Supernatural Realities - Mac Pier

A few things. I had some high school friends that were very committed Christians and they were praying for me. I was nudged to begin reading the New Testament, which I did. But I also had a demonic encounter in the February of my junior year high school that really helped me realize the reality of supernatural. And then I also had a near death experience. So that all happened within about four or five months. And that really really got my attention. My name is MacPierre. I'm founder of Movement.org. I've been privileged to live and work in New York City for 40 years. And this is my Faithly Story. Welcome to Faithly Stories, the podcast that brings you inspiring tales from conversations with church leaders as they navigate the peaks and valleys of their faith journeys through their ministry work and everyday life. Join us as we delve into their challenges, moments of encouragement and answered prayers. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff, and volunteers. Learn more at Faithly.co. Get ready to be uplifted and inspired as we unveil the heart of faith through stories from the front lines of ministry on the Faithly Stories podcast. So could you tell us how your faith journey started? My faith journey started in the Midwest, where and from I grew up in the state of South Dakota in a small community. My family attended a Presbyterian church where I grew up and I attended one to VBS. So it was part of my formation growing up. My faith was not real active in high school and during my junior year in high school had a confluence of about four different experiences and circumstances that led me to make a personal faith to Jesus. And almost concurrently with that faith commitment at the age of 17, I had a grasp of the necessity and the urgency to unite God's people to work together. How long were you in South Dakota? I was in South Dakota through my university years and then I worked for three years on staff with university and moved to New York when I was 25. So what city was we're yet and what was that like? Well the city I lived in the last three years. I was a city of Sioux Falls. It's the largest city in the state. Today it's actually quite a rapid growing city. We are members of a church that are now called Central Church. One of our other church members there is Senator John Thune. The church is really attracted a lot of strong marketplace Christians and it's had a big missions footprint all over the world. Could you kind of just expand on like what life was life but also just like faith life in my very rural area? I grew up in a town of 600 people my great grandfather 110 years ago started the 18th bank in the state. So when he started the bank it was still very very rural very very much in the pioneer stages of things and we grew up in my wife and I both grew up in small towns. It's predominantly a farming background lots of agriculture and so we went to small high schools my high school my high school graduate in class was about 38. My high school attendant my whole high school is about 150. My wife's high school is a little bit smaller. She came from a community that had a lot of Scandinavians. Her family was a evangelical Lutheran over the last several generations so that was her roots. We met at the University of South Dakota in Vermilion and we might we got involved very involved with the University group there. The University really became a doorway into a deeper discipleship with some of its Bible and life conferences. We both attended the Urbana missions conference in 1979 which was very formational and life changing. In fact when we were there we we made a lifetime commitment to missions so it was 45 years ago this month where we attended Urbana along with about 17,000 other university students and that was quite formational. That was a bit of our journey there growing up in the rural Midwest and in meeting at university. So what was those influences at your younger age where it brought you to faith? I had a few things I had some high school friends that were very committed Christians and they were praying for me. I was nudged to begin reading the New Testament which I did but I also had a demonic encounter in the February of my junior year high school that really helped me realize the reality of supernatural and then I also had a near death experience. So that all happened within about four or five months and that really really got my attention. It really raised the antenna for me of the supernatural, the reality of eternity, life and death kinds of issues. I was I was paying attention in the summer of 1976 when it all came together for me. So what was the initial hesitation or you just I mean what was faith prominent in your family? We grew up in a church that I would consider to be fairly nominal. So we we were not anti-faith but it wasn't something that was a central part of our lives. In my family we had a mix of persons that were very faithful and going to church. We had others that rarely went to church but we never really talked about our faith as a part of our value system as a family and I think that's not in common particularly in some rural areas and I think to like our parents our parents were part of the would call the greatest generation and they tended to be very quiet. Particularly the men tend to be very quiet about things that were more private and internal. So that was a bit of the culture that we grew up in. It's also not uncommon in urban areas. So could you elaborate on this demonic experience you had? Sure. I was living in the basement of my parents house was and I remember it was February of 1976. My bedroom was at the end of the hallway or the end of the basement and the rest of the basement was dark. I was it was a weeknight and I was studying and I was laying on my bed and I fell asleep and as I fell asleep I had a dream and in the dream I was doing exactly what I had been doing when I was awake wearing the sand clothes laying on bed studying and then I noticed that there was a figure that had walked down the stairs to the basement and then walked the entire length of the basement into my bedroom in a sense to to come and get me and then I woke up and it was very real and there was a real sense that there was a real sense that that the supernatural was real and very powerful and it was a was an