I first started attending God’s Relay Race, which is a city wide marketplace prayer gathering in 2020, hosted on the second Saturday of every month at the Westport Plexpod. I really cannot say enough about the character of the leadership and the quality of people this prayer gathering brings together. It’s more than just a prayer gathering. It’s a Kingdom business fellowship.
We come together starting out with some songs and opening prayers welcoming the Holy Spirit. Through this process we have prayed for people and businesses encouraging one another and decreed blessings over Kansas City, stirring up Kingdom business understanding responsibility in action from those that attend including myself.
In this episode, I decided to do a replay of an earlier audio recording, trim down to highlight just the Genesis story of this incredible gathering of God’s business people in Kansas City. Here is the Genesis story of this business prayer gathering with Scott Stanger.
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Transcript
Nathan Sack 00:14
Welcome to another Faith Horizons Kingdom Brief. These are short podcasts between 5 and 10 minutes. The purpose of a kingdom brief is to share highlights from ongoing Kingdom activities and announce events in Kansas City. I first started attending God’s relay race, which is a city wide marketplace prayer gathering in 2020, hosted on the second Saturday of every month at the Westport Plex Pod. I really cannot say enough about the character of the leadership and the quality of people this prayer gathering brings together. It’s more than just a prayer gathering. It’s a Kingdom business fellowship. We come together starting out with some songs and opening prayers welcoming the Holy Spirit. Through this process we have prayed for people and businesses encouraging one another and decreed blessings over Kansas City, stirring up Kingdom business understanding responsibility in action from those that attend including myself. In this episode, I decided to do a replay of an earlier audio recording, trim down to highlight just the Genesis story of this incredible gathering of God’s business people in Kansas City. Here is the Genesis story of this business prayer gathering with Scott Stanger. So in 2019, you started God’s relay race, which is a city wide workplace prayer gathering. Can you tell us a little bit about God’s Relay Race?
Scott Stanger 02:06
Sure. Well, let me give you a little bit more background. I mean, I’m gonna go back to when I became CEO of Stanger Industries, in 2000. I had what I call a King Solomon moment, and it’s where it just you know, you feel the weight of the responsibility you have as a leader. And so that very first year that summer, I went on a spiritual retreat, just to say God, just like Solomon’s came and said, give me wisdom of how to lead these people. That was kind of this, the same driving motivation. My heart was, Lord, give me wisdom. And now I’m going to set aside this time to go on a spiritual retreat and seek You for that wisdom. See, what is it that You want me to do here in this in this executive leadership role over this business. And so that began, then an annual summer retreat, spiritual retreat, where I would just get alone, I would take my Bible and my journal. I would take a payroll list of all of our employees. I would take a customer list of all of our customers, our vendors. I would take what was our strategy, our business plan for that year, and I’d literally get alone in a retreat center, and lay these things out and seek the Lord over them and read through the scriptures and pray and listen to worship music for several days. In fact, it would go on a whole week. So that was the genesis, if you will, of where I start doing this spiritual retreat, seeking the Lord for His will, His heart in our business. Well, it grew because we I left my family’s business in 2008, and moved to Waco to join some friends who had a construction company that they just launched. And it was God was doing amazing things. And they asked me to join them. So I went down and did that. And there, I took the experience that I had at International House of Prayer, which has a weekly marketplace prayer time for two hours, every week, I took that experience, and went down to Waco and said, Hey, is there anybody down here who’s doing this? Didn’t find anybody doing it. So I just gathered some marketplace friends, and we started that I said, Well, here’s what it looks like. It doesn’t have to be that exactly. But we took that and created this weekly marketplace, prayer time and people were gathering. And I truly believe that if you go down and you study all the things that God’s been doing in Waco, Texas, not just the Chip and Joanna Gaines and, and fixer upper. I mean, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But there have been incredible economic prosperity and a spiritual awakening and many wonderful things happening across that city. And with all humility, I believe that we played a small part of being a catalyst for that transformation. You know, I like that word transformation that happened in Waco. Well, so we moved back here, my wife and I, we moved back here to Kansas City in 2015. And for the first couple years, I had other obligations to my employers and I couldn’t do the annual spiritual retreat. But I continued to be involved in marketplace ministries, integrating faith in the marketplace, and so on, go into the prayer meeting at International House of Prayer and their marketplace prayer gathering. And so back in 2019, this little book that I’m holding in my hand called The Spiritual Roots of Kansas City, was published by Bill High and Annika Bergen of The Signatry. It’s a fantastic book, I think that every Christian in Kansas City, not just a marketplace Christian, every Christian Kansas City should read this
