E.18 — 5 Steps to City Transformation
Season 2: Episode 18
5 Steps to City Transformation
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In this episode you will learn:
Why intercessors and prophets are both hugely important
What we did when we found a spirit of racism in our city gates
Who you need to connect with in order for transformation to be ongoing and fruitful
Episode length: 28:11
Transcript
The Blueprints Have Been Released
City wide transformation has been coming out of God's strategy room for quite a while, but it's only been in the last few months that I've seen the blueprints of heaven begin to be released for how to build. If your heart burns to see God transform whole cities, it doesn't take a lot of steps to see it happen. God is looking for the pioneers and visionaries who have the guts to step into large scale transformations of cities. And on today's podcast, we're going to dive into some practical things you can do today to see your city transformed.
Welcome to God's strategy room. As we move into the new epoch in Christianity, God is releasing Kingdom strategies and blueprints. Join us as we dive deep into God's strategy room to discover the wisdom of heaven for the transformation of cities. I'm your host, Angela Meer. I am the apostolic lead for firehouse, a center for citywide transformation in Southern Oregon. Let's jump into this week's episode.
Hi, and welcome to this episode of God's strategy room. I want to talk with you a little bit today about city transformation. You see, there's so much push in in the spirit right now for God to see people raising up who want to see their whole city transformed, whatever city that you're building in, if it's your local, regional city, or if you're getting ready to move to a city that God's sending you to, there's some steps that you can take to begin to see city transformation, so that the kingdom of God is being released in your city in every possible way.
What does it take?
This is such a powerful tool of the Lord right now. And he is oftentimes using people that are just willing to say yes, to go into this new strategy and to see a whole city transformed. It does take a few things that maybe you need to have kind of in spades.
Step 1: Guts
And one of them is guts, to be honest with you. And it takes bravery. And it takes courage. And oftentimes I find myself in the midst of our city transformation, having to draw into the Lord for a lot of courage.
You see the same thing happen for Joshua, you see all over, especially in Joshua chapter one, when he's about to take over Jericho, and he's about to move into taking over the promised land.
God just keeps saying to him over and over
“Joshua, be courageous.”
And that's what it's going to take. Because taking on new territory takes courage, it requires that you kind of reach outside of yourself and pull the grace of God into your life. So that you are able to do things that you never thought you could possibly do.
Because city transformation is amazing and fun and has incredible benefits. But it also requires people who are willing to put in the work and make sure that God is getting the glory for the things that he is building in your city.
Step 2A: Build the Troops
So that's number one. Number two is that I definitely think that you need to build the troops.
So when we start to think about building the troops, we may think to ourselves, “Oh, let's start a church.” But I really think that God's moving outside of this paradigm. With churches, what we tend to do is we tend to draw in from the resources of what's going on there and make sure that everyone's feeling okay.
That's really because it's based on a pastoral model.
Pastoral models just want to make sure that their people are okay, and that they are having healthy marriages and that kind of thing.
And there is definitely a place for that.
But if you're interested in city transformation, you're probably looking at raising up more of like an apostolic or prophetic hub. Or you maybe you're even looking at creating a center in which God could utilize your group for various, different approaches.
So you want to start gathering the troops.
And what I mean by that is, this could be anyone from your mom, to your best friend, to a handful of people in your local church. Whatever it is, I just want you to start thinking about people who are interested in the vision of city transformation. Oftentimes, we're interested only in things that maybe are not that.
So you're gonna want to start asking people and beginning to share your vision of city transformation with a wide variety of people and seeing who's really ready to kind of dig in their heels and say, “Yes, I want to see God transform my city.”
And so, begin with that. Begin with the troops that are going to bring that about, you're going to want a wide variety of gifts and skills. And you know, I actually have a podcast about this, about building a team that's going to make sure that you can go the long haul. So look for intercessors, look for people who are prophetic look for people who are builders and practical about that.
Look for futurists and visionaries, people who know how to look into the future and bring the future into the present.
Look for various people who are willing to just build and do things that are going to be practical in nature. And this will begin to be the the kind of group that you'll want to have around you. So this is a really good way to start.
And it doesn't even have to be all that official, some people are doing this for just meetings in their house. Some people are doing this through getting together at coffee shops and beginning to form a nonprofit. And some people are just doing this even more organically than that they're just gathering the troops. And so don't feel like it needs to have a particular structure at this point. Just trust the Lord to begin to gather your people through prayer, and through intercession, and through shared vision.
In Acts 2:42, it says that they devoted themselves to the apostles doctrine, to the breaking of bread, to fellowship and to prayer.
And that really is what you're going to be looking for, you're going to be looking for a group of people who really are dedicated to these kinds of practices, because they're going to be part of a major operation, about moving the city into a reset towards God's kingdom. So that is an incredible aspect of what you get to have is a real community behind you.
Step 2B: Building Upon the Intercessors
So number two, is I want you to consider building upon the intercessors.
What do I mean with this? Well, oftentimes, we have intercessors, who have already gone the way before us to kind of begin to pray over a city, they began to ask Gods for strategies for what the city needs. And it's always best to build on that rather than to start from scratch.
I’ve seen this happen all the time with intercessory movements is that they come in and they go off of historical records, or that kind of thing, instead of what other saints may have already built on, already established a foundation in intercession.
What it does is it tends to get you stuck in a model of intercession without moving outward towards city wide transformation.
Find the People
And so I want you to really consider beginning to research. Talk with some of the intercessors in your city. What kind of prayer marches have they had in your city? What kind of involvement have they had in intercession that they've already laid a foundation so that you can build upon it.
Another way that you can build upon the intercessors is to utilize your prophetic people. If you have prophetic people in your group, they can tell you which aspects of the spiritual atmosphere of the city have already been taken care of, and have already been cleaned out so that you can build on the firm foundation.
Oftentimes, what prophets do is they help discern what's going on in the spiritual realm. So they're perhaps looking at things like where the angelic is already operating, or where the demonic is possibly operating, and how to clean that out of your city.
The Right Place at the Right Time
Let me give you an example. When I moved into Grants Pass, Oregon, I didn't realize initially that God was calling us to city transformation, I knew that he was calling me back to the city to pray into the promises of God over the city and to see those promises come to pass.
But I didn't realize that he was calling me to also make sure that my city was being transformed.
And so as time went on, and I began to realize this,
The Lord began to give us projects, bit by bit of, of intercession.
And so we began by take tackling a major intercession project about a ruling principality that was over our state. And the Lord began to give a strategy about how to network with people throughout the state to see that this ruling principality came down.
And so once we began to work on this major project, it was about a three month thing where we began to collect, you know, get people's information throughout the state, begin to connect with various resources throughout the state. And we were positioned in time by God because the Lord told us when to do it.
We were positioned in time in a series of about six weeks of worship events throughout the state. And we just happened to be filling the gap between all other worship events that were going on throughout the state. So we knew that we were taking part of something larger than ourselves. And we began to pray over this particular principality, or, not pray over, but we began to pray over the issues that were enthroning this particular principality in our state, and we really hammered that for about 24 hours straight.
We had a 24 hour intercession session that was over zoom so our whole state could be involved. And at the end of it, the intercessors came to us, the prophetic people came to us and they said “This is exactly what you needed to do to go forward.”
Uprooting a Spirit of Racism
And so that was one step forward for us in intercession. The second step happened about six weeks after that, we had an intercessor, who had a dream and this was, to place you in time, this is when we started to see the BLM movement start to rise up and there began to be a lot of racial tension in the United States.
And she had a dream in which she was at the old gates of our city. And at the old gates of our city, there was some racial tension that was going on. Now, we knew practically, that our our city had been involved in the sin of being racist, right. And so we knew that a lot of people had prayed over that issue already. But what she was bringing up in this dream, what she was getting from the Lord in this dream was that it wasn't just tied to forgiving, asking God's forgiveness for the sin, but it was also tied to the gates of the city.
Now we see all throughout Scripture, and I talk about this a lot in my podcast, that God is looking to take over the gates of the city, this is the place where important things happen in the city.
Okay, so for us in, you know, recent times, that means things like the gates of our city may be politics, or it may be businesses, or it may be church structures, the gates of the city are places by which there is important things that are happening on behalf of a city.
And so what she was having in her dream was that the old gates of our city were still holding on to a principality or a spirit that was connected to racism.
Purifying the Old Gates
And through that, we recognize that God had a new prayer assignment for us. And we took our intercessors, there was about 20 of us. And we went out to our city and we went to all the old gates of our city from north, south, east and west. And what I mean by “old gates” is that this is the place where the city was established in the beginning, okay, and it's grown beyond this now. She felt in particular that God was saying that this is the old gates of the city, because the building in which the dream took place was one of the oldest buildings on that side of town.
Anyways, so we went around to each of the compass locations of the old gates of the city. And we began to pray and to prophesy over the old gates, that they had to make way for the King of Glory to come in, and that everything that was attached to the old gates of our city that were no longer serving the kingdom of God and the King of glory, had to go.
And so by cleaning out the old gates, we began to see that there began to be an increase of our reach. And what we began to see is that there became people coming from regions that we weren't even truly invested in, but they were regions outside of our city.
And it was like, by loosing what had happened over the gates, all of a sudden opened doors for regions outside of our city. And so people from outside of our city began coming to our ministry at firehouse and there began to be more of a push towards a regional thing, rather than just a city thing.
And the reason for that was because we were faithful with intercession and we built upon the intercessors.
We didn't go back and ask for repentance for the sin of racism. We already did that.