important contributor to to get me to think about life beyond what can be seen. Wait so what did this figure do or say or you just noticed? Really wants to figure entered into my room then I woke up so that was kind of the end of end of that encounter but it was quite startling and did this encounter ever repeat itself or was this a one-time event? It was it was one time. Yeah so that shocked you into like going deeper into the supernatural? Well I just made me aware of of things that that were beyond what we could see that's like when you when you have that experience and you're reading the New Testament and you're reading you're reading about all these supernatural power encounters I've had a little bit of the same experience when I've traveled the places like Delhi and have gone into a Hindu temple and you can just feel the presence of the demonic so it really really develop a sensitivity toward that so I've been in different places around the world where you get a real sense that there's there's a lot of spiritual oppression and that was somewhat similar in that regard. Did you share this experience with anybody and did anyone help you process this? I don't remember sharing about it with anyone immediately that summer when I was invited to come be an editor at a Bible camp up in North Dakota and I had a lot of friends that were there so it was it was interesting me to go there and be there and that summer I was there I did meet with a pastor who helped me understand what I've been thinking and reading and reflecting on and that helped put everything into perspective and context. I think I'm trying to understand like how did this experience shape you and propeller you toward not just faith but like like a specific framework of like a doctrinal understanding of the supernatural right because you can either go like the orthodox reform side or like the more liberal cameras and I have no idea where you land so like where did this journey take you I'm just super curious. Yeah I would say well so where the the journey led me when I so the I actually remember the date that I made a formal confession of faith which was July 20th 1976 and I remember that day because that was a date that I had this conversation with this pastor and when I when I prayed with the pastor and he guided me into the prayer it was really like it was like having having a veil come off of your eyes and you're seeing things completely differently in some ways almost for the first time and there was a real sense like when I I've read anti-rights autobiography of Paul and he said that in Acts 9 when Paul was on his journey to Damascus he had an explosion of truth in his mind in his heart and that's a bit of what I had I would say I had an explosion of truth in my in my mind in my heart and I was very motivated to share my faith coming up out of that experience and I was a senior in high school and fairly small high schools I mentioned but I had about 20% of the student body in a Bible study my senior year while we were meeting before a school began and and then when I went away to university and got active with the university I shared in nine of the 14 sorrows and fraternities regarding my faith I would have a friend of mine go with me he was a musician and together we would we would share our story and I did I led two campus missions while was at university so this is all really within five years of my niche what I would describe as my initial conversion so it was real heart for the gospel real desire to to share that with with other people and when did your near death experience happen that happened in May of that year was associated with our junior senior prom I had a date and we were we were we left the prom and we were going to join classmates at a movie theater about 20 miles away and it was very late and I was driving and we both had fallen asleep at the we I'd fallen asleep my dated fall asleep and as we were as the car was varying into the ditch I woke suddenly and then I jerked the steering wheel and then ended up in the opposite ditch facing the opposite way and so there was a real sense that that that could have been fatal if something else had happened I almost survived near death at the age of 14 I was on a on a bicycle driving on a highway and was hit by a car traveling 50 miles an hour and survived that so I had it so within about four years I had a couple of experiences like that and how did that affect you because at 14 I guess your faith wasn't all there but like this one it's after the profession of faith and how is it different well the second was it was actually before the profession of faith so so the profession of faith happened in July this happened in May and so again it was just it was another contributor to the sense that there really is the real the really is the sense that we're we're quite mortal and and every day's a gift we're not guaranteed what's gonna happen for us and so anyway that that was pretty pronounced for me after that experience I guess I'm a little shocked at like the not that this experience happened but just to me when I hear that I feel like most people would just be confused right and like doubt and question but for you it was like a positive catalyst toward faith so like could you explain like how that worked for you yeah so I I think how it all but all converged for me is was really developing some early disciplines and reading and reflecting on scripture even though I was still a late teenager and and really became fairly rooted fairly quickly for me part of it for me I was I was a fairly serious student got good grades I didn't have a lot of other behaviors I needed to shed at that point so it really became very substantive and real for me faith one of these I learned early on is that that the Christian faith is the most logical belief system in the university it gives a world view that makes sense of the world to make sense of history it makes sense of things that are eternal and temporal so what happened after college after college it's a little bit of the story here so my wife and I attended the Urban Emissions Conference in 1979 which was the middle of our junior year so we had we had a year left I was actually able to graduate a semester early so that the timing was we were gonna graduate we were actually we got married just a week after I graduated semester