Stepping into the unknown

The rain dropped heavily from the green-grey sky over Durham City this morning. It was bouncing off the slick pavements with considerable force. 

No wonder the city is almost deserted this morning.

Looking over the unusually quiet streets has had me reminiscing about the last five years here in Durham.  

Our time here in this city is almost done. Just six or so more weeks. Then we head to London to a new appointment that we are quite nervous about, although the nervousness is laced with anticipation. 

We have had a delightful battle here in the North East. 

It's been a life shaping time for both Dawn and I.

I've learned what it really means to sit with people who are marginalised, broken, seeking, and in some cases purely and squarely outcast. 

I'm about to find out what it will feel like to have to leave those closely formed relationships behind. 

We don't know what the new appointment holds for us yet. We will meet with the new bosses in London next week to find out more. 

The last two appointments we have had, we knew exactly what the task was and we had to convince decision makers that the vision we have was right for the time and for them too. 

So far the vision to create specific centres of prayer and justice in Cities has unfolded in ways we couldn't have foreseen. 

Because really it's God's vision.

But we for the first time in our ministry are stepping into the unknown as far as the vision God has laid on our hearts is concerned. Does God want us to take it further? Is it time for a fresh vision to be spoke into us? 

I'm not sure.

Yet. 

One thing I do know is that I'm ready and listening. 

And the big questions I have this certainty tagged on to them, that I know they will be answered in due course. 

I think of the vision God gave us. 

I've stood up for it, spoke about it, breathed it and lived it. Been battered over it, almost lost the will to live with it and sometimes had my doubts about it. 

Without thinking. 

Because if I'd thought about it too much I'd have probably let go of it. Way too easily. 

I've had to defend it in people's offices, even when you look at some people squarely in the eye and you just know they don't get it. But somehow God has got me over brick walls. 

Which leads me to share a story with you. 

I was speaking at a conference in Wales about ten years ago. I delivered the talk, then when the session was coming to a close, the host announced that at the end of the session a prayer team would be positioned up at the front for people who wanted to be prayed with could head for. There was probably sixty or so people in the prayer team, and the host went on to say and I guess Gary could join them and I'm sure if anyone wants prayer from him then he will be available. I was a bit peeved to be honest because I was tired and just wanted to head home. But I went and stood with this team as people stared to stream forward. I saw an old man being helped on to raised platform where I was standing. He looked at least a hundred years old. His skin was deeply tanned but weathered lie leather. He walked slowly and gingerly towards me. He squared up to me eyeball to eyeball. But his eyes were piercing blue, kindly but full of life and confidence. He only spoke briefly. He had been saved at a revival meeting years ago when revival was sweeping Wales. He was seriously anointed. He said these words. "I have a word for you from God." Now I have loads of people giving me words in the everyday of my ministry, and i've learned to really be careful with what people say to me. I remember a woman saying to me once, "Does the word plant-pot mean anything to you?" It took me all my strength not say, "yeah I'm looking at one!" So I've learned to really test and discern words given to me. But this guy, he was one that I knew before he spoke that I had to listen to him and had to receive from God through him. He said this simple word. "God wants you to know you are going to come against some substantial brick walls in your ministry. Mostly the brick walls of religion, but the Spirit of God says that he will get you over every one of them if you keep you gaze on him." I felt very unsteady on my feet as the Spirit of God flowed from him. In fact I had to get Dawn to drive me home (which is sometimes a dangerous thing!) because I was so touched by the power of God. 

And ten years on.

Yeah.

A true word borne out. 

As Dawn and I look to the future, we know brick walls await. 

But we also trust in the word of God that he can do the impossible. 

And so we prepare to step into the abyss of the unknown. 

But I want to share with you a scripture, this scripture has been right in my face for the whole of my ministry especially when I have faced up to the brick walls that this guy was referring to. Walls that sometimes seemed like there was no chance for us to get over them. This scripture always surface like an electric current from my heart to my head. 

This is it. 

This is what The Lord says to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armour, to open doors before him so that gates will not shut. I will go before you and will level the mountains. I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. I will give you hidden treasures, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am The Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name. (Isaiah 45: 1-3)

And that is exactly why and how God gets you through, over, around or whatever the massive brick walls that suddenly loom up on us during the course of our journey through life. 

So today, just hold that truth close to your heart. 

God is going before you. 

He is obliterating whatever stands in the way of his salvation. 

So keep going. 

Keep your gaze on him. 

You will navigate through anything even the biggest of brick walls. 

