INTRODUCTION
I will tell of the kindnesses of the LORD,
the deeds for which he is to be praised,
according to all the LORD has done for us.
ISAIAH 63:7
I found myself travelling around England with Justin Welby in the week prior to his enthronement as 105th Archbishop of Canterbury. Wherever he stopped, crowds converged for a day of prayer at the local cathedral. And quite by chance, the final day of this tour was to be in Chichester, the picturesque Roman city where the 24-7 prayer movement had begun more than a decade earlier. It was to be a particularly poignant day.
The local police clearly hadn’t expected anything more than a few old ladies with interesting hats, but the crowds outside Chichester Cathedral that day were large enough to stop the traffic. We were surprised too. Kneeling on a cold stone floor in a Gothic barn beside a man in a long black dress is hardly a compelling prospect. And yet thousands of normal-looking people —only a few of them with interesting hats —had turned up, just as they had at previous locations, merely to pray.
Who could possibly have foreseen any of this ten years earlier, when we had begun our quest just down the road, in a pop-up prayer space in a faceless warehouse on a dead-end street at the edge of town? Back then the cathedral authorities had viewed us suspiciously as the lunatic fringe: fire-breathing zealots, radicalised youngsters taking it all a bit too seriously. But a decade of non-stop prayer in more than half the nations on earth had carried us a mile and a half across town, from that first peripheral prayer room cocooned in clumsy graffiti to this fan-vaulted temple, built a millennium ago, at the geographical and psychological centre of the city.
Attempting to walk through the crowd outside the cathedral, Justin Welby paused by a Costa Coffee delivery van. Its driver was sitting in his cabin, helplessly adrift in a sea of pilgrims. “Saving the Nation from Bad Coffee” boasted the slogan immediately above the new archbishop’s head.
Wherever we stopped on our Prayer Tour, we began the day by sharing a hearty breakfast with the local bishop. Justin Welby would always make a powerful speech, between mouthfuls of porridge, about his three great priorities. The primary objective, he would say, is a renewal of prayer and the religious life, and he would then point out that there has never, to the best of his knowledge, been a revival in the church that did not begin with a renewal of prayer. His second priority, he would continue, is reconciliation, because relationships are broken at every level in society: within families, between nations, and even in the church. We would all nod at this, of course —the bishop, the dean, the canons, and me. And then the archbishop would progress to his third priority: evangelism, because the nation needs the good news of Jesus. “We’re not just the Rotary Club with a pointy roof,” he would say, munching his toast and fixing a beady eye on the local hierarchy. “That’s why prayer must come first. Without prayer there will be no renewal of the church, and without a renewal of the church, there is very little hope for the world.”
It was quite a moment. For a decade members of the 24-7 movement had been scurrying around back-street clubs, independent coffee shops, and university campuses, banging a drum for “prayer, mission, and justice.” We aren’t used to palaces and pontiffs. Men in dresses tended, in our world, to be transvestite clubbers in Ibiza, not venerable clerics presiding over ancient ecclesiastical institutions. And yet here I was with the leader of the third largest denomination on earth as he declared prayer, mission, and justice to be his top three aims. It was a head-mash. I nearly shouted “Amen, brother!” and “Hallelujah!” —but that’s not the sort of thing you do over breakfast in a bishop’s palace with a man who is about to be enthroned as the leader of 80 million people.
Arresting Thunderbolts
Of course, the archbishop was right. The Bible teaches that prayer is the most powerful transformational force in the lives of individuals, churches, and even nations. Whenever and wherever God’s people truly rediscover their purpose, their peculiarity, and their power, they do so through prayer. And the result of any such renewal, if it truly is a renewal of the Spirit, is first that the church is revived and then that the prevailing culture is rewired for the glory of God. There isn’t a single example of a transformational Christian renewal that did not begin in prayer.
Church attendance may be declining throughout much of the Western world, but the proportion of the population that prays has remained consistently high,[1] with 75 to 97 per cent of Americans claiming to do so at least once per week, and 57 per cent praying daily.[2] In Britain, a government survey of beliefs discovered that a quarter of those who describe themselves as “nonreligious” still “take part in some spiritual activity each month, typically prayer.”[3] We have often been surprised at the number of non-Christians who don’t want to be preached at, yet still want to be prayed for. Prayer, it seems, is bigger than the church —a wide-open space for missional connection with a post-Christian culture that remains surprisingly spiritually open. But this is not a new phenomenon. Christ’s first apostles prioritised prayer before all other leadership tasks, in spite of the demands of spectacular church growth (see Acts 6:4). They understood that their calling, as the renewed people of God, was to be “a house of prayer for all nations,” a theme we shall explore throughout this book. Christians today, who disagree about so many important things, tend to agree about the absolute priority of Christ’s call to be a people dedicated wholeheartedly to prayer.