early so we're pretty young I had interviewed four and gotten a job with the IRS I had gotten an undergraduate in business management I was one of 120 applicants so I got the job so I felt like that was a door that had opened and then in January of 1980 President Reagan was inaugurated and the first law he signed into effect was the federal hiring freeze so the job that I thought I had was gone within a couple of weeks I hadn't even gotten started fortunately I I was working at my family's bank while my wife finished up an internship but when when I got the news about this job being taken away I had to reassess my options and I had two options at that time I had applied for and gotten into the Thunderbird School of Graduate Management which is a MBA program where you learn a foreign language the other was an opportunity to join staff with university my staff member John Howe was leaving university at that time and he invited me to take his position I weighed the two options and felt like joining staff with the university would get his get his overseas more quickly we began that assignment I began that assignment in the summer of 1981 and then 1983 we did a 10 week a 10 week mission in North India and a state called Bihar's the size of Nebraska and it has a population of about a hundred million people the ratio of Hindus and Muslims the Christians we were told was about a hundred thousand a one so it was a very very intense experience we were on long for the summer with a group called Operation Mobilization and we met every Friday and prayed three to nine hours and growing their prosperity and that was fairly foreign to my experience but it was very formational and on the other side of the experience we made the decision and got the invitation to move to New York City in June of 1984 what did you do in New York when I came to New York I was on staff at the university so I was on staff for 10 years six years I was air director I had about five staff we oversaw about 15 campuses so our team worked on the private schools like Columbia, Jewelyard, NYU, Pratt and we also worked with the state universities particularly Long Island like Stony Brook some of the other state universities so I did that for for six years four years I assisted the regional director Bobby Gross who was overseeing all of New York and New Jersey I also had the opportunity to speak at the Urban 93 missions conference the Urban 96 missions conference I began to bring churches to pray together in 1987 I met some staff from here's life which is campus crusades or crews in our city urban ministry and we met in June of 1987 and we decided to bring 16 churches to pray together on a Friday night 1988 and during that season it was really the beginning of what I call almost a murder pandemic in New York we had seven years in a row of eight murders a day that began the late 80s into the early 90s and because the city had become so violent many of the churches and leaders in the city were feeling quite overwhelmed so when we had that first prayer gathering we invited those 16 churches and 75 churches showed up so it was it was quite a quite a catalyst to really launch the concerts a prayer movement in the city what did you do after interversity so after a university in 1984 I joined the team of concerts a prayer international just to work full time on the prayer movement for the next four years we were able to grow the prayer movement from about 600 churches to 1300 churches that were involved in some capacity so that went till 1998 and then we decided to become our own New York organization and we became concerts of prayer greater New York so that began in 1998 and then in the year 2000 Tim Keller asked me to co-create with him what was called the Church multiplication alliance and we took a couple years to figure that out what we started with about 10 denominations who wanted to do some church planning particularly in and around Manhattan and so we basically married Redeemer's expertise with our convening skills and we did that for several years and then 2009 we commissioned the research to assess the progress we were making and the research indicated that there had been a 300% growth in evangelical churches in Manhattan from 1989 to 2009 which was really a stunning research and we took that research and we created our first movement day in 2010 as we began 14 years ago Tim committed to speak every year and the first year we had people come from 34 states and 14 countries and as we continued the movement day journey began to gain interest internationally we had our first global gatherings in Pretoria, South Africa in 2015 and then Puerto Prince Haiti 2015 we began to work in Dallas in 2014 2016 we invited the Globe to come to New York at the Javits Center we had 3,000 leaders from 400 cities in 95 countries and coming out of that we've really been trying to keep up with interest all over the world I would say we have some form of presence in about 500 cities globally so movement day started off as a church planning insight it was I would say that's what its roots were really it was really a consultation that that had had as its vision bringing leaders from the same city in a room together to really ask the question what is God doing in our city what would we like to see him do over the next 10 years what does that look like so it definitely included church planning but it also included a number of other efforts as well so based on the research you said there was a 300% growth but is that including if churches like shut down and new ones were added or is that a cumulative effect it's definitely cumulative basically in the 80s the estimate is that on Manhattan where there's one and a half million people there are about 9,000 people attending evangelical churches and then when this research was commissioned in 2009 that 9,000 had become 45,000 so it was it's actually more than a 3% growth when the research was commissioned again in 2014 the 3% had become the 5% so I don't think we have enough knowledge to know what percentage of it was from conversion growth what percentage of it was people that migrated into the city but it was a really palpable change anybody that was here in the early 80s and then saw what life was like in 2014 can really tell a significant difference so I would actually just ask you what it was like in the like even though I grew up in New York I spent most of my time in Queens so I actually don't know what the climate of church was in the city and I do know like Tim Keller was like influential in planning or in urban centers but like I guess now I take it for granted that like we have these churches that are planted in the city and there's like a bunch of them so like what was the climate like and like how did like the like the Tim Keller effect like yeah happened in New York City yeah it's got questions I think an important date to go back to would be like 1964 if you go back to 1964 you Google what is the ethnicity of New York at that time it was 88% white 12% African American in 1966 President Johnson signed the Immigration Act and that opened the doors to people coming in from Africa Asia Latin America and really what's happened since 1966 I would actually call it a very gradual spiritual awakening across New York and a lot of it the initial impact was led by immigrant churches so in Queens you have at least at one time you had 300 Korean churches just across northern Queens you have literally hundreds if not thousands of African American Jamaican Trinidadian Puerto Rican churches that have been raised up over the last 50 60 years so out of Burrow by Burrow Christianity's been very robust and traditions like the Korean church where they get up and have these 5 am 6 am prayer meetings some of the some of the churches would actually send buses out as far as 45 minutes away to pick up people and come back and pray I really even though there's a lot of cultural cultural expression there it's also something I think got really has honored over the decades but Manhattan was always been very different because Manhattan is is in many ways Manhattan is more like Western Europe historically very secular very affluent in Midtown anyway so when Keller came along I think Tim made several real contributions one of his contributions in the early days of Redeemer is that he would sit down and meet with about 40 people a week just to talk with them here their story and their story is really informed his preaching and someone said that Keller's preaching was like fly paper against the culture and people really were drawn to Tim's preaching and what that could look like until Redeemer grew very rapidly and when Tim and I sat down in the year 2000 Tim said to me he said New York needs lots of new churches the conviction was that churches 10 years and younger eight times more effective in reaching new people said we need lots of new churches but they're not all going to be Presbyterian and so there was a real recognition that God was doing a lot in very diverse traditions whether it be Baptist or Pentecostal or Methodist or Lutheran and that was really the kind of the marriage of our outer burrow network and Tim and Redeemer's church planning expertise and it really took root and there was a lot of growth I think to Tim's credit over the last especially the last I'd say 15 years of his life he really did a good job of connecting with some more of the outer burrow leaders and movements I know who's doing a lot with Spanish churches and the Bronx I know that Tim was interacting with lots of other leaders across the ethnic spectrum and that that's that's been a real contribution and I I think that one of the analyses of all this is that part of what Tim Keller brought and myself to a lesser extent is that when you come into a place like New York as neutral outsiders there's some things that you can do that are easier than if somebody's indigenous to the city we just that's just the nature of things and and God was able to honor that and bring together bring together an alliance and in a real conviction that that movements are always preceded by alliances you have to aggregate in order to accelerate so it's really important to marry different traditions in their respective strengths to one another the best we can so what are those advantages for people that not like growing up in New York well I think you come in and and you're not you're not attached to a particular attached to a particular neighborhood or a community you just kind of come in and you're and you in a lot of ways there's a lot that you don't know and then it forces you to learn some things it forces you to be more of an observer and one of the interesting thing about New York is that I think that 90% of the active Christians in New York are either minority or immigrant and I think this is sounds a little counterintuitive but one of the advantages of being Caucasian is that I've noticed that that for whatever reason I don't understand it but for whatever reason groups that are really diverse have been willing to trust a leader from a Caucasian background just as really functioning is kind of glue and I think our our vision for our work we really see ourselves as a Barnabas kind of organization we come alongside we're really called to encourage and to resource and to empower and really to be deferential to others and and that's really what we've tried to do is to really celebrate all the really diverse ways that God has been at work in the city and to use our platform as a way to bring people together that wouldn't otherwise come together so I've heard that in other domains about like the predominant like white figure and how especially in the United States that like like minorities would be more drawn to that and someone said and I kind of agree I think it just comes down to like when we grow up especially media a lot of the faces we see are white right and so we just have this like ingrained in a childhood and that's why like representation I you know is important although like I feel like the liberal left think that too seriously sometimes but I do think there's a there's gonna be a shift in the upcoming generations of not just what someone looks like but what someone sounds like well I think too it's an interesting dynamic because the white church in much of urban America has really declined significantly there was a book written in the 70s called cities churches and communities and the premise of the author was that after World War II the US became the first suburbination in the history of the world and the two things that fuel suburbanization were inexpensive housing and racism so you had a lot of flight out of a lot of cities and