First in a series of blogs to accompany a Week of Prayer at Hertford Baptist Church.

I was definitely a slow starter in the prayer business. Having had no Christian upbringing, the whole concept was an entirely alien one to me, although what I did possess was the desire to communicate with the God who had made himself known in powerful ways in my life.

But no – prayer, for many years, was perfunctory, short, and for some of those years, just not a huge priority. Prayer did, however, begin to come alive for me in the late 90s and the advent of the 24/7 prayer movement, which marks 20 years this year – 20 years of non-stop prayer!

The Salvation Army in the UK was heavily involved with the 24/7 movement, and I soon found myself engaged in a whole variety of praying initiatives, prayer rooms, warfare prayer – you name it, I was there. Spending time in a prayer room….writing, painting, singing, pacing, reading, using liturgy, or just being still in the awareness of God’s presence, began to teach me, train me and give me an appetite for prayer.

I realised that the one thing that Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them was ‘how to pray’ – I recognised that I too had to be taught. I grew not to be content to be a rubbish pray-er – I wanted to deepen in my intimacy with my Father God. I was well into my ministry as a pastor at this point and knew that I could never, with integrity, lead people where I had never been myself.

I’m no massive expert in prayer at all. Who of us is, really? Jesus is the only Master but he’s a pretty good example to learn from! The amazing thing is that we CAN learn to pray, we CAN deepen our connection with God, and we CAN experience a whole variety of ways to go about the business of praying.

As this week goes on, tune into the blog here for some of the different ways that have helped me to deepen my prayer life.