8

STRANGE ANGELS

AMERICA • IRELAND • ENGLAND • SPAIN • UGANDA

God makes his saints out of fools and sinners because there is nothing much else to make them out of.

FREDERICK BUECHNER, THE FACES OF JESUS

There was one last conversation I needed to have with Brian Heasley before he returned to England. It would involve asking a question so outrageous that I’d been putting it off all week. I knew that his answer, one way or the other, would have enormous implications for the future of the entire 24-7 mission. What neither of us knew, however, as we drove in the Scooby-Doo van towards Kansas City International Airport to catch Brian’s flight home, was the number of miracles awaiting the outcome of this one awkward exchange.

We were seated in a Lone Star Steakhouse beneath a giant pair of bull horns the width of a truck. It was now or never. “Brian,” I began, taking a deep breath, “we need someone to go and lead our work in Ibiza; to establish something permanent on the island the whole year round —not just summer teams.”

Brian’s fork had frozen, halfway to his mouth.

“Look, we haven’t got any money. We wouldn’t be able to pay you a bean. In fact, we don’t really have any infrastructure on the island at all, so I don’t know where you and Tracy and the boys would actually, um, live.” It was a lousy pitch, but I didn’t know how to stop. “It’s a messed-up sort of place, as you know: drink, drugs, sex on the streets, you name it. Terrible place to raise teenagers.”

Brian was looking at me quizzically. “You do know,” he said, placing his fork very carefully on the side of his plate and staring at me with a wry smile, “that I’m the senior pastor of a growing church in a beautiful Norfolk town, and I’m not entirely unpopular with my congregation?”

Suddenly I felt stupid. Why would anyone abandon a fruitful ministry, with a house and a salary, in a church that loved him, in a pretty, rural English town in which his two sons were happily at school and where his wife’s family all lived close by —why would anyone leave every shred of security in order to start from scratch, on a wing and a prayer, without a house or a church or a community or a word of Spanish or even an income? What responsible father would risk the happiness and safety of his beautiful wife and two young, impressionable sons in the debauched party capital of Europe?

Andrés

I was about to back down, apologise, and tell Brian that if he knew anyone who might be interested to let me know, when an image flashed through my mind. It was a picture I’d seen of a dreadlocked, tattooed Venezuelan called Andrés, a male stripper at some of San Antonio’s seedier nightclubs. Our team had recently befriended Andrés, they had prayed with him, he’d experienced the power of the Holy Spirit and had given his life to Jesus. We had introduced Andrés to one of the only Spanish-speaking churches on the island, expecting that they would welcome and nurture this brand-new brother generously. Initially they had been kind, giving him a place to stay, while making it clear that they disapproved of his appearance, his tattoos, and the way he dressed. Andrés knew that he wasn’t perfect and had certainly made some serious mistakes, even after becoming a Christian, but he couldn’t understand why Jesus wanted him to cut his hair, to dress formally and cover his tattoos. Hadn’t we told him that God’s love was unconditional? The truth was that Andrés needed discipleship, but instead, the moment he put a foot out of line, he was shunned and rejected by the only church in town that spoke his language.

I was sitting here now, trying to ask my friend an outrageous question because of people like Andrés. It wasn’t about building an empire, or a brand, or extending our reach; it was about countless lost souls looking for Jesus without knowing his name, night after night in the pubs and clubs of this forgotten mission field.

The gospel has always provoked the church just as much as it has challenged the culture. “The Church,” as Archbishop William Temple famously said, “is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.”[47] We are a prayer-fuelled missionary movement, continually discomfited by the consequences of our own gospel.

One of the most significant turning points in Christian history came when the apostle Peter received an appalling vision during his time of prayer. A menagerie of non-kosher animals descended from heaven, and a voice commanded the apostle to do the most offensive, repulsive thing imaginable: “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat” (Acts 10:13). It was a confrontation designed to offend the most deeply ingrained cultural and religious convictions of any devout Jew. Embracing and discipling a Venzuelan stripper was a very minor challenge indeed compared to this. It’s surprising that Peter didn’t dismiss the voice as a Satanic temptation rather than a divine revelation.

A knock at the door, at that precise moment, interrupted Peter’s reverie, summoning him to the house of a Roman soldier called Cornelius. Peter was propelled from his place of prayer to preach the gospel just as he had been on the day of Pentecost. But this time, shockingly, his audience was to be a Gentile household:

While Peter was still speaking . . . the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God.

ACTS 10:44-46

It was a breathtaking moment, a paradigm shift, a quantum leap for the gospel, through which Peter and the other leaders in Jerusalem came to fully accept that the glories of Christ belonged even to the dirty Gentiles.

True prayer continues to provoke and propel us out of our holy places to engage with those who challenge our subconscious cultural perceptions and deeply held religious prejudice. To reach the unchurched we will have to leave the church to visit places and people we might previously have considered “unclean.” Peter’s experiences in the house of Cornelius suggest that when we step out in this way, we do not need to be afraid. Far from being defiled by dirty people and places, we may well bring cleansing and experience the Holy Spirit moving in surprising ways.

The harsh way in which Andrés had been rejected presented us with a simple, stark choice: We either could stop sending missionaries to Ibiza because the church, at that time, was unable to welcome and nurture the sort of people we were reaching, or we would have to establish our own long-term discipling community on the island to care for those who came to faith. It may sound like a no-brainer, but it wasn’t an easy decision. To this day we still receive criticism for planting missional communities, even though we spend most of our time and resources blessing and supporting existing churches —most of whom would welcome Andrés with open arms.

It was also a difficult decision because planting a community in a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah would be unspeakably hard. This was not the sort of place you could just lay on good preaching and decent coffee and watch the thing grow. It would require an exceptional prayer warrior who knew how to plant a church, run a nocturnal mission, care for people who are utterly broken, and somehow do all this without an income. In short, we needed Brian Heasley.

“Look,” he said laughing, “I promise I’ll talk to Tracy and we will certainly pray about Ibiza, but you’re not exactly selling this to me!” He took a sip of his drink and gazed out of the window. “Mind you, it’s interesting —you asking me this now. A piece of paper fell out of Tracy’s Bible the other day —a word someone had given her years ago about travel. Since then we’ve been wondering if maybe it’s time to move on. Everything’s going great in Norfolk, but . . . well, I suppose it’s this call to keep pioneering.”

When I heard this, I think I breathed for the first time since the conversation had begun.

“A few weeks ago on holiday,” Brian continued, “Tracy just turned to me and said —for the first time ever —that she could imagine living somewhere else but that it would have to be sunny! So I actually said to her” —Brian leaned forward conspiratorially —“‘How about doing something with 24-7 in Ibiza?’ That was the first place that popped into my head, and she made me promise not to mention it to you unless you raised it first.”

I gasped. “Lucky I did, then!”

“Look, don’t get too excited, Pete; it was only a chat on holiday. Nothing serious. But we will pray about it, OK?”

I dropped Brian off at the airport, whispering a prayer that God would speak to him loud and clear. As I drove away, my thoughts kept returning to Andrés walking forlornly away from the church. It would be tragic to stop sending mission teams to such a needy place. But if Brian said no, I honestly didn’t have anyone else I could ask. Where else was I going to find a seasoned pastor, a natural evangelist who loved 24-7 Prayer and knew how to trust God for provision, who also had enough experience with drugs and criminality to be able to relate to the majority of young adults who flocked to Ibiza every year? “O God,” I prayed again, “speak to him.” Brian’s background seemed to me to have prepared him perfectly —perhaps uniquely —to develop our work in one of the toughest spiritual environments on earth.

The Life of Brian

Growing up in East Belfast during “the Troubles” had been tougher for Brian and his brothers than they realised at the time. For them it was normal to have bombs exploding, people disappearing, hunger strikes in the nearby Maze Prison, and a large paramilitary mural at the end of their street depicting masked men with machine guns declaring, “For God and for Country.” Their father was a straightforward, mostly self-educated working-class man who taught his four sons not to sing the rebel songs, not to hate, not to take sides. He knew that the troubles in Northern Ireland were tribal, political, maybe even religious; but they had little to do with Jesus, who calls us to love our enemies, to forgive those who sin against us, and to pray for those who spitefully use us.

