It was so good to be able to attend the Altars Scotland leaders’ prayer conference in Edinburgh at the end of October. Having been to the Hebrides Revival Conference again back in the early part of the year, the event was launched there, and I signed up for a ticket straight away. There seems to me to be something significant stirring in the area of prayer for a move of God in our day.
The Rev Duncan Campbell, refecting on the Hebridean revivals of 1949 – 1952, said that the altars of prayer in the heart, home, church and region must be prepared and maintained in the preparatory prayer that precedes any move of God, which is what gave the conference its name after its sister event in New York,
I also had the blessing of 6 days away afterwards on retreat where I had the chance to just allow all that had transpired at the conference to sink a bit deeper. The contrast from the three-day, fairly high octane prayer conference and the very quite days at a Northumbrian retreat house was quite stark, but perfect!
There were a number of things that I became quite convicted and convinced about over the course of the conference and through my time of reflection, and so just note them here:
- perhaps we don’t really know how to pray. Sure, we can say prayers, but are we really schooled in the kind of depth and travail of intercession that this season needs? It is so difficult to find words and consistency to continually cry out to God for our church and nation, and maybe even for ourselves. We allow either dryness or frustration to set in, and our prayer becomes powerless. I know this can be true in my case. We note that the disciples don’t ask Jesus , ‘teach us to preach’ or ‘teach us to evangelise’ or ‘teach us to worship’. Their plea was ‘teach us to pray’, and perhaps that’s the need of the hour.
- this might not fit your theology, but one of the speakers, Andrea Wigglesworth, suggested that the mark of our prayer in this season is perhaps ‘Tongues and Tears’…along with a sense of a groaning in the Spirit, that ‘O God!’ that arises from a deep place. I have to say that this matches my own personal experience…there is a deep sense of lament about the condition of the church and the nation before God. Couple with this a sense of casual inattention to the presence of the Lord amidst his people, and a faltering vision of who God is amongst his people. I find myself increasingly grieved, and as that increases, so does that call to the deeper depths of prayer.
- much of the church is in survival mode, and that can sometimes mean that our prioritites in prayer become so very navel-gazing. What then of the heart and mission of God? Is he as preoccupied as we are with denomonational or congregational survival, or perpetuation of things that perhaps need to be planted like a seed in order for it to have new life?
- when it comes to unity, there was a remarkable unity in the room: hearts fixed on one purpose to see God glorified and Jesus honoured, and the nation changed. The reality is that, wider in the church, there is not the same heart for that kind of unity. The contemporary spirit of ecumenism is often much more about survival, load sharing, and finding the lowest possible denominator to ‘do stuff’, which is a very poor man’s kind of unity, and it doesn’t reflect either the glory of God or the kind of glory that is supposed to be manifested in the body of Christ. There is a real sense of need to be in solid partnership with those whose burning passion is Christ and the gospel.
- we have a low view of the church itself – we fail to grasp the full extent to how God wants to move in and through his people.
- in our churches, if we’re going to move towards the flame of God’s reviving presence, we at least have to set the altar, get ourselves laid upon it, and wait to God to send the fire. It’s as simple as that, however long that process takes. The best place for us is surrendered to God, and many of us need to learn what that looks like.
I am pretty sure I’ll be working through what God was saying for some time yet, but one thing I am is dissatisfied to walk through life numbed to his presence and continually on the backfoot in response to the desperation of the church and nation for a move of his power. There is something stirring and we need to press in and contend for the very best God has for his church and the nation in these darker days where many threats abound.
Exhausted but grateful!