the the communities that stayed in the cities and really a dug in their roots tended to be a lot of minority and immigrant communities who've been here for really for decades if not centuries and and I particularly appreciative of the Pentecostal movement I found that Pentecostal Christians have really adapted well in urban environments and they've been very resilient and so I just have a lot of respect respect for that community in particular with the current landscape and the trend that I see and I kind of want your feedback on this is that like as the city gets more affluent it gets gentrified more and more right so the minorities gets pushed out and the focal point becomes these young like high skilled labor like white color of people and those people tend to like not really be looking for faith but it just seems like for the Gen Z and Gen Alpha I don't know if it's faith that they're looking for but they are looking for something that's missing right so how do you see like everything that you've experienced right how does that look to you project it on to the upcoming generation and how like they're so vastly different growing up in a vastly different like environment yeah it's a great observation I would just say as a general rule there tends to be an inverse relationship between affluence and spiritual receptivity and and that's why historically you know I think this was something that Tim Keller said at one time the the least likely person to be in church on a Sunday was a white male between 40 and 50 but now it is it is changing rapidly with Gen Z and Gen Alpha I think Gen Z may be the first generation where Gen Z's around the world have more common with each other than they do between themselves and even their parents there was a French sociologist that said that Gen Z's may be the first generation that are not embracing inherited religion and that has implications both for young people that grow up in the church but also an opportunity to influence people that come from different religious traditions I think the implication of it is when you live in a fairly affluent society and granted there are lots of pockets of poverty in in New York but at a global level we're in the top 99.99% of relative wealth around the world the challenge is always going to be if if people are going to grow spiritually being relatively affluent we have to challenge people to a radical form of discipleship that's and that's going to take some really skilled leadership in that regard I've been very impressed with the research of Josh Crossman and his as long as a really important essay called the Great Opportunity and he believes that unless something changes that that we will continue to lose about a million young people a year from the church and that by 2050 half of the churches in America could be closed so that's one one forecast and he has some really good antidotes to all that but I do think we have to be as leaders depending whether we're boomers or millennials we really have to be paying attention to how God is stirring among young people because I believe that the most spiritual movements are started by people under the age of 28 that's really people in their light teens college early career it's a really formational season of life but do you feel like young people usually like spearhead movements because like part of it is like I don't know better so I'm just gonna go for it and then part of it is the are more emotionally tuned with like what's going on yeah it's an interesting question I do think that young people have a bigger appetite for risks and I also think that young people have have the ability to be creative less inhibited obviously typically haven't started a family yet don't have those that set of responsibilities by the time that I was 25 years old I had made five major decisions I made a faith decision I had made a marriage decision I had made a vocational decision I had made a geographic decision and if we're able to influence people young people in that and obviously people people especially in New York at married later than 25 but if we're able to help people set their trajectory earlier in their lives that I think they'll be people want to take greater risks I have a question about the church and like so like when you know church planting was happening in the 60s 70s 80s and 90s the imagery I have is just like you know you have a pastor and a congregation and families right but as the family structure is like doing the lane and people are delaying family structures like I kind of see like a lot of young adults and like older adults singles in churches and I feel like that changes the dynamics of churches to right and the reason I ask this is because I feel like the church model that we have been using is being broken right in a sense because the demographic is changing vastly and the culture of that demographic I think is infusing into the older tradition it's not working anymore right and so one thing I'm still struggling with and like working through is I feel like people still need human connection right and you don't really get that in a large group but you get it in a smaller group right and I know like in my early years I was like so against house churches but now it sounds so so much more appealing that we can meet during the week and actually get to know each other and because I feel like the whole pomp and circumstance of religion is dying out for the younger people because I also think they're seeking authenticity right so in your mind like absorbing that like how would you go about doing it differently or maybe you disagree and the older model works or like you know like yeah what are your thoughts well I think I think church in the 21st century has to be very innovative because a lot of times you have constraints you have the constraints of real estate and parking and you have all those constraints you have the other constraint that you have particularly in play like New York or people are really time for and so people can only people don't like to do so much like my wife she's leading she started a group called Bible study fellowship in Queens it's all over the world but she's the first one to start in Queens and last year they were meeting at a church but this year they're doing it all on Zoom just because it was really hard to get women to come out at