Billy and Eileen Heasley prayed earnestly every day for their four sons to grow up knowing Jesus —the real Jesus of the Bible —and not to be sucked into the prevailing poison of sectarian violence. Nearly every morning they invited Brian and his brothers to memorise a Bible verse before school, often rewarding them with sweets. “Those childhood Scriptures have followed me,” he says. “Through school, into adulthood, even when I was in prison. I just couldn’t get them out of my head.”

The Heasley family rarely had a fixed income and learned to rely upon God to provide for all their financial needs. It wasn’t easy, but it certainly taught them to trust God for everything. On one occasion, when the family car had broken down, Brian’s big brother announced, “I believe God is so powerful he can give us a new car in fifteen minutes.” Billy must surely have glanced nervously across at Eileen and checked his watch, but within five minutes (not fifteen) there was a knock at the door and a gleaming silver Simca parked in the drive. “I’ve got a wee car for ye here, Billy,” said the man on the doorstep. That’s the kind of miracle a kid doesn’t forget in a hurry.

When Brian was eight, his dad secured a position pastoring a church in England. The whole family somehow squeezed into the small car with all their luggage and moved across the Irish Sea to begin a new life in Grays, Essex. Starting at Quarry Hill Primary School with a thick Irish accent was intimidating, and Brian found that most of his new classmates had different-coloured skin, which he’d never seen before. But an older boy —a real bruiser —was assigned to look after him, and Brian soon got to grips with the multicultural environment. Their new house had an apple tree in the garden and, best of all, a park next door where Brian and his brothers spent all their free time building dens, riding bikes, and playing football until Eileen called them in over the fence for tea and homemade cakes warm from the oven. “I guess,” says Brian, “if I’d known that my mother was about to die, I’d have paid her more attention. Talked to her a bit more. Played a bit less football. Asked her a few more questions.” He pauses. “But she was eternal. She was . . .” His voice trails away and eventually he sighs. “A boy needs his mum.”

Eileen died suddenly, almost without warning, when Brian was eleven. She had been the centre of gravity, the homemaker, the tender voice amongst five men of varying sizes. Their joy-giver had gone and they barely knew how to grieve. Billy tried his best, but his sons were becoming wilder, hurting in their own different ways. Brian began hooking off school to visit London, where he would stare in awe for hours at paintings by Caravaggio and Rembrandt in the National Gallery. At the age of seventeen he was finally kicked out of college and decided to run away to Ireland, hoping perhaps to reawaken childhood memories of a happier place and time.

When he arrived in Cork, a busker urged him to visit Skibbereen, the most southerly town in Ireland, where you can sit on the rocks and sometimes, he said, hear the angels playing harp. After a few pints of Guinness, Brian believed him and set off, but the angels weren’t playing that day in Skibbereen and he was merely picked up by the police for stealing food. Bizarrely, the officers dispatched him to a Hare Krishna community that promised to feed travellers, and so it was that Brian found himself living on an island on the Fermanagh Loch with a bunch of bald vegetarians in orange robes, chanting and dancing around in circles. The monks were kind but weird, and eventually Brian could take it no more. He returned to Essex with a heavy heart. There had been no angel harps in Skibbereen, no enlightenment amongst the Hare Krishna, and there was no mother to welcome him home.

Having failed to find answers in Ireland, Brian began looking for comfort elsewhere. He stormed out of home on his eighteenth birthday and was soon whacked out on drugs. His weight fell to just 125 pounds. He attempted to rob an electrical goods store armed with a claw hammer and moved into a party-squat with a disreputable crowd. “They’d very kindly bring me a line of speed on a mirror and say, ‘Morning, Brian, here’s your breakfast.’ We were all just trying to get back to that buzz we’d had at the start.”

