Speak Life To Dry Bones

The Mandate of the Church in the City

I am so passionate about the Church of God. So passionate. The Church of God is God’s plan A. And if I was God, I’d probably have a plan B. Let’s be totally honest: we are a rough-and-ready group. When we look at the life of Jesus, He didn’t “off pick ’em,” did He, when He picked His disciples. Yet He has chosen His Church to be His hands, His feet, His mouthpiece in every community.

I absolutely believe in and love the Church. But I know we’ve still got a long way to go to be the light and the salt that God has called us to be.

Like Sally said, we’ve been in Lincoln for coming up to 21 years now. I grew up in Newark. I loved growing up in Newark. I loved being part of a pastor’s family. Church was our be-all and end-all. We didn’t really have any hobbies outside of church. Church was everything.

We went to Bible college, and then me and my husband Dave moved down to London for four years. Going from a small market town like Newark to living in London was a big change, but it gave us the opportunity to see how different churches did things, to see what God was doing in our capital city as well as in other places. We were then able to bring some of that heart back into Lincoln.

I remember at Bible college people used to say, “What are you passionate about?” Some people would say, “I’m really passionate about young people; I want to see young people run for Christ.” Fantastic. Others were really passionate about children. And I used to sit there thinking, I’m just really passionate about the whole thing. I can’t pick one small thing.

As I began to settle into Lincoln, I realised I’m passionate about the word “community.” I’m passionate about the Church being at the heart of community. I’m passionate about the Church being the place where, if anybody has anything going on in their lives and they need some companionship, they need a family to belong to, that’s what the Church can be.

That’s what we’ve had the privilege of developing in Lincoln over the last 20 years: the Church taking her rightful place, the Church having a voice into a city, into a town, into a community like no other. It’s incredible.

Now I’m in a job where I get to travel around the UK, and seeing what the Church is doing is blowing my mind. It’s absolutely incredible. The Church has a mandate to fulfil in every town and city.

Speaking Life Over Our City

The series that you've been going through is called “Wisdom That Builds.” When Pastor Dom sent me the verse for this week, he said, “Feel free to use it, or feel free to do your own thing.” And it was really interesting, because the verse he sent through was exactly what I already had on my heart to share with you. I thought, “Awesome. God’s got a plan. He always has a plan.”

The verse is Proverbs 18:21: “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat of its fruit.” The whole sense of “say less, mean more” is the theme for today. Our words are really powerful.

Did you ever hear that rhyme when you were growing up: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? It’s rubbish. Words can hurt you more than sticks and stones, let’s be honest. Words are powerful. And the Word of God talks a lot about words.

In Matthew 12, Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” Proverbs 12:18–19 says, “The words of the reckless pierce like swords, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” James 3, from The Message paraphrase, says this:

“A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything—or destroy! It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it—smoke right from the pit of hell. This is scary. You can tame a tiger, but you can’t tame a tongue. It’s never been done. The tongue runs wild, a wanton killer. With our tongues we bless God our Father; with the same tongues we curse the very men and women he made in his image. Curses and blessings out of the same mouth!”

You could spend a whole year just looking at that, couldn’t you? It’s huge. But the power of our words cannot be minimized, friends. That old saying, “sticks and stones,” is so incorrect. Words are so powerful.

There are some people here right now who’ve had words spoken over them when they were younger, and those words have actually carved the path of their lives. Maybe you were told, “You’re not good enough,” or, “You’re never going to achieve that,” or, “You’ll never be able to do this or that.” And actually being able to break away from some of that and speak a new thing over our lives—to see what God says about us—is so, so important.

As a church, you are at a crucial point: putting your stake in the ground and buying a building in the center of this town. I am so excited for you. What I imagine God can do through you as a local church in this town is immense. And it’s time to start speaking a new thing over Newark. It will take each one of you hearing what it is the Father is saying, and then speaking, acting, and playing your part.

God’s Word to the Valley of Dry Bones

I really sense God wanted me to unpack a passage that speaks directly into this from Ezekiel 37.

Ezekiel was one of God's prophets before Jesus. At that time, the way God spoke to His people Israel was through individuals called prophets. When Jesus came, He opened up the way for all people—Jewish and non-Jewish—to be in relationship with God. He also gave us the Holy Spirit, who enables us to hear God for ourselves.

But in Ezekiel’s day, Israel were not hearing from God. They were in a complete mess, and God was using His prophets to speak to them. Ezekiel had witnessed the Babylonians destroying Jerusalem. We’re going to read from Ezekiel 37 what God spoke to Ezekiel, and I believe what God is speaking to this church.

“The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’

“I said, ‘Sovereign Lord, you

Jesus With Us in a Broken Church

I believe that God sometimes shows us a valley of dry bones for a reason. It’s really important that we see it – not only in our own situations, but that we also lift our heads and see our town, Newark. I want us to actually see what God is saying to our town.

Our words are powerful. Like we said at the beginning, they hold life and death. But the Word of God holds the power of complete transformation and revival. So it’s important, first of all, that we see.

I believe that sometimes the church can bury its head in the sand. We can gather as a beautiful, holy huddle on a Sunday, everyone heads back to their homes, cracks on with the rest of the week, meets again the next Sunday, and then the next Sunday, and at no point do we stop and ask, “What is God wanting to do with the place where He has put us?”

What is breaking your heart right now? Because for you, it might be different than it is for me. It will be different for different ones across the room. If genuinely our hearts broke for everything that breaks God’s heart, I don’t think we’d be able to survive it. Instead, He often breaks our heart for something specific.

What He wants to do with His church is help us realise this. Have you ever had that thing where you’re really passionate about something and you think, “Everybody should be really passionate about this, because I’m passionate about it. Why does nobody else care?” We can get so annoyed. Is it just me? Am I the only one? No, there are a few of us like that.

I can absolutely throw my dummy out. I get really annoyed if people aren’t passionate about the things I’m passionate about. And then God says to me, “Yes, but Sian, that’s what you bring to the table. That’s what I’ve allowed you to see. I’ve allowed you to see those dry bones for a reason and to do something about it. It’s not going to be what everybody else is passionate about. They’ll be passionate about something that isn’t even on your radar. You can’t even see what’s going on in that area, or why that person is so burdened.”

This is what He does with His beautiful, broken church: He breaks our hearts for a particular piece of His Spirit’s work – something that we think, “Actually, that’s probably going to be my calling and my burden, something I need to do something about.”

Ezekiel walked among the bones. He was immersed in them. It’s really hard to see brokenness from a distance. God never asked us to separate ourselves from the world. We are in it, but we’re not of it. In one sense, we are passing through because we have an eternal destination. But we are here now.

Sometimes we can live in our own little bubble, separate ourselves from the pain of our community. When we intentionally choose to open up our hearts, it can wreck us – but in a good way. It allows our hearts to stay soft.

So many times there are warnings in the Word of God about our hearts becoming hard. We can harden ourselves. How many of you have just stopped reading the news recently? I have. I used to read BBC News every morning just to see what’s going on in the world. Now I probably manage it a few times a week because it’s too painful to see what is happening.

Yet that isn’t the solution – for us to bury our heads in the sand and not know what’s going on. Instead, our prayer needs to become, “God, what is right in front of me? What is breaking Your heart that I need to allow my heart to stay soft to, to be impacted by?”

Why did Jesus choose to live among the people? He could have distanced Himself. He could have set up camp on a mountain somewhere and dipped in every now and then. But He lived His life immersed in the place where God had put Him. He ate with people. He spent time with them. He couldn’t help but see the dry bones all around Him.

Let’s not be a church that looks away from pain, pretends it’s not happening, or sticks our heads in the sand. Let’s look it in the eye. And when we worry, “What if it becomes overwhelming?” we remind ourselves: with man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.

How do I allow myself to keep a soft heart, worshipping a holy God, while I look the pain of our communities in the eye?

Learning to Lament Our Brokenness

Secondly, it's really important for us to allow time to feel. One thing about us as Pentecostals—our community doesn’t even really know what “Pentecostal” means, they don’t know what “AOG” means, they call us “A-O-G, the AOG Church”—so I just say, when they ask, “What are you? Are you like Church of England?” I say, “We’re happy clappy.” “Okay, great, I know what that means.”