The church: A Post Mortem?

In my pre-Christian life I worked in a hospital, mostly in the harsh and frantic arena of the operating theatre.

I can remember years ago in my training watching a couple of post-mortem procedures. 

I remember watching the pathologist at work and thinking that it wasn't a very happy type of job really.

The purpose of a PM is to ascertain and verify what caused a person to die. 

The pathologists I saw at work were pure genius. They were exceptionally brilliant people who knew exactly what they were doing. 

It was fascinating to see them at work. 

Why am I bringing this morbid subject up?

The other day someone spoke to me at length about the state of their Church. For a whole hour I just listened to a very passionate dissection of the problems this particular Church had and the reasons that it was dying. 

In fact the emotional discourse ended with that very statement, "We are already dead!"

I think the person telling me all this was a bit unnerved by the fact I didn't say a thing. 

I never spoke once. 

Why?

Because I really am fed up with that kind of statement. 

I hear it loads of times. "The church is dying, the church is dead, the post Christendom church is this, the post modern church is that." Tradition is killing the church, contemporary church is the way forward, we need a new leader, they should never have appointed so and so, and so on and so on. 

Anyone else sick and tired of all that tripe?

Or is it just me?

And frankly?

I'd rather focus on the life of the church than its death. 

The church seems to have some seriously passionate ecclesiastical pathologists. 

Except. 

Those who do this aren't experts like real pathologists. So when they perform their churchy post mortems they so often come to the wrong conclusions, they so often get the anatomy wrong. They continually use the wrong instruments, they all to often determine the wrong cause of death. 

Worse?

They verify the death and sign the death certificate. When its still alive!

A few weeks ago, at one of the Corps Dawn and I lead, Sacriston to be precise, at the end of a Sunday service after the last prayer, the people decided to just surround Dawn and I and just pray for us. The meeting had finished, the stage lights were out, the big screen turned off, the place was intimately lit, someone got up and called the church to surround Dawn and I and they prayed over us. They could see we were in need of some encouragement that night.  I don't want to dramatize it but the power that filled Dawn and I was much needed and felt incredibly uplifting. A few years ago, just before Dawn and I came to the North East, people were saying Sacriston Salvation Army was a dying place. The ecclesiastical pathologists were out in force performing their Post mortems. Maybe it was, but the fact is it wasn't dead. We just needed to lift our eyes up to God. That Might not sound very groundbreaking to some I understand that, but the spontaneity of the people that night was a demonstration of the life the Spirit of God has breathed into us.

So I've seen God revive a struggling Salvation Army Corps. 

Give it life in an instant. 

The same power is available in full to all.  

So I would prefer to talk about life in the church rather than its death.

I think concentrating on death robs us of life. 

If we spent as much time concentrating on what the possibilities are to reach a hard world as we do concentrating on dissecting the seemingly dead Church then I believe we would see greater victories than ever before. 

So what does the Spirit of God say today.

Test this. 

The Spirit of God says that I meant it when I set before you life or death and urged you to choose life. There is way to much work to do to be held back by trying to find the reasons why the church seems to be dying. Now is the time to look to the panorama, the vision, and the vision is me. Look to the horizon and shift your eyes to that place where the possible lies. That place where the fire is. That place where the ability to change is. Take your hands off the death. I have envisioned you to seek life not death. Direct your knowledge, your skills, your passions to the bringing of life. Are you tired child of being part of the death talk? Then follow me, put all you have into the life I have given you. The world needs a church that's alive. And it is alive because I am alive. My heart beats within it and yes there will always be those who choose death but you child, you would be far better choosing life. Speak words of life over everything you are. I will be with you all the way. I love you. Your father. 

I for one will leave the ecclesiastical pathology to God. The beyond expert God. I want to be part of a church that is full of life. And I want to hear statements like "the church will be alive until Jesus comes back!" 

The only way is to turn all our attention in him. 

He is life. 

Hanging in!

Richard had all his worldly belongings with him. 

A back pack, a bag of DVDs, and a digital set top box. 

"I'm not going back to that place!" He declared with certainty. "I homeless again now."

I got him to come to the cafe in S21 with me. I got us each a cup off coffee. I asked Richard to tell me what was going on with him. 

I've spoke about Richard a few times on my blog, so many of you will know that I have had a roller coaster of a ride since the day I first met him. A catalogue of ups and downs as I've tried to hang in with him on a part of his journey. 

"The person who lives below me in the shelter is annoying me. I can't stand the noise." This was his reasoning behind leaving. 