When the police released a photo-fit likeness of Brian, he fled to Amsterdam and spent a few miserable weeks there on the run. Eventually he returned home to Essex and decided to surrender himself to a passing police car. It was probably the least dramatic, most gentlemanly arrest for armed robbery in history. Not like NYPD, Breaking Bad, or America’s Most Wanted. Strolling up to the policeman, Brian introduced himself as a wanted criminal. “Oh right, well look, you’d better just hop in the car,” said the officer apologetically, opening his back door. “Let’s pop you down to the station, shall we?”

Brian was charged with armed robbery and sent to Chelmsford Prison for attempted theft. “Stick yer chin out, son,” said the Scottish guard kindly to the terrified new teenager. “That’s it! And yer chest too. Act like you’ve done it before.” Brian was escorted brusquely through a series of steel doors, dressed in a new blue remand uniform but still wearing his own shoes (a small victory), on the way to spend his first night incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

The sound of men crying and even howling that night echoed eerily around the nineteenth-century penitentiary. Brian soon discovered that these were the groans of new inmates enduring drug withdrawal. He learned to bury his head under the pillow to shut out the sound. That’s how he still sleeps to this day.

The following morning, a giant with a broken nose, a man who had stabbed three people, was staring at him. “Why,” growled the man suspiciously, “do I know you?”

Chin out, shoulders square, try not to look afraid.

By now the giant was studying Brian’s features, a little too close for comfort.

Suddenly he jabbed Brian in the chest. “Heasley!” he cried triumphantly. “Quarry Hill Primary School. Remember? Teacher made me show you round on your first day. Funny little Irish kid, you was back then. Don’t you remember? I was the big boy what looked out for you.”

Brian grinned with relief as much as recognition.

“Welcome,” said the giant, holding out his hand. “I guess you’ll be needing me to look out for you in here too, eh?”

Somewhere outside those forbidding walls, an Irish preacher must surely have been on his knees, praying hard for his son at the start of his first day in prison: “Lord, would you protect my boy in there . . . Would you help him not to be too scared today . . . Please teach him what he needs to learn . . . Help him to make friends —the right kind of friends.” It seemed only yesterday that Billy had been praying such similar prayers for the same frightened little boy, waking up for his first day in another uniform at Quarry Hill School. And of course, inside Chelmsford Prison, God was answering Billy’s prayers, reenlisting the same guy again —a violent, broken-nosed giant to protect a very lost sheep.

Later that week, Brian’s dad became his first visitor. “I could see that it was breaking him up inside to be talking to me like that, across a barrier, in the visiting room.” Brian looked into the eyes of his father on that first visit, and felt deeply ashamed. “It finally dawned on me that this man who had once held me and had watched me grow must have dreamed dreams for my life. And this —the visiting room at Chelmsford Prison, having been kicked out of college, drug abuse, simmering aggression, armed robbery —this was not the dream that a young father dreams for his son. It was too easy to blame it all on the loss of my mum, but no one made me terrorise a shopkeeper with a claw hammer. Other people lose their mothers without doing the things I did.”

Brian pauses, and when eventually he continues, it’s in a whisper. “I wanted a prodigal moment with my father when he came to visit me that day. But it didn’t happen. You don’t hug and cry with a man like my dad. And you definitely don’t hug and cry in prison. You learn to lock all those feelings away in your cell.”

Back in his cell, Brian read the Bible voraciously. Even at night when the lights went out, he would lie there with his head under the pillow, blocking out the screams, remembering verses he’d memorised as a child. Brian’s shame was deep, and his prodigal journey was to be long and painfully slow. In fact, there were to be three further terms in prison —sentences for threatening behaviour, violent disorder, theft and fraud —before he finally, fully “came to his senses and said . . . ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son’” (Luke 15:17, 18-19).