But as “happy clappies,” as Pentecostals, one thing we’ve never been really good at, or that we’ve not really been taught to do, is to lament. To lament. No, no, no—let’s preach about breakthrough. We want to talk about the good stuff, the shiny things, and just hope for the best. Yet there is something the Jewish people have really got right here. When somebody dies, they do something called “sitting shiva.” For seven days, you cut off from everyday life and you just mourn together with others.

Someone once said that lament is allowing the expression of pain to manifest within a safe and godly framework. We need to grieve how broken things are, not just pretend it’s not happening, but really grieve. And within that space of grief, we ask forgiveness—for times we may have done something to contribute to this pain, or things we could have done to help but chose not to.

When we see the hopelessness, what we do is we take that pain to God and we lament with Him. And there’s something really incredible that happens in that moment. God not only allows you to feel what He feels, but His love and His compassion become part of us. We sit within that transformational place of “This is not what God intended. This is so far removed from that,” and we sit in that place of brokenness. But when we are lamenting and we’re allowing God’s heart to become our heart—like I said, God cannot work with a hard heart.

So many times, hardened hearts lead to bitterness. They lead to a lack of being able to be used at all by God. Let us be a church that knows how to grieve the brokenness in our communities, whilst always knowing that God is in control.

When you sit with somebody who is going through a really difficult time, and maybe they don’t know God, you have an opportunity to just sit and be a gentle presence, rather than trying to fix. Any fixers in the room? I’ve got my hand up—as soon as I hear a problem I’m like, “We can fix that, there must be a way.” Sometimes you just need to be quiet, sit there, and cry with them. There have been times where I’ve just cried with people because I don’t have any answers. There are no words. Sometimes there are no words. But just being with people is so, so powerful.

So we need to be able to see, but we also need to be able to feel and sense God’s heart in it all. And then we need to be able to speak. What is God saying? The beauty of the words of God is that once they’re spoken, they have eternal power. We have access to 66 books in the Bible of promises and words from heaven on many situations. He may highlight specific verses to you from there. He may give you visions, dreams.

I don’t know about you, but I think sometimes God needs me to be unconscious to speak to me. So many times at night He’ll give me dreams of what He’s doing, so I can see things from a heavenly perspective.

Don’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed, but realise you serve the God who spoke the world into being. As broken and as hopeless as things may seem, we serve the Creator God. And what does it say in Revelation, where He talks about this new heaven and this new earth? “See, I am making all things new.”

Friends, that’s not just for “over there”; that’s for right now. What did Jesus teach us to pray? “Your kingdom come, Your will be done.” We can usher in the kingdom now. That is what He has called us to do. Nothing is impossible for God.

Hope in Christ, Anchor of the Soul

I’ve been thinking about this word “hope” for a while now. Hope is something our world is really struggling to find. Many people I spend time with during the week, people in our community, come into our spaces in a place of despair, a place of hopelessness. They lack hope.

The Word of God says that hope is an anchor for the soul. Many people don’t have that anchor in their lives. And the only hope worth speaking about is the hope that Jesus offers.

It’s so important that we get this right as churches. Sometimes we can focus only on the physical side of things: “Let’s make sure they’re fed, let’s make sure they’re clothed, and then let’s send them on their way.” But when we do that, we can end up selling people short. Yes, the physical stuff really matters—please, let’s not try to save people’s souls and ignore the fact they’ve not eaten for three days. That’s not okay.

Jesus said, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was in prison and you visited me.” And people said, “When did we ever see you in that situation, Jesus?” And he said, “When you do it for the least of these, you’re doing it for me.” So let’s make sure we’re seeing and caring for the whole person.

But also, let’s not just send people on their way with their situation fixed and never think about the reality that, spiritually, it can be a bit like the army before the breath of life was in them—just a heap of bodies, with no breath in them. We need to concentrate on the internal as well as the external, the soul as well as the body.

God’s Redemptive Care for the Vulnerable

I don't ever preach about anything that God hasn't taken me through personally, because otherwise it's just head knowledge. So I want to share a couple of stories.

We had a vulnerable young woman in our community whose partner was in and out of prison on drug charges. She had two children. When I first met her, the school got in touch with us and said, “She's really vulnerable. She really needs somebody to belong to. She's on her own here.” She was pregnant with twins, and she had a two‑year‑old and a five‑year‑old. The whole situation just felt really hopeless, if I'm honest.

