What does it take to bring a church to life?
In the southern part of Silicon Valley you’ll find a church that’s about 100 years old. The church has a great Kingdom legacy but over the years its focus became less outward focused and more inward. It still had lots of good ministries and solid biblical teaching, but more effort was going into keeping people happy than on being God’s ambassadors.
“We’d basically evolved into a cruise ship,” says Dan Yoder, the current chairman of the church elder board and a church member there for the last 50 years. “A cruise ship is all about the comfort of the passengers, and the staff are there to keep the passengers happy. But right now we’re in the process of retooling ourselves into a battleship. Everybody on a battleship is on mission. Everybody knows what their job is. And everybody knows it’s not for their comfort.”
While many established churches in the Valley are in decline, these days Dan’s church is fired up to reach the 97% of people in their area who don’t attend church on a regular basis. How did a 100-year-old church make such a dramatic about-face?
Dan says that God deserves all the credit. But Dan has had a unique part to play as well. If the Holy Spirit is captaining the ship, Dan is probably serving as first mate.
Dan’s training for that role began several years ago on a trip with Novo to the Middle East, where an incredible gospel movement has been taking place. Dan was astounded by the supernatural ways God was showing up while he was there. In one Discovery Bible Study he visited, 80% of the participants (Syrian refugees) claimed to have seen Jesus or had a vision of Jesus. Then, in prayer, one of those refugees quoted a scripture passage verbatim that she’d never even heard, from a book of the Bible she probably didn’t know existed—and it was the same scripture passage God had been using powerfully in the life of the American she was praying for. Dan had never seen the power of God demonstrated like this before. When he got home he reread the miracles in scripture and realized what he was witnessing in the Middle East was just like that. As a result, he began to accept that this supernatural dimension to faith was normal.
In subsequent trips to the Middle East Dan grew in his ability to pray boldly and hear from God himself. His expectation that God would show up in miraculous ways grew. Then, in 2018, Dan heard a very specific word from God: “You need to figure out how to apply what you’ve learned in the Middle East to Silicon Valley.” God was calling him to lead the charge toward reaching the 97% in his hometown. And his church would quickly be joining in on the adventure.
As Dan considered what he’d learned about gospel movements in the Middle East, he recognized that everything God was doing there began with prayer. Dan knew strategic prayer was where things would have to begin in the Valley as well. Enter Novo’s Spiritual Authority Cohort, a 7-month course in strategic prayer and gospel movements. Dan and his wife led a group of 70 people through the Cohort that first year. Several people from the church participated, including the lead pastor. Through the Cohort, those 70 people were developed in the same areas Dan had been in the Middle East: listening for God’s voice, prayer-walking, praying for healing, and stepping out in their God-given authority to make a Kingdom difference wherever they went.
The church’s lead pastor was deeply impacted as he went through the Cohort. He had never prayed for healing for anyone before, but during the session on physical healing he prayed for someone’s back to be healed, and it happened! He became a strong advocate for the Cohort, promoting it across the church and casting the vision that their church was going to be about the Kingdom, about partnering with the Holy Spirit, and about being aware of the supernatural.
Missional DNA was beginning to spread throughout the church body. What had begun with one person’s growth and call to mission was now multiplying to many more people in the congregation.
The church formed a new vision—In our generation, introducing Silicon Valley to Jesus. It was bigger than anything they could accomplish on their own; this was a God-sized vision that would need the participation of the “big C” Church, the whole Body of Christ. With multiple leaders in the church now excited about the possibilities for spiritual and missional growth within the Novo Cohort, the church hosted another one. This Cohort had 80 more participants from 12 different churches in the Valley.
By this time, about 90 of the church congregants had gone through the Cohort, including half of the church’s staff and elders. There was now a large group of people excited to be part of what God wanted to do in the Valley and committed to strategic prayer.
There were some high tech prayer-warriors in the group who used google maps to map out the current reach of the church—all the people who either attended the church or had participated in different church ministries and programs. The map showed a massive network of believers across the city—there were dots everywhere. But there were a few obvious places on the map with no Christian presence at all—and one large section looked particularly significant. It turned out that that area had a high-end shopping center with three large office towers adjacent to it. It wasn’t the kind of place you would expect the enemy to have a stronghold, but the neighborhoods around it had a lot of crime going on, including murders. During initial prayer-walks they noticed a lot of tagging on the buildings, including satanic or occult graffiti. They knew they needed to focus their prayer there first.
When they discovered this stronghold, another Cohort grad from the church, Megan, took the lead in prayer. Since she was a runner she went prayer-jogging in that area five times a week. As she ran, she would listen for God’s voice to tell her turn by turn where to go and how to pray. Every other Saturday a large group from three or four different churches—both Cohort graduates and people who were curious or passionate about prayer—would gather there with her to prayer-walk together. From time to time a few Novo staff were able to join them, praying alongside the group and giving advice from their own prayer-walking experiences. Dan also reached out long-distance a few times to ask questions about things the group was encountering. Over a couple of years as they were faithful to pray through the area, the prayer-team began to experience a shift. The rough areas were being torn down to make way for new construction. The stronghold was coming down.
Last summer God gave Dan a vision confirming the exciting changes he had in store for Silicon Valley. “I was on a flight,” Dan shares, “and as I looked down at Silicon Valley, I saw a massive lion straddling the bay, with his paws on dry land on either side. I knew it was the Lion of Judah. The lion roared, “I will have my day, I will have my day!” And I knew in my spirit that it wasn’t referring to the day of judgment, but the day of awakening. God has big plans for the Valley.”
“I believe we're on the cusp of a major revival of the “big C” Church—the Body of Christ—and a spiritual reawakening in Silicon Valley,” Dan says. “I think we are in for an amazing ride! And Novo’s Cohort is helping us to build a set of leaders that I believe God will use in ways that will blow all of us away over the next couple of years. There will be some churches that just continue to die, but I think we're going to see the beginnings of another Middle East-type gospel movement break out in Silicon Valley. At least, that's what I’m praying for.”
ABOUT THIS STORY
Dan Yoder has spent the majority of his life in Silicon Valley, and Calvary Church of Los Gatos has been his home church for 50 years. Dan’s a recently retired engineer, marketer, and engineering manager. Dan is on the board of NEO, Novo’s mission partner in the Middle East. He’s married to Becky and they have two children and two grandchildren.
The Novo Spiritual Authority Cohort has now had 4,000 participants from 270 cities, including international locations. It’s a free 7-month course offered in either virtual, in-person, or hybrid formats. The Cohort is dynamic and highly interactive; a lot of the learning comes through group discussions and “prayer experiments” with others. You can learn more about the Cohort at www.novo.org/sacohort