Slowly, God began to put Brian’s life back together. He turned up at a church in a rural Norfolk town called Diss as an ex-con on probation, after his fourth term in prison, and found himself invited to Sunday lunch —accepted, not condemned. That wonderful church loved Brian unconditionally, and gradually he began to find healing and restoration. His childhood faith came alive. Before long he was offered a job as the youth pastor. He met Tracy, a beautiful girl who seemed to like him and eventually agreed to become his wife. And then, a full decade after arriving at the church as an angry, broken man newly released from his fourth stretch in prison, Brian Heasley was asked to become its pastor.

It seemed to me that God had been preparing Brian over many years for the extreme challenges of a mission field like Ibiza. I prayed like mad that he and Tracy would agree. Where else in the world would we ever find an experienced pastor, steeped in the Scriptures, with such an unshakeable faith in God’s ability to provide for every material need through prayer, whether it was a car in the driveway or a guardian angel in prison, who could also relate to those caught up in the destructive cycles of casual violence, criminality, alcohol poisoning, and drug abuse? Little did I know that as Brian and Tracy sought God about Ibiza, they were about to receive some of the clearest, most dramatic guidance I have ever known.

The Transvestite Prophet

One of the first things Brian did on returning to England was to buy a book about Ibiza. Feeling a little jet-lagged, he took it upstairs and lay on the bed. “Lord, is this Ibiza thing you?” he whispered.

At that precise moment his reverie was shattered by a blast of music from the room next door. “Whoa!” sang the voice. “We’re going to Ibiza!” Brian’s niece, knowing nothing of her uncle’s dilemma, had just randomly chosen to play an old hit from The Vengaboys. Then she played it again. And again. And again.

Brian laughed. “OK, maybe. But if you don’t mind, I need a bit more than a dodgy dance track, Lord.”

On Monday a mentally ill, homeless transvestite turned up unannounced to see Brian in the church office. He was wearing tights under filthy, ripped jeans, and a touch of eyeliner. He smelled terrible. But Brian really didn’t mind; people like this were his favourite part of pastoral ministry. Without knowing anything at all about Brian’s dilemma, the man looked him in the eye and said, “I’ve got a house for you, Brian. It’s in Ibiza. You should go there!” He didn’t have anything of the kind. It was just a random comment from an addled mind that somehow spoke directly into the specific question Brian was privately asking the Lord.

God certainly seemed to be speaking, but so far it had been through a confused transvestite and a serendipitous rendition of a cheesy dance-floor anthem. Neither could be considered conventional or reliable means of guidance for major life decisions involving small children and potential financial jeopardy. It was enough, however, to persuade Brian and Tracy to visit Ibiza, to spy out the land discreetly without alarming the church, their family, or the kids.

Their first appointment in Ibiza was with the headmaster of its only English-speaking school. He listed, with great relish, all the famous people whose children attended the school, and the Heasleys quickly felt intimidated. Eventually he paused and inquired about their reasons for relocation. But before Brian could explain that he was a globe-straddling rock star and that his wife worked in international finance for a Russian oligarch, Tracy said very simply, “We’ll be missionaries. With an organisation called 24-7 Prayer.”

Brian held his breath. A complete stranger suddenly seemed to hold their entire future in his hands, and he was clearly trying to formulate a decorous way of telling them that penniless missionaries weren’t quite the clientele he was looking for on the PTA. But instead, at that moment, an older lady stepped forward. She had been sitting quietly in the background, and now introduced herself as the owner of the school. “I’ve heard of 24-7 Prayer,” she announced, beaming at Tracy appreciatively.

The headmaster looked surprised, and so did Brian. “We would be delighted,” she said, extending her hand and shooting a glance at the headmaster, “to offer your sons places at this school.”

Every traffic light seemed to be turning green, but it was all happening too fast. Brian and Tracy decided to go for a walk on one of the island’s fifty beaches. They selected Playa d’en Bossa, which stretches for two kilometres of golden sand with beautiful views of the Old Town. Barefoot and holding hands, Brian and Tracy set out walking between the sun-loungers on the sand and the crystal-clear sea lapping at their toes.