She came to our community space, and I met her for coffee. She started to tell me that there were some things going on at home, and I said, “Do you mind if, next time we meet, I come over to your house for a coffee? Would that be all right?” She looked a bit embarrassed and said, “If you really want to.” We had that awkward back‑and‑forth of “only if you’re happy for me to,” and so on.

When I walked into her house, there were two mattresses on the floor that her partner and these two children were sleeping on. I looked around and thought, “This is a stone's throw from our church building, and I had no idea this hopeless situation was going on.”

So, as a church, we did what we often do: “What can we do? How can we help?” We put our “let's fix it” hats on. “Let's fill the house with furniture. Let's make sure they've got everything they need physically and practically.” And that's what we did. Everybody got involved, and it was beautiful to be able to help. Then, when the twins were born, we were able to help with the bits and pieces that she needed.

But how many of you know that sometimes that's just a sticking plaster? There are deeper things going on.

About six months after the twins were born, a social worker went round to the house, saw the situation, and the fact that the kids were just being completely neglected. Not long after, we were holding a big fun day at church. We had a big barbecue going on, the whole community was there, and I saw her walk into the car park holding photos of her children.

She said, “Can we go somewhere? I need to talk to you.” We went to a quiet room and she said, “They're gone. They've taken all four of the children. They're gone.” “Dry bones” isn’t even the word for it. As she cried and we looked at these photos, she said, “Maybe the best thing I can do is let them go, because I wasn't doing a good job. I couldn't do it. It was too much for me. I couldn't do it.”

I said to her, “We believe in a God who hears our prayers. So if you don't mind, can we just pray? We'll pray for the children, and I'll pray for you.” It felt like it was the last thing I could do. You know when you've gone through all the things you think might fix the situation, and you end up saying, “Well, the only thing we can do now is pray”? Why do we ever use those words? The first thing we should do is pray. The first thing we should do is give it into God's hands. But that day, I said to her, “Let's pray.”

After that day, her life spiralled. I saw her in doorways, shooting up with her friends. The street pastors were keeping an eye on her, but over the next couple of years it just got worse and worse. She was heartbroken that her children were in care. Her family had said to her, “Well, you know everybody in care gets abused.” So now she was thinking, “My children might be in an even worse place than they were with me.”

As I spent time with her, I said, “We’ve just become foster carers, and we've had to go through a big process to become foster carers. So I know that your children will be in a safe place right now.”

A few months later, I heard that her partner had died on the streets. She came back to our church building, dragging her dry bones with her, and she said, “Now he's dead, I feel like I can live.” Over the next year or two, we started to see a transformation. Her life began to flourish. She got into college. She managed to get clean. But she knew that life as she had known it was gone, and that her children were somewhere else.

Let me tell you how amazing our God is, because we don’t always get to see the other side of these stories.

In 2020, I went to meet with another Christian foster carer in the city and asked a million questions about what on earth we were doing with our lives, wanting to start fostering. She brought out a book that she keeps with all the photos of her foster children over the last five years. On the very first page, her very first placement, were this woman’s children.

I can't say this without getting emotional. Photo after photo showed the transformation of these children—from a place of neglect and despair to happy, smiling, chubby faces. I fell to pieces. When I was praying with their mum in that small room, holding those photos, God was already placing her children in the hands of somebody who was going to love them, someone who was going to bring new life to them.

And it didn’t stop there. They went on to be adopted by a Christian family in Lincolnshire.

When we're faced with a pile of bones that seems utterly hopeless, the first thing we should ever do is say, “God, what are you going to do?” That whole story is part of what broke me when I saw that woman holding those photos, completely dry and hopeless. At no point did I ever think we’d be foster carers. But as you start to spend time with the brokenness, God starts to break something inside you that makes you think, “Maybe we could do something. Maybe we could be the answer.”

The encouragement is this: God doesn’t just leave you on your own to deal with those piles of bones. When I think about that woman’s journey, I think about the street pastors in our city, the Christian foster carer, the Christian adopters—a whole gaggle of people God was using.

There’s a verse in Acts where God says, “I have many people in this city.” Sometimes we forget that God can mobilise His incredible church to be a safety net for many, many lives. Your words are powerful, but God’s words in your mouth are transformational.

