing a place where we could see the world.

We prayed that God would provide miracles upon miracles so that we might build a new 3500 seat worship facility.

And then, the church prayed for their Pastor. I wept like a baby. It was unplanned, and I was unprepared for the emotion of an entire church praying for me. I want to say thank you for all who participated, who fasted, who took time to come to the house of God to seek God’s face.

I think of the one verse in I Kings 18:36 where Solomon was praying, and he said these words, “Give attention to your servant’s prayer and his pleas for mercy, O Lord my God. Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is praying in your presence this day. May your eyes be open toward this temple night and day, this place of which you said, ‘my Name shall be there,’ so that you will hear the prayer your servant prays toward this place.”

Those who gathered felt and experienced the presence of God. It is my prayer that we at Shepherd would truly become a PRAYING CHURCH. May we continue in His presence by staying on our knees, humbly asking for His love and mercy. May HIS name be made known in this city and may His eyes be upon us “Day and Night.”

70,000 Churches and 3.5 million people!

Written by admin on . Posted in church planting. No Comments on 70,000 Churches and 3.5 million people!

This post is from Dave Ferguson who is doing more for church planting than anyone I know. I only wish he lived in California. This was HIS post on his blog. I wouldn’t read his blog on a regular basis unless you want to be challenged to make a difference in the world.
That was a teaser….

Here’s what he posted today…

Our legal counsel had just advised our church board to formally oppose a zoning permit for a new sweeps cash casino attempting to open near our campus, an intervention that successfully blocked the development. When I finally looked away from those legal documents and checked my calendar on my iPhone on Wednesday morning, it said that I had a 1:30 pm appointment with “Sam from India.” I had to ask my assistant Pat, “Who is this and what does he want?” She explained as best she could, but I had no idea that who I was about to meet would be one of the most memorable appointments in a long time. When Samuel Stephens and his son Danny showed up you would never have guessed how God has used them. Both were very unassuming and I felt like I had to pull out of them the amazing things that they have seen God do through their ministry, the India Gospel League.

It was Sam’s father that founded the India Gospel League and when Sam took it over in 1992 it had grown to 200 churches. Now, 18 years later under Sam’s leadership there are 70,000 churches and more than 3.5 million people that are being reached. Wow!

Here are a few take-aways I had from our conversation together:

Every church has a goal to reproduce at least one new church per year.
Every church planter was in a network that meets monthly.
Every network provides training and accountability for meeting their goal of reproducing.
This was an appointment that I will not soon forget!

THIS IS INSANE

Written by admin on . Posted in City of Los Angeles, jobs, taxes, Wendy Greuel. No Comments on THIS IS INSANE


This stuff drives me crazy….

We have to get this system fixed. Don’t we have ANYBODY who can run for office and stop the wasteful spending and get rid of all the red tape. I believe that God has called us to be STEWARDS of all of our resources.

I saw this article today and wanted to share it with you. I know Wendy Greuel is doing a great job. Pray for her for she knows we need to fix all these problems, but she can’t do it on her own. According to this report, it’s taking 2 million dollars to create ONE job.

Here’s the article. It’s INSANE!!!

The Los Angeles City Controller said on Thursday the city’s use of its share of the $800 billion federal stimulus fund has been disappointing.

The city received $111 million in stimulus under American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) approved by the Congress more than year ago.

“I’m disappointed that we’ve only created or retained 55 jobs after receiving $111 million,” says Wendy Greuel, the city’s controller, while releasing an audit report.
“With our local unemployment rate over 12% we need to do a better job cutting red tape and putting Angelenos back to work,” she added.

According to the report, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works generated only 45.46 jobs (the fraction of a job created or retained correlates to the number of actual hours works) after receiving $70.65 million, while the target was 238 jobs.

The audit says the numbers were disappointing due to bureaucratic red tape, absence of competitive bidding for projects in private sectors, inappropriate tracking of stimulus money and a laxity in bringing out timely job reports.

“While it doesn’t appear that any of the ARRA funds were misspent, the City needs to do a better job expediting the process and creating jobs,” she said

Burning the Quran?

Written by admin on . Posted in Bible, enemies, honoring God, Love, Pastor Dudley Rutherford, quran. No Comments on Burning the Quran?


Although I firmly do NOT believe in the Quran, and even though I firmly believe that Jesus is the ONLY way to salvation for all mankind, I believe it’s wrong to have a National Quran Burning Day.