“OK, I’m going to pray something a bit weird,” Brian announced after a while. “Lord, if you want us to come to Ibiza, please give us just one more sign: Let us bump into Aunty Anne while we’re here.”

Tracy’s aunt happened to be holidaying somewhere on the island that week, but they had no idea where. With fifty beaches and 6 million tourists a year, the chances of bumping into her were infinitesimal, so they had deliberately not told her about their visit.

“OK, but what happens if we don’t see her?” asked Tracy, realising how unlikely it was. “Does that mean we’re not supposed to come?”

Before Brian could respond, a gust of wind blew a beach ball out from the crowded ranks of sunbathers. It bounced right in front of Brian and Tracy, pursued by a generously proportioned lady in her fifties wearing a black bathing suit. “Tracy?” the woman screamed. “Brian? What on earth are you doing here?”

On the flight home Brian and Tracy reviewed events with a measure of awe. It had all started weeks earlier with Tracy’s fairly innocent announcement about wanting to live somewhere sunny, triggered by the rediscovery of a fourteen-year-old prophetic word about travel and movement. In response Brian had immediately suggested Ibiza, priming them both for the unsolicited conversation with me.

Next there had been the Vengaboys track at the precise moment Brian asked God about Ibiza: “Whoa! We’re going to Ibiza!” Even their name, “Venga,” is the Spanish word for “come on!”

Next, a couple of days after that, God seemed to have spoken prophetically through a homeless transvestite, who barely knew what he was saying.

Then, in Ibiza itself, they had been offered places at an exclusive school thanks to the surprise intervention of a stranger who just happened to know 24-7 Prayer.

Finally, there had been the instantaneous answer to Brian’s prayer for a specific sign at Playa d’en Bossa, in the shape of Tracy’s Aunty Anne emerging from a crowded beach in pursuit of a beach ball blown by a random gust of wind at the exact moment when her path would cross theirs, and immediately after Brian had prayed to meet her amongst thousands of tourists on this particular beach at this precise moment. The mathematical probabilities were mind-bending.

When they landed in England, they collected their baggage and boarded the airport transit train to the car park. “What do you think?” Brian finally asked. “Do you feel like God’s speaking?”

Tracy was giggling, pointing up at the advertisement for a travel agency, immediately opposite them in the train: “Plane Obvious,” it said. “The way to go is 24-7.”

That evening Brian quietly slipped out to the church prayer room with his friend Albert. The story of the last few days soon came tumbling out.

“So what do you think?” Brian asked.

“What I think,” said Albert, grinning, “is that God’s shouting at you!”

“What do you think?” Brian asked another friend later that night on the phone.

“It’s so clear that if you don’t go now,” said the friend, “it’ll be an act of disobedience.”

The next day Brian and Tracy Heasley said yes to Jesus. They made the decision to leave the comforts of their home, their church, their jobs, their incomes, their children’s schools, and their country in order to pioneer an extreme mission, for which they had, it seemed, been perfectly prepared.

I flew back to London from Kansas City for the fifth anniversary celebrations of 24-7 Prayer. Floyd McClung came with me and spoke powerfully about the call to keep pioneering in prayer, mission, and justice. “You’re a prayer movement, for sure,” he told the gathered crowd, “but you’d better get ready, because you’re becoming a mission movement too.”

Brian and Tracy cheered. Others looked less sure. One of our leaders later threatened to resign, concerned that we were getting distracted away from intercession. But the movement from prayer into mission was unstoppable. It just kept happening, whether we liked it or not.

Kacunga

We heard about a prayer room in Uganda where God had simultaneously given several people the same strange word: Kacunga. It turned out to be the name of an island —one of 3,000 on Lake Victoria, a vast inland sea connecting Uganda with Tanzania and Kenya. Having located it amongst the eighty-eight Ssese islands in the Kampala District of the lake, Paul Masindende and a troupe of valiant prayer warriors set out from their prayer room excitedly, wondering what they would find on the island God had named.

