Dear friends

I was sitting at the start of last week in a prayer meeting of Anglican leaders praying for London. Prayers were orchestrated by leaders from the ‘famous three’: HTB, St Helen’s Bishopsgate, and All Souls Langham Place, as well as by leaders from smaller churches in New Wine, Re:New and other networks. Evangelical leaders from across the streams, united as one river. A river bubbling in prayer as dozens of voices around the room led small groups in prayer, reminding me of student days. We prayed for an hour and a half and I couldn’t move from my seat for a little while afterwards. I just wanted to sit there and soak it in and pray some more. 

I am rubbish at praying on my own, but put me in a room with others who want to pray and I take flight. I can’t believe how easy it is or how impactful it becomes. I come away wondering why I don’t do this all the time. It’s partly muscle memory when I pray in those settings, and for that I have to thank my younger self who learnt more before he was ordained than he had since then. I learnt two things about prayer as a young Christian: The power of prayer and the need to practice.

The practice was simply that I had a year, aged 18, where I got up three mