One of the ways you can sow in to what God is doing in the community houses is by praying for them! Below are some points of prayer shared by Ryder, one of the men living at the Austin I.G. house:

“1. A lot of us have recently experienced inner healing, and we would like continued healing in some areas of lives and hearts. Some of my personal issues I dealt with were social anxiety and a general feeling of insecurity about my identity in Jesus but as Jesus has encountered my heart, I am now walking in greater truth and freedom in these things. Please continue to pray for all of us to experience greater transformation and healing.

2. We would like prayer for safe travel over the holidays as many people travel to other places to be with their families for Christmas.

3. We would also love if you all prayed for increasing unity in the house!  We are all very close, but want to walk in more of the unity of the Spirit as brothers.

Thank you for your prayers and we hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!”

-Ryder

Below is an update from Michael Strickland, sharing in detail some of the exciting things happening at the Austin I.G. house in the past few weeks!

Toby is a friend who I met about a year ago. Someone invited him to our hooka house church/bible study me and a few guys were doing, and at that time he did not believe in Jesus. Toby was actually raised Jewish. After a few weeks of coming, he started opening up more and being more personal with us. We started to have good conversations about Jesus and were reading the bible together. He eventually started to join in when we would pray together or pray over someone. As time went on he started really enjoying reading the bible and praying with us and often said he felt the presence of God when we did those things.  I can’t think of a specific date that he started following Jesus. For Toby it was a process of experiencing God’s love at a personal level that eventually led him to realize that Jesus was the one true way. He has probably been following Jesus for about 3 months now.

A few weeks after he really started falling in love with Jesus we went down to 6^th street to pray for people. 6^th street in Austin is like a miniature Bourbon Street.  As we walked around praying we approached a guy who had a sling on his arm. We talked to him for a while about how much Jesus loved him and we got to pray for him. He had a lot of physical problems wrong with him. We prayed for him and his headache went away, and he also said he felt a lot of peace.  It was really awesome and I could tell Toby was encouraged.  Throughout the night we prayed/talked with some other people and God was really speaking through us.

Later on that night we were walking back to my car and a homeless man approached us. He started rambling about football. We listened to him for a while and he eventually asked for a dollar. I felt like I should give him one. After giving him a dollar I asked him if we could pray for him and he starts to kind of freak out. He says, “Yall are Christians?! Awwww man I cant believe yall are Christians.” I couldn’t tell if he was upset or sad or what. He immediately started sharing about how he had been thinking about going to church the next day and went on to tell us all these stories from his past about when he saw God doing things in his life.  It quickly became clear that he wasn’t upset, but he was blown away that here God was still seeking him out on 6^th street! It was really incredible. Toby and I just start telling him about God’s love for him and how much God cares for him. We pray over him for freedom from addictions and depression. After about 10-15 minutes of talking to him he says, “What do I gotta do man? What do I gotta do to follow Jesus?” So we lead him in a quick prayer to accepting Jesus. We talked with him for a while, gave him our phone numbers, and referred him to some churches in Austin. This was Toby’s first night out praying for people and a guy gets saved! Toby said it was one of the best nights ever. This was about a month ago.

Last night (12/4) we had our first official house church meeting at our house. It was really incredible. People from all types of circles came. There were people from AA, students from UT, and this guy who is a hair stylist/makeup artist. People were so open with each other and we worshipped, prayed, and discussed the bible for a total of about 4 hours. And to top it all off, Toby got baptized!