But what we did is the prophetic voice through dreams gave us a sense of that racism was attached to an old city gate, and that we needed to purify the gate.
And so you can see why this is so important to be attached to prophets and intercessors, and dreamers, when you begin to build on your intercessors, because what you're doing is you're cleaning out the spiritual atmosphere, where the enemy has attempted to enthrone himself in your city, so that God can come into those regions and he can begin to fill those regions with his glory.
So that's step number two is if you want to build on the intercessors.
Step 3: The Right Wine Skin
Step number three is ask for the right wine skin for your city. Now, what this looks like is “What is a wine skin?” and Jesus said, “Make sure that you don't put old wine in a new wine skin because it will cause the wine skin to burst.” And vice versa. Not to put new new wine in an old wine skin. Did I flip that wrong? I'm not sure if I'm remembering that correctly. But you guys know that verse about wine skins, and we talk about wine skins a lot.
And a lot of times I find that people don't really know what that means. So I'm going to give you a little bit of a lesson on this.
Wine skins, basically, is a flexible model by which the power of God can be released.
Does that make sense? So the wine skin has to be flexible, and it has to be new, so that the new things that God's doing through city transformation can be released in the earth, okay?
See, if one doesn't have a vessel, it just spills out all over the place. So likewise, when God begins to pour out His glory through city transformation, if you don't have a model by which that that city transformation can take place, and a flexible model, then what happens is it just kind of spills all over the place.
Innovation
And for us, the wine skin that God gave us was innovation. He began talking to us about being solutionaries, about having solutions for problems out there in the world, about being people who sought the solutions of God through innovation, rather than even people who were a part of like, cancel culture, perhaps, okay, so instead of saying, “Oh, that's bad, that's bad.” Instead, the church is coming with solutions to the problems that are on the earth. And so for us that looked like a Google complex. I've talked about this in a previous podcast about a dream that I had about the church looking like a Google complex.
And so we began to build around this idea of innovation.
Well, what's interesting about this is that I didn't realize it until later, I was talking with a friend of mine and she was saying to me, Angela, she said, “Is your city known for innovation?” And it really got me thinking. And it dawned on me that not only is my city known for innovation, typically in in blue collar areas, so typically, we see a lot of innovation in our cities through like farming techniques, or different kind of machine, to machine and factory operations and innovating new and faster ways to be able to do things in factory operations.
And so we see a lot of innovation with that, we see a lot of innovation with botany, and different things with plants in this region. It's a very agricultural region. And so this is an area where innovation is steeped in our society. And so it's already something that's baked into the DNA of the city. And what God's doing is causing us to draw upon the DNA that he's already placed in this city so that we can begin to innovate more things, and greater things so that we can see the city transform around innovation.
Regional Wineskins
And if you have questions about that, I really highly recommend that you go to my podcast called the church as Google complex and you'll get more information about that. But the point here is that I want you to start considering “What is the right wine skin for your city?” Now, your city might be centered around music, what if you're in Tennessee and your city is centered around music, then you may be getting a wine skin from God about bringing new kinds of instruments into your musical worship.
Or maybe God gives you a whole new download of rigging worship onto the earth or new types of songs that kind of come from a different kind of paradigm. Okay, so that might be one wine skin, another city might have a wine skin for really building into children and what children offer the body of Christ. And maybe they have really innovative ways to get children involved with the Spirit of God and involved with the Bible. And they just have a real wine skin to see children raised up and have supernatural ways by which children are engaging in the Spirit of God. And by utilizing that wine skin, they begin to transform the churches and the schools and the various places that children go in society. And they begin to see a transformation throughout their society where the whole city is being built upon children and the power that God wants to release on children.
Okay, so these are examples that I'm giving you. So your wine skin might not look like innovation, it might look like something totally different. But I want you to start considering and start praying and asking the Lord to give you the right wine skin for your city.
Step 4: Blueprint
Okay, finally, we have two more steps. Number four is that you want to get the step by step blueprint from God.
The step by step blueprint from God is his kind of idea of what he wants to do in your city. Now, I will admit to you that when God first gave me a step by step blueprint, it was a five step blueprint. And the final step, I knew that was what I was moving towards. And it was like this, this apostolic center that was both practical and spiritual.
But now that I'm involved in city transformation, I know that that step is not the full picture.
I know that, as I've been getting more involved in it, that the Lord is really interested in seeing my entire city transformed by innovation, right, he wants to see a city rise up so that more and more people are coming into the glory of the Lord, it says that, that people will say, “Let us go up to the house of the Lord, that we may learn his ways.” And that's out of Isaiah.
And so that basically is saying that there is a, there is a call of God for for the world to see how the body of Christ operates, and see how they are the head and not the tail. And by seeing that, they will say to themselves, “We must come to God, we must stream to God.”
