On Monday, we had the joy of travelling to Stanford-Le-Hope in Essex to hang out with our fellow dreamers, activists and friends from 24-7 prayer in the UK. (Well, the hanging out was a joy, the two hour journey there and the three hour journey home were less celebratory I can tell you!..how did it take us so long to drive 32 miles?)
I enjoy network days. Basically people from across the UK rock up in one place, we do some worshipping, share some stories, pray for/with one another, connect with strangers who become friends over a scrummy lunch, then do some more thinking and dreaming and sharing. It’s a great opportunity to reconnect with old friends and to make new ones, to learn from people who share a similar heart and passion to us, and to be refrshed and inspired for the new stuff that God is doing in the messy, creative expression of prayer that we find ourselves part of.
It was lovely to be able to share with the wider 24-7 community some of our journey as a Boiler Room over the last few months or so, and it was a blessing to be prayed for and to receive some encouraging and exciting words for the coming months. One especially has been buzzing round and round in my mind the last few days… some verses from John chapter 15:
“If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. This is my command: Love each other.” (John 15:7-17, NIV)
Sometimes it can feel a bit like we’re slogging away, and the serving stuff comes easier, and we’re just doing the daily stuff. And then God reminds us that he calls us friends, and that’s a wholly different relationship, and it changes our focus, and we act from a place of intimacy rather than duty, engagement rather than habit; everything is infused with his breath and buzzes with his touch of life. And from that place, we learn it’s not even about how we ‘act’, what we do etc, but just who we are – that is enough and it is a delight to God.
There were lots of other words about fruitfulness and authority and stuff like that… definitely some stuff to take back and share with the team and the Boiler Room people.
After a scrummy lunch, we regrouped and spent some time thinking and listening and praying about 24-7 prayer on university campuses, new training programmes, and fresh ways of communicating the vision to people.
We rounded off the day thinking about the area of social justice, and the part 24-7 prayer has to play in this. And this, for me, was the bit of the day that was the most exciting/disturbing/poignant/profound/shaking. We watched a prophecy that was recently given to the movement which talked about this, about a mantle of social justice, about the poor, about ’souls’. Somehow I’d managed to miss seeing the video of this before, and I sat there in my seat shaken and moved to tears by it. I’ve spent the last few days trying to work out why it stirred me so deeply and how on earth I’m being called to respond to it.
- Firstly, I guess one of the things that strikes me increasingly, as we keep journeying as a boiler room in Wandsworth, is that it’s nigh on impossible to separate prayer and social justice. It’s like prayer gives breath to our campaigning, and the fight for social justice gives feet to our prayers. I may pray and pray for my friend to break free from the drug addiction that has so harmed the last fifteen years of her life, but if I am not prepared to fight alongside her, to sit on a kerb with her holding her hand as she weeps, to celebrate a week when things feel more victorious, surely my prayers limited to nice words and well meaning intentions.
- I think it’s a Salvation Army thing too. I love the energy that exists in the friendship we have, as a denomination, with 24-7 Prayer. And so to hear them being given this same clarion call, this same mantle that we carry, the same urging from God to reach out to those who are forgotten and voiceless and overlooked, that seems to further cement that connection. And I remember that when I got into this Boiler Room stuff I thought it might be glamorous, I thought it might be the ‘cool Christian thing to do’, but God quickly reminded me that this was so far off the mark, and it’s not about glamour or being cool at all, but getting your hands dirty and scuffing your knees along the way.
William Booth encouraged his colleagues to reach out to ‘the last, the lost and the least’; and there is a line from the 24-7 Prayer ‘The Vision’ poem that reads, ‘Herald the weirdo’s! Summon the losers and the freaks. Here come the frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes.’ Same heart… different wording? Different generation… same focus?
I need to muse some more on all this stuff, because it feels a bit like when you know that God is saying something but it takes a while to gather all the pieces.
We got lost on the way home from the Network Day. I don’t know how it happened but signs for Stratford just kept dematerialising, and we nearly ended up in Chelmsford. But our detour (somehow) took us to the Mile End Road, in East London, where the Salvation Army story begun all those years ago. We found ourselves stuck in traffic that wasn’t moving, and the moment wasn’t lost on us, and we wondered whether it was such a coincidence after all. We found ourselves praying that God would re-awaken that calling in us, that mantle that was given to Booth all those years ago, that responsibility that we still carry. We said sorry for the ways we have laid it down and chosen compromise, we asked God to have mercy on us, and we prayed that we would consistently refocus on this during the days and months ahead.
Gotta love those 24/7 guys!
J