night and all that so I think I think the environment that we're in we need some real innovators a good friend Robert Guerrero who's worked with church planners especially Spanish speakers he talked about a church planner who started a church plan in a laundromat and you know you have to really think outside the box and figure out what you want what you want to be you know the guy that I studied with for three years he was asked by Billy Graham to go study the the cities of the world his name is Rebaki and he would always ask this question what's better a 747 or a bicycle and the answer to the question was it just depends on where you're going and so I think we have to be very elastic in what models tend to work I think as as things get more expensive in urban areas I think that will force churches and communities to think smaller just because of the cost of time and the cost of real estate I think we just we need to have a very open-handed definition of church and I know internationally the house churches are that's the only way that some churches some movements can survive we do a lot of work in India and because of Hindu nationalism they're very concerned about anti-conversion laws and places like Uttar Pradesh where the Taj Mahal as they've already put 1700 Christian leaders in prison so they're having to make a lot of really hard contextual decisions one last thing about the church thing is because you brought up a really good point about like how like especially just inflation things are getting more expensive one thing I definitely do see as churches get bigger is that the concern for their budget becomes more prominent right how do you feel about that let's get questioned and I'm always really reluctant to criticize I believe that God leads different leaders in different directions I just think that it's really important for any church leadership to really discern the unique mandate that that God has given them and there are some leaders that have done fantastically well using media one of the reasons that Billy Graham became so well known globally he was one of the first a Christian leaders to really harness television and God really used that so I'm reluctant to criticize I think we need to always assess where we're waiting our resources and in the return on investment as it were of those resources I really do think do think the Catholic church has gotten one thing really right which is the parish model I really do believe as much as possible if people can live near where they worship that's optimal I just noticed in New York that people tend to live working worship in three completely different spaces and it's very easy to spend so much of your week just commuting commuting here commuting there we had a we had a home in flushing for almost 30 years and we were able to my wife was able to commute to work and we and we were 10 minute walk from our church and I was able to work from home and the difference that made over over years and decades was quite profound we really felt like we got to know the community I really became a student I think it's the most religiously diverse neighborhood in the world and we would meet people that would be attending mosques and Hindu temples and Buddhist temples and and it was we were able to do that because we were really we were really committed to being proximate I completely agree I also think technology and information age has like made us like it's a double-edged sword because you know what more of what's going on but it's kind of like do you really want to know because it makes you lose focus of what's happening in front of you and the whole idea of the local church is like you should be able to like walk to your church and know your neighbors and yeah so what are you doing now well I am I really invest my energies primarily in two directions so in New York we continue to work particularly in the prayer arena we have our our January pastures prayer summit coming up January 27 to 29 we have a weekly zoom time on prayer with about 30 to 40 liters every Tuesday afternoon that began during COVID we're in our fifth year we began first Thursday prayer about 35 years ago which we continue on zoom so that's what we do in New York we we have our movement day every October this we just had our fifteenth movement day and then we also have a training initiative for under 30 liters called advanced leadership intensive so that's all New York globally we work with leaders in hundreds of cities around the world we create a training initiative called movement day scholars that takes them through a three-year training and they graduate in community by creating a ten-year plan for their city and we've had over a thousand liters go through that training many of them in India were working and working across five continents right now and we have these gap movement day gatherings like we'll have a large gathering in Dubai and March last year we have leaders from 150 cities and 45 countries that came doing a lot a lot in Asia in particular because Asia is about 60% of the global population and we're really giving attention to that we do a forum in Singapore we'll do our second one this September and then working with leaders Africa the Balkan the Brazil that's a so it's a broad it's a broad canvas for us so what are you hoping for I faithly well I know there's a there's a need to have my understanding of it it's a bit of a it's kind of a LinkedIn for people of faith so that that serves a really valuable purpose and how can we be praying for you in your family yeah can pray that that we continue to to see favor we want to want to see the church become more muscular in New York and in all the challenges that it faces and be more impactful and internationally praying that God would would foster greater and greater unity in some of these regions that are really facing overwhelming challenges we're doing some fair bit of work in Beirut they've just had 400,000 people displaced during the war so we're we're a bit of a thermometer and all that so pray that God gives us favor and a way to contribute into those all right thank you Mac for coming on jerk thanks so much all right bye guys thank you for tuning in to the Faithly Stories podcast we pray this episode gave you the encouragement you needed to continue 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