Where Does it Come From?
And so this is a powerful step by step that we need to have from the Lord, which is a blueprint. And this is what builders get, right? So this may be you, this may be someone else in your group, this may be a prophet in your group, it may be an intercessor in your group, it may be a combination of conversations, it may come really practically through conversation.
But really what you're looking for is the Lord to give you something that you can start seeing yourself moving towards something so that you're not just stuck on “Oh, this is the long range goal. And I don't even know how to start.” Right? you want to start at the beginning, which is why I'm giving you steps right now to city transformation, you want to start with gathering your troops, building on the intercessors, asking for the right wine skin, and then begin to get the blueprint of where to go from there.
Step 5: High & Low
So then finally, I don't want you to forget, when you're getting the blueprint from God, make sure that you consider two types of people in your city transformation, because these two types of people are really key to where you're going, you need to consider the very, very low in your city. And what I mean by that is the drug addict, the the homeless mother, the widowed person, the mom who's perhaps raising children on her own, you need to consider this aspect of your society.
Because by serving this aspect of your society, with city transformation, this is where you're going to see the biggest breakthroughs is that you want those people to be in your heart, when you begin to move towards city transformation, you want to make sure that you are taking care of the poor, you're taking care of the widow, you're making sure that the orphan is being taken care of in your city.
And you're asking God for solutions through your wine skin to make sure that they're taken care of.
Okay, so you want to consider the low, but you also want to consider the very, very high. For instance, today, I'm going to meet with the mayor of our city. And I will be talking with him about various things that are going on with our group and city wide transformation.
It's important to me that I connect with the political, and the people who are involved in the gates of my city, right? And they know who I am, and that they know that I am invested in my city. And I want them to know my face, I want them to know my name. And I want them to know my mission. And that is the thing that you need to consider too.
Who are the people in your city that you need to be known by?
Ask the Lord for open doors to go in and to meet those people and to see those people and to really make sure that those people are on your radar for where you're going. Because these are the people who are making decisions for the city. And you want them to be thinking about you and thinking about your relationship with them when they're making decisions that may affect how you are moving towards city wide transformation.
What if you had someone in politics over your city that wasn't interested in opening the door to you? Well, here's a couple different things, I would first of all, go back to building on the intercessors. Making sure that the Lord is opening doors for you where there are places where you can get in and talk with these types of people. This is going to be a really important aspect of where you go. And so making sure that you're covered in prayer and asking God for an open door.
What did Paul say? Paul often said that “An effectual door of the gospel might be opened to me.”
And this is the same for us, you guys, is that we're asking God for an effectual door to the gospel.
It doesn't matter who you are.
This is why I said it takes bravery to move into city transformation is because in Proverbs 31 it talks about a virtuous woman, it says that her husband's at the gates and she's at the gates too.
This means that we need to begin to look at ourselves and recognize within ourselves that the Lord is asking us to begin to take the gates of our city, and to know the people who are at the gates of our city and to have good relationships with people who are at the gates of our city.
So you'll want to consider these two types of people as you're building towards city wide transformation.
Don’t Stop Building
All right, so finally, last step, and this is easy, guys, this is the easy part right here, build, build, build, build, just keep building the vision that God's putting in front of you.
Sometimes it'll feel like you're just getting enough illumination for the next step.
And that's okay, just take that next step. But here's the thing is that in Nehemiah, we have an excellent example of city wide transformation. And with the book of Nehemiah what we have when Nehemiah came into the city, he had lots and lots of opposition, he had people laughing at him, he had people mocking him, trying to trick him, trying to put words of curses on him, all types of things were occurring from Nehemiah.
The Wisdom of Nehemiah
But there's something that happened with Nehemiah after he went through all of that. And it became a signature aspect of who he was, and city wide transformation. And that is this. At one point, he simply said, “You need to have one hand on a sword, and one hand building the wall.”
What this means you guys in the spirit, what this means for us spiritually, is that God is asking us to be ready to fight the battles, while also building the thing that we're calling to be built.
Because there's going to be a lot of opposition, there's going to be a lot of stuff that you have to deal with. It's not fun. There's going to be a lot of people who are going to be naysayers, and the Lord’s saying, keep your sword up so that you can build, build, build, keep fighting the good fight, and build each brick along the way.
Because the Lord will bring people to sharing your vision because it's in his heart to see city wide transformation.
And if you're simply willing to say “Yes, Lord, choose me.” Then then you are ready to go.
And the Lord will use you and He will start gathering troops around you with similar vision.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope this is an incredible transformation step for you that you begin to start thinking of yourself outside of the confines of perhaps typical church environment and start to begin building city wide transformation around you.
I'm praying for you asking God to release troops to you. And I think that you are about to move into some serious, awesome, powerful days of display of the glory of God. God bless you in Jesus name. Thanks so much.