A Pastor named Terry Jones from a small church in Florida is planning such an event. And although there are MANY things that are WRONG about the Quran, burning them is not the answer.

Let me give you several reasons WHY we should NOT be burning the Quran. (I found some of this in an Article written by William Harvey.)

1. It really goes AGAINST being a Christian. I am all for standing up for things that are of God. I preached this past weekend on Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who refused to bow down to a golden image, and we need to have the same courage as them. Honor was given to their God (the one true God) because of their devotion. They were standing for truth; they were not trying to burn down Babylon.

In Acts 19:18-20 there were some folks who burned some books, but they were actually scrolls that they themselves had owned. The passage refers to “those who had practiced curious, magical arts” gathering to burn scrolls in which they no longer believed. This is quite a different act from choosing to burn a book in which you have never believed or burning a book that is going to cause pain world wide.

Jesus made it VERY clear in his Sermon on the Mount that we are to LOVE our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. We are to TURN the other cheek and try to befriend those that think differently than we do. How are we ever going to reach the Muslim people if our first act is to offend them by burning the most important thing in their religion?

Once you burn the Quran, you lose all hope of ever reaching them. They will HATE you and HATE your faith. You will drive them FURTHER AWAY from where you want them to be. It’s possible to reach the Muslims around the world and introduce them to the Savior, but NOT if you start out by burning their sacred book.

Just last week I had a conversation with a Muslim man about the Lord. Just like Jesus with the woman at the well in John 4, I started out by engaging him in a dialogue about current events and then I moved the conversation along until we were able to talk about Jesus being the Son of God and the Savior of the world.

I believe God would have us be merciful to all and to build bridges that enable salvation, rather than burning bridges that divide and hinder the Gospel.

2. It disrespects the memory of those who died on 9/11.

In the words of Mr. Harvey in an open letter to Mr. Terry Jones, “The vicious thugs who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon almost nine years ago did so in order to widen the cultural divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims. Your planned protest would also accomplish this, allowing the message of violent extremists acting in the name of Islam to resonate more widely. The innocent victims of 9/11 deserve better than for you to use the anniversary of their death to commit an act of which their murderers would have approved.”

3. It is un-American.

The First Amendment protects Americans from any government effort to abridge our freedom of speech. We are free to say and do what we please, however not all things are benifical and in fact, some things cause great harm. If our government said that you had no right to express yourself, this would be un-American, but irresponsibly exercising that right stains our hard-earned heritage of liberty and our tradition of tolerance. In the same way that many people feel it’s within a legal right to build a mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero, just not prudent. The same applies to the burning of the Quran: It might be legal to burn the book, but the wise thing would be NOT to burn it.

I wish everyone felt the same way about our flag. For me the American flag represents the freedom we share. It causes personal pain whenever I see or hear of someone burning a flag. They might have the freedom to do so, but if they were in their right mind they would never do it for the pain it causes in so many people who fought and died for the freedoms we have here in the United States of America.

4. It is endangering American lives.

Your actions endanger not only our military around the world, you are endangering my life and my family. The vast majority of Muslims who learn about the planned protest will peaceably counter-protest, but there will be many, operating under their own perverted interpretation of the religion, who will want to protest by killing Americans wherever they may find them. Thousands of Americans in the military, in the foreign service, and doing humanitarian work in countries from Mauritania to Indonesia (where thousands of Muslims have already marched in protest of your plan) are in danger.

Please join me in praying that this event does NOT unfold and if it does, I pray that we will not be judged by the actions of a few foolish people. But I’m certain we will be, and therein lies the problem beyond our ability to fix.

May God forgive us of ALL of our sins and may we be mericful as God has been merciful to us.

Pastor Dudley

Check out The Vine

Written by admin on . Posted in Blog. No Comments on Check out The Vine

Did you know that we have a group of college-aged adults who meet every Sunday in the sanctuary at 6:30 pm? The Vine is our Sunday night service led by Pastor Phil Allen, and its mission to promote transforming growth among a generation of young believers through biblical teaching, missions and discipleship.

If you are a young adult, I hope you will get involve in The Vine very soon. Check out this video, which will give you a little taste of what this gathering of dynamic young people is all about:

The Vine Promo from Shepherd Youth on Vimeo.