Nightlight Cafes and the Church’s Witness

Second story, and I’ll end with this.

When we first arrived in Lincoln in 2005, I had this dream. The city was pitch black and there was only one light on in our community building. I could see a woman clutching a cup of coffee and crying to someone who was a Christian.

I went to church the next Sunday. Bear in mind, we started leading the church at 25. I was very young, very naïve. I said to the church, “I’ve had this dream. The light was on in the darkness. We need to become a 24/7 church.” I looked at our congregation of 30 quite elderly people and they all went, “That’s really lovely… not sure it’s going to happen.”

What I didn’t realize was that sometimes God gives you a dream that’s for later. His timing is perfect.

Ten years later, I’d created a network of churches in our city, because I knew it doesn’t just take one church. It takes the body of Christ working together, praying together. I’d also got involved in conversations with the NHS about the need for crisis cafés, because the suicide rates in Lincolnshire were much higher than the national average. What breaks God’s heart should break our hearts.

So we gathered the churches and said, “Let’s pray into this. What is God saying?” As I started to pray, I remembered: “God, you gave me a dream once of the light being on in the dark. As one church we couldn’t make that happen.” I looked around the table and realized there were eleven churches represented there.

As I shared the dream, another lady, a Methodist minister, said, “I had exactly the same dream a few years ago—that the light of our church was on in the dark.” Someone else said, “That’s what we’ve been praying and believing for, that maybe our church could be used in that way, but we don’t have what it takes.”

We realized God had been speaking to us over years as churches, and all it took was for us to come together, pray, and commit it to God. And God said, “Right. Now is the time—because you’re talking to each other, you’re praying together.”

From that point onwards, we were able to start something called the Nightlight Cafés. We took the idea to the NHS and said, “Maybe the church could help with this.” One of the commissioners said to me, “What would you need to make it happen? Come up with a proposal. You need to give it to me in two weeks so I can take it to the commissioners.”

So it became this journey of, “God, what does this look like?”

Now we have around 30 Nightlight Cafés across Lincolnshire, fully funded by the NHS, but with the church at the heart of it. Every night of the week the light is on for people who are feeling overwhelmed, feeling like life is too tough. We’re not professionals, though we’ve had a lot of training in mental health and related areas. We’re simply that gentle presence: “Let’s have a coffee. Let me hear what’s going on for you. Let’s play a game together. Let’s just do something simple and human.”

And bit by bit, we’re starting to see people finding Christ through this as well. It’s so, so beautiful.

Friends, we need to see. We need to feel. Then we need to do something about it. We need to speak; we need to act.

I wonder if we could just close our eyes right now. What is Holy Spirit saying to you? What part of this journey are you currently on? It may be that you know exactly what those dry bones are in your life. Maybe there’s been something that has broken your heart for many years, and yet you’ve always said to God, “I just don’t feel equipped to do anything about that.”

I want to ask you to be brave right now and speak again to God in your heart. You might say, “I don’t even know how God can use me in this.” Let me tell you, God does. Over this town, over the many communities represented in this room right now, God has a unique blueprint. He not only hears the cries; he has an answer for those cries. And his answer, time and time again, is his church. It’s you. It’s me.

You may have been searching—“Maybe somebody’s done it somewhere else before that I can copy?” Let me tell you, you serve a creative God, and sometimes he wants you to do something that’s never been done before, something that’s out-of-the-box.

So in this place right now, Heavenly Father, we lay all of our own agendas and our own feelings and thoughts down at your feet. We come to you with open hands, open arms, and we say, “Will you use me? Will you allow me to feel what you feel? Will you show me how to lament with you, God? Will you show me what it is that you want me to do, what you need me to say? Give me words, give me pictures, give me visions. Help me to gather people around me who have the same heart, because together we can do incredible things.”

Lord, I speak over this town that the body of Christ will come together and work together. It’s not just one church; it’s many churches making up one body. Lord God, will you make a way? We want to see lives transformed, hearts touched, people taken from a place of darkness into a place of light, people taken from a place of brokenness into a place of shalom—wholeness.

We speak that and we declare that right now over these bones we see before us. Every day, may we bring them before you and say, “God, have your way. Use me. I’m yours.”

Amen. Amen.