It was a long journey by land and by boat, but at last they arrived and discovered an indigenous community of illiterate subsistence fishermen who had never heard the name of Jesus. The Kacungans were eking out a life on the island with no electricity, no hospital, no school, no church, a 90 per cent HIV infection rate, and a 99 per cent belief in witchcraft. The Holy Spirit had, it seemed, directed the Ugandan group very specifically to a community that was desperately needy and totally unreached by the gospel.

The islanders welcomed their unexpected visitors warmly, and were astounded to hear how God had singled them out from all the other islands on the great lake. When they heard the gospel he’d sent to them, fifty of the Kacungans immediately believed and received Jesus. A church was planted amongst an unreached tribe in a single day —all because of a specific, unexpected word from the Holy Spirit in a prayer room far away.

At our fifth birthday celebration in London there were many thrilling reports such as this one from Uganda. And then there were two separate prophetic words from trusted voices, both telling us to prepare for another five years of prayer. It was a sobering moment. We’d always said that we’d stop whenever God did, and that had sometimes been quite a reassuring prospect. But now the Spirit seemed to be telling us to prepare for a decade of non-stop prayer. This was about to become a significant chunk of our lives.

I looked around the room nervously. There was a sobriety on many of the faces I knew so well. Then slowly I watched them pledging themselves to strike out again from Blue Camp 20, whatever and wherever it might be for them. Together we set our sights once more on Santa Fe.

Somewhere in the crowd a young father found himself so stirred that he went home to his wife and together they quit their jobs, sold their house, packed their two young children with everything they owned into a VW campervan, and began travelling. Scot and Misty Bower would spend the next five years on the road touring Europe, blown by the wind anywhere the Spirit sent them, encouraging and equipping 24-7 communities wherever they happened to be.

Somewhere else in the crowd, a girl called Carla kissed a musician called Steve for the first time. She was there because she had surrendered her life fully to Jesus five years earlier in the very first 24-7 prayer room. Now she was doing anything she could to help out around the office. But the Spirit of God was moving in Carla’s life, raising her up from office work to become one of the great global champions of the movement. On that day in London, however, she was falling in love with the man who would become her husband.

With marriages being made, careers being jettisoned, and prophetic exhortations to continue for a decade, the stakes were being raised significantly. We were growing up fast; it was sobering and it was fun. God was connecting and commissioning people in remarkable ways. Then, standing in front of that large crowd, I asked Brian and Tracy Heasley why on earth they were giving up a safe life leading a growing church in a picturesque Norfolk town to go to Ibiza without any security at all. I knew that Brian had many great things he could say in answer to that question. Things about growing up in Belfast, losing his mum, and spending time in prison. Stories about the extraordinary ways in which God had called them to Ibiza through a homeless transvestite and a chance encounter with a lady in a bathing suit pursuing a beach ball. Observations about Abraham in Haran and Andrés in Spain and the need to keep pioneering for the sake of a generation that is “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36).

Brian could have said so many inspiring things in answer to my question. Intelligent things. Things that might be strategic in drumming up a bit more support. It was a soft pitch of a question, and all he needed to do was hit a home run. He opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. And then Brian Heasley, the hardened ex-con, the seasoned pastor, began to weep. He stood in front of that great congregation and simply lost it. Tracy held his hand tight, and he cried.

The room fell silent. Everyone felt the holiness of the moment; the cost of the cause. And then we prayed for them, commissioning the Heasleys by crowd-surfing them above our heads to the back of the room. It was a way of lifting them to the Lord, promising to uphold them in prayer as they embarked upon the next great adventure of their remarkable lives.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

ISAIAH 6:8

SELAH

When he looked out over the crowds, his heart broke. So confused and aimless they were, like sheep with no shepherd. “What a huge harvest!” he said to his disciples. “How few workers! On your knees and pray for harvest hands!”

MATTHEW 9:36-38, MSG

• Do I dare to ask Jesus to break my heart for the lost souls all around me?
• Do I know anyone who is “harassed and helpless” right now?
• With whom could I share the hope of the gospel today?

We have to love our neighbour because he is there . . . He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody.

G. K. CHESTERTON