book, and understand the legacy, the spiritual legacy we have here in Kansas City. It’s amazing. So this book goes all the way back to the very beginning in 1806, all the way up to modern times of churches and organizations are here existing, and having an impact in our city in this day and age. Many incredible inspiring stories here, miracles that are just, you know, jaw dropping, and so on. Well, this book came out in 2019. And it just so happens that before I discovered this book, that I was sitting there, and I was praying, and I realized my schedule, would allow that I could resume my spiritual retreat that I’d had been done for so many years, and had been temporarily suspended there for a season. And so as I looked at my schedule, like, Okay, what would be the optimal time for me to do this spiritual retreat. Lo and behold, the last week of August in 2019. And I normally do it for a whole week. So it’s the five weekdays and then two weekends. So that’s nine days in total. But then I looked at the date, and I go, Wait a second, this backs up to Labor Day, so I could have a 10th day. And wow, Labor Day is our nation’s celebration of work. Well, how fitting is that I’m going to go on a spiritual retreat for a workplace calling. And it’s going to coincide or culminate on our nation’s celebration of work. And then somebody gave me this book, and I read about the story in 1923, when 52,121 business leaders gathered in downtown Kansas City, to mark the marketplace for Christ. It’s the largest gathering of its kind in the history of our nation as far as business men gathering together in one place to celebrate Jesus Christ. And I was reading this book, just getting super fired up thinking about my spiritual retreat. And then it just dawned on me, wait a second, 1923. So this is 2019. I’m thinking, wow, in four years, we’re going to have the centennial of this historical event that happened right here in our city. It would be, it’d be terrible if we didn’t somehow commemorate that. And so that’s when I thought, you know, my spiritual retreat, it’s not just going to be for me, I want to open this up to anybody else who wants to come in. And we’ll use this as annual stepping stones to see what God wants us to do to celebrate this centennial 1923 event. So lo and behold, we said, okay, what are we going to call this, you know, I got together with some brothers and sisters we’re praying about is we’re planning for it and securing a venue and promoting it, and yada, yada, yada. And we felt like we’re in a relay race. I mean, you know, relay races where it’s different legs, and each runner runs their part, they hand off the baton to the next runner. And that’s what we felt like we were doing that there was a generation 100 years ago, that were called by God to gather together. And there was a ripple effect that was felt for decades, because of that gathering amazing things that God did through that. And again, it’s all in this book, The Spiritual Roots of Kansas City. So we felt like okay, the name for this event needs to be God’s Relay Race. And that was that was the theme. And boom 2019 we embarked on that. We set aside those 10 days, culminating on Labor Day. We pray for 12 hours a day, from 7am to 7pm. It’s literally just being in a in a room together. We have some worship music, we have some whiteboards, we have some, you know, visual aids that help us. We might have as many as 50 people praying, there might be 5 people praying, it has an ebb and a flow to it. It’s, you know, 12 hours a day because we want to give people an opportunity if they want to come in before work, or they want to come in during their lunch hour. They want to come in after work or anywhere in between. They know that there’s a place there for 10 straight days that they can come in, and we can pray for them for their role in their business, whether they’re the owner or they’re, you know, just one of the rank and file employees, as well as pray collectively for what God wants to do in the marketplace of Kansas City. It was so popular that first years people came together and he said, Scott, I really feel like this is going to become more frequent. This isn’t just going to be an annual thing. Maybe it will be weekly, or quarterly or monthly or whatever. And I go, wow, I wasn’t looking forward to it, because there’s a lot of work to pull it off that first time to get the momentum going. But this the second year that we gathered, so this would have been in 2020. It was really clear by the end of that, that, yes, the God was putting on our hearts that this is going to be more frequent. And lo and behold, in 2020, then we launched it into a monthly God’s Relay Race. So the second Saturday of every month, we gather for 2 hours on a Saturday morning at the business incubator of Plex Pod in Westport, which if you read this book, The Spiritual Roots of Kansas City you’ll understand the significance of Westport and why it’s so important for us to be there to be praying for businesses.
Show Notes
God’s Relay Race is a workplace prayer gathering that meets on the second Saturday every month at the Plexpod in Wesport.
You’re invited!
The Second Saturday of every month from 8-10am at the Westport Plexpod.
To add to your calendar, click on the link below.
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For more information go to – www.kcpray.com