It was in the fourth century that John Chrysostom wrote an effusive hymn acknowledging prayer to be “the root, the fountain, the mother of a thousand blessings”:
The potency of prayer hath subdued the strength of fire, it hath bridled the rage of lions . . . extinguished wars, appeased the elements, expelled demons, burst the chains of death, . . . rescued cities from destruction, stayed the sun in its course and arrested the progress of the thunderbolt.[4]
It is tempting to downgrade Chrysostom’s rhetoric. Our own experiences of prayer probably fall a little short of “extinguishing wars” and “arresting the thunderbolt.” Yet every one of his examples has been drawn directly from the Bible. It was Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who “subdued the strength of fire.” It was Daniel who “bridled the rage of lions.” It was Moses, Joshua, Jehoshaphat, and Hezekiah who harnessed prayer to “extinguish wars.” And so on.
Prayer, Mission, and Justice
Of course, prayer alone won’t get the job done. There is a gritty pragmatism to most of the great biblical prayer warriors. Daniel prayed diligently three times every day, but he also made astute political choices. Moses raised his hands in protracted intercession against the Amalekite army, but all the while Joshua was wielding his sword in the valley below. The great abolitionist William Wilberforce urged against “neglecting God in the secret place of prayer,” but in fact he spent most of his life writing letters, making speeches in the Houses of Parliament, and building a consensus against slavery.
There’s a lovely old Russian proverb: “Pray to God but continue to row for the shore.” Prayer must outwork itself in action, and so this book is about more than prayer and presence. It is also about mission and justice. It is about the saying of prayers, for sure, but also about the becoming of prayers in a thousand practical ways.
Ever since that first prayer room in Chichester went viral, we’ve been Forrest Gumping our way around the world, praying through 9/11 and the financial crash, the war on terror, presidential elections, and the rise of Taylor Swift. Having never intended to start a movement, we don’t feel particularly responsible to maintain it. To this day we don’t advertise or try to persuade anyone to start prayer rooms or Boiler Rooms.[5] People just seem to want to do these things, and so we try to help them. We have become a little more organised and efficient over the years, but there still isn’t any kind of plan for marketing or global domination.
For more than fifteen years we have lived in a fairly constant state of bewilderment at the places God takes us, the surprising new things the movement becomes. I am aware, therefore, as I sit down to write this book, that my part of the 24-7 story is merely one perspective, a fraction of the whole. Just last night I was told by a publisher that the impetus to start her new business had come from a divine commission received in a prayer room. A nationally renowned professor of psychology recently told me that many of his most formative experiences have taken place in prayer rooms. One of my best friends confessed that he only finally found the courage to marry his beautiful girlfriend after a succession of prayer vigils, wrestling with God until he finally overcame his terror of commitment. God is weaving a million stories together, creating a narrative far bigger than us all.
This book cannot possibly, therefore, be the 24-7 Prayer story. It is just my experience of the thing, woven in with that of three particular friends: Brian Heasley, the Irish ex-con who pioneered our work on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza; Kelly Tietsort, who moved from the buckle of the American Bible Belt to work with prostitutes in a walled city run by the Mexican mafia; and Jon Petersen, who grew up in Japan, raised his family in the red-light district of Amsterdam, and now lives at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Denver, Colorado. I am indebted to them for allowing me to share their remarkable stories alongside mine.
Dirty Glory is a sequel to my earlier book Red Moon Rising, but I have tried to write it for new readers, too. It explores four overarching themes:
- Incarnation. As its title implies, Dirty Glory is a celebration of the Incarnation, the “Word made flesh.” That’s why there are so many stories of God’s glory working in unlikely places, through ordinary, dirty people like you and me. It is, I hope, a message of grace for us all.
- The presence paradigm. The presence paradigm, unpacked in this book, is an exciting way of viewing the message of the Bible and the purpose of life itself through the lens of God’s primary desire for friendship, family, and partnership. It shapes the way we pray, the way we preach the gospel, and the way we seek to love the poor.
- The house of prayer. This book also explores what it really means to be a “house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:7), perhaps one of the most important, most misappropriated phrases in the Bible. Why is the house of prayer such a priority for Isaiah, for Jesus, and for us today? You’ll find that each section of Dirty Glory explores a different facet of this theme.