I talked to him for two hours. I rang the shelter where he lives, got them to talk to him. After  a real battle I managed to persuade Richard not leave the accommodation. 

And he's still there a week later so I'm relieved. 

This describes the kind of occurrence in a typical day at Sanctuary 21.

This week I've also been to Crown Court as a witness in a case. I unfortunately had no choice as I witnessed something and filled a statement out so I literally had to go. It was the most horrible experience ever. One of the other witnesses was a young girl who comes into Sanctuary 21 who is really struggling with addictions and some mental illness. When the court dismissed me, she was still waiting to go on the stand. She looked at me with pleading eyes to stay and support her in the witness room where we were waiting with a witness care officer. She was a mess on the inside and on the outside. All I wanted to do was to get out of there. But her pleading eyes sent their strong signal straight to my all too soft heart. The legal team thought it would be a good idea if I stayed. So when she gave her witness, I went into the public gallery so she would see someone she knew. Then when it was over I had a cup of tea with her in the witness room before she went. 

I decided to walk back to Sanctuary 21 from the court. I needed some fresh air. It was raining heavily, but I didn't care. As I walked back I wondered why I do this? This last six months has seemed to me to be one humongous battle. 

But I've hung in. 

I don't know how. 

But I have.  

As I walked through the rain drenched streets of Durham, the rain somehow enhancing the beauty of the old English University City, my mind kept on seeing these two occurrences I've just told you about, Richard and the young girl. And as I thought about the fact that I've hung in, I began to see the simple answer that God was showing me to my question of why do I do this? All the flack I get in ministry. All the toughness of the last six months in particular. Why? Why do this? There must be a thousand better things I could be doing? Then I saw Richards pleading face and the young girl in the courts pleading eyes, and I suddenly had an answer to that.

The answer was that "You do it Gary because I need you to hang in with the lost and the broken." And I began to see that actually there is nothing on this earth I would rather be doing than being there for people who are living with no hope in their hearts. As hard as ministry is sometimes. And I understood that "hanging in" is an essential part of mission. In other words not giving up on anybody. Not giving up on yourself even. 

I said earlier in this post that I don't know how I've survived ministry in the last six months? Well, that's not quite right. 

I do know. 

It's the strength that the Spirit of God supplies the human mind, body and soul. 

And as I prepare to leave Durham, and Sanctuary 21, a place we planted from scratch, and head for West London, I feel strong. I feel somehow God has allowed this intense battle I've been through to prepare me for something special there in that famous City. And I really know that there will be a lot of hanging in with people when I get there. A lot of victories waiting to be won, and God is sending us to show us his power like never before. 

I'm ready to go, as hard as it will be to leave Durham and let go of S21.

Ready for London. 

Talking of hanging in.

As I write this post a guy has just banged on the coffee shop window and give me the thumbs up. It's another one of the people we have hung in with, we've seen very little shift in his life, his life of drugs and crime, but he loves to come to Sanctuary 21, he had a big toothless smile on his face and shouted so the whole coffee shop heard, "I hope the soup's better than yesterday!" 

As I gave him the thumbs up back, my spirits raised up a notch further. And the Spirit of God whispered, "Who will go for me Gary?" And I had to reply in my Spirit, yeah that'll be me Lord." 

Just a reminder today that it is so vital to hang in with ourselves and other people, even when there is slow or even seemingly no progress, there is a world out there that desperately needs us too. 

It may be the way they will meet a saviour?

It may be the way we will meet the saviour?

Blessings today

Prayer. A shift in attitude

Christian prayer so often gets a bad press.

Both outside and sadly sometimes within the church.

I meet so many people who say that they have little or no prayer life.

I've had people coming to me in the past asking for help with their prayer life, and one common problem they might express is why is prayer necessary?

People can find it hard to get their heads around the concept of talking and listening to God as expressed through prayer because they wonder why if God knows what we need before we speak then why bother?

I remember my own prayer life struggled for so long.

My own struggles included things like wondering if it was making any difference to my life? Is anyone listening? It seems like I am making the same old requests over and over again. Prayer is such a bind, I have to do it because I'm told its what Christians do.

In my early days after my initial euphoria, my life as a Christian started to settle down, and prayer was easily left in the background because it felt heavy and tiresome and too much like hard work. Frankly the demonstrations of prayer I seemed to see around me added to the gloomy view I had of this frankly boring discipline.