- The life of prayer. Perhaps inevitably, the most important topic explored in this book is prayer itself. Drawing on the lessons we’ve learned through fifteen years of continual intercession, these stories have been compiled in order, I hope, to equip and inspire you in prayer.
It is disheartening to observe how rarely anyone teaches thoughtfully about prayer, in spite of the fact that it features, in one way or another, on almost every page of the Bible, and that it was the one area in which the disciples explicitly asked Jesus for training.
You probably remember that embarrassing occasion when the disciples prayed for a boy afflicted by terrible epileptic seizures, but it didn’t work. Presumably he suffered a seizure right there in front of them as they were praying —how else could they have known that he hadn’t been healed? It would have been a humiliating moment for the disciples, and heartbreaking for the boy and his dad. But then Jesus returned from the Mount of Transfiguration and healed the son immediately, explaining to his red-faced followers that “this kind can come out only by prayer” (Mark 9:29). It’s easy to imagine their indignation. What did he think they’d been doing out there? Hadn’t they been praying too? Didn’t their prayers count?
In this dramatic encounter we see that some people’s prayers at certain times can be more powerful than others. Not all prayers carry the same weight. We may recoil from such an apparent grading of intercession, and yet we know this difference to be true in our own experience. Who hasn’t found their faith levels heightened after a particular time of spiritual retreat or blessing? Who doesn’t know at least one faithful old saint whose whispered prayers can shift things that entire stadia of young zealots can merely tickle?
We are living at a remarkable time of vast, global mobilisation in the realm of intercession. Prayer initiatives proliferate in the West and especially in the developing world. Crowds gather in auditoriums or online, just to pray. At such a time it is important to remember that God’s hand is not overpowered by a certain critical mass. Revival is not awaiting one more stadium rally, or one million more hours of intercession, or —dare I say it? —one more 24-7 prayer room. The pressing need in an age like our own, when so many people are praying so much, is not for greater activity but for greater spiritual authority.
It is urgently important that we learn to partner with God in prayer, yet our pulpits and platforms remain predominantly silent about how to pray and why. Contemporary seekers are therefore still coming to Jesus with that ancient request: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1).
That is why —if our mission to this culture is to be more than a marketing campaign; if our acts of Christian mercy are to be anything more than well-meaning social work; if our churches are to be something other than religious clubs; if our voice is to ring out with the authority of prophetic dissonance in contemporary culture; if miracles are to multiply; if the gospel is to be preached “with signs following” (Mark 16:20, KJV); if the kingdom of God is truly to be “not a matter of talk but of power” (1 Corinthians 4:20); if our faith is to be a real, deepening, conversational relationship with the living God —we must discover how to pray.
My other reason for telling these stories is to inspire you to seek God with renewed passion. Knowing how to pray is less important than wanting to do it. My aim, therefore, is to recount our experiences in such a way as to remind you that prayer works and that it is worth it in the end. That’s why I set out to describe the first five years of the 24-7 journey in Red Moon Rising, which has had such an unexpected impact. But our thinking has inevitably moved on since I wrote that book, and so have the stories of answered prayer which have, if anything, been even more amazing than those we experienced during those first five years. We have often been left shaking our heads in utter wonder at the miraculous ways God answers prayer.
But if this is a glory story, it is a peculiar kind of glory, mostly touching down in broken places and messed-up people who rarely feel as spiritual as the story makes them sound. I’ve tried to be honest, therefore, about the wonder of the journey as we’ve prayed non-stop since the start of this century, but also about the struggles, the simple, bare-knuckle questions with which we have often been forced to wrestle.
And so I’m here now, pulling up a chair, grinning like a maniac, saying, “You’ll never believe what’s been happening.” And I’m planning to keep right on yarning at you, telling you tales, throwing you thoughts, until eventually you beg me to stop. Until you throw up your hands and cry, “OK, OK! I get the point. I hear you, Pete. Quit talking about it and let’s start doing it. Cut out the middleman! Let’s pray!”
God my Father,
you love us too much to leave us as we are;
Jesus my Lord,
you live to intercede for us;
Holy Spirit,
you are praying for us now with groans beyond talking;
so lead us out onto the wild frontiers of faith.
May this book sow a little mischief in our lives.
May these simple stories wake us up,
May they rub salt on our lips and defibrillate our hearts.
May our desire for your presence begin to erupt beyond the predilections of current circumstance.
May the frameworks of normality begin to feel intolerable.
Compel us to wonder again, inspire us to innovate, provoke us to rage against injustice.
Pete Greig
Guildford
Pentecost, 2016