For example sitting in a circle with a group of equally bored people waiting my turn to pray in a prayer meeting, or an excuse of one, because someone thought it would be best to have a prayer meeting because that's what we do.

No wonder that I almost lost the will to live in some of them.

My own journey with prayer took a turn for the better about ten years back.

I realised that the bad press, the negativity surrounding prayer, the bleakness that surrounded it was down to one thing.

Attitude.

So I flipped my attitude over.

My attitude was rubbish!

The way I looked at prayer was being fuelled by the negative spirit which sadly prevents large parts of today's church from understanding that prayer is vital to its actual survival.

I began to see prayer differently.

I started with my personal prayer life. And it's that on which I want to reflect on in this post.

The first thing I began to see was actually a revelation to me, it was a very simple thought in my head. The thought consisted of this, that prayer is not a method but an attitude.

This changed the way I pray straight away.

Before this revelation my personal prayer was methodical and mechanical. It usually consisted of me asking God for something, then setting the answer to that request myself. Then anything less than that answer ended in me being disappointed in God and edging ever further away from him as far as my relationship was concerned.

That was my attitude.

It needed changing.

So I flipped it over.

Then I thought what if I just trust God to be God. What if my prayer life actually had a helping of faith attached to it. Maybe I could just leave the answer to God and stop telling him what the answer should be.

The second part of my attitude bypass was that I needed to drop the dread. Drop the attitude that I had to do it, and drop the striving to do it out of duty.

So I looked at a different way.

I began to look at it as the vital lifeblood of my relationship with God. So I began to practice developing a lifestyle of prayer not a method. I know liturgy, rhythm, prayer meetings, quiet times are all necessary for some people and do have a successful history throughout Christendom, and are open to development and creativity, and can be brilliant ways of keeping the flame of prayer burning, but they also have a dangerous side. Namely that they can become dry, repetitive and can frankly put God into a little compartment that we open up to see him for half an hour in the day.

So I thought.

Why not try to speak and listen to God in everything I do. That includes set rhythms of prayer, but means I have to keep the flame of prayer burning outside them times too.

As I did that I began to see my hope grow and my faith grow as I started to see things that I'd never seen before. I began to see Gods answers in every day life. The walls came down on my conscience and on my compassion, as I began to see God in the every day.

I rid myself, as I developed (and continue to develop), of the chains of complicated prayer and began to just speak to God in my own way and in the realms of my own character. It's daft how many people try to be like someone else in prayer. All that does is make us feel inadequate and the voices in our heads say, "You can never pray as eloquently as that person" and in fact creates an arena where "superstar" people of prayer develop their high status images, and we end up thinking we are best leaving the prayer to them.

That's not the point of prayer.

The point is that God is desperate to communicate with us whoever we are. He's not bothered about eloquence or status, he just wants to share everything, namely the whole of our lives with him.

So it makes sense that we should just be us when we are entwined with him in prayer.

There are no levels of prayer.

Some people would have us think that there are.

But all I can see is that we all have equal access to God.

And God wants us to be, well, us.

We just need to be sharing everything with him as we talk to him and listen back to what he has to say to us.

So we are required to pray.

Because God seriously desires our company and wants us to seriously desire his.

The second thing I think I had to understand apart from changing my attitude was this.

That I needed to have total trust in His Spirit that lives in us, and to be receptive to that Spirit.

Three verses can help me explain what I mean.

If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus up from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that lives in you. (Romans 8: 11)

For those who are led by the Spirit are the children of God, the Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again, rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by Him we cry Abba Father! The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. (Romans 8: 14-16)

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God. (Romans 8: 26-27)

These scriptures talk of the Holy Spirit living in us. Instead of thinking after reading this, "Well if the Spirit is praying for us anyway, well why pray?" I began to see that I needed to through his grace develop my receptivity to towards the work of the Spirit in my life.

Faith that the Spirit of God even when I'm struggling to pray still communicates the prayers I need to pray. Hey, even when I'm not struggling the Holy Spirit is still in me, still working all the time.

In prayer you can't lose.

The Spirit of God prays in accordance with the will of God.

Obviously there is multi-aspects to prayer, personal prayer being one. It is the basis of a relationship with God. It shouldn't be a chore. It should be a necessity. If you are struggling with prayer and you feel like your prayer life is not going well then it may be time to shift your attitude. There is so much to discover just waiting on the other side of your attitude change. A new level of relationship, a release of revelations and a depth of spiritual life that you maybe couldn't seem to grasp a hold of before.

So get praying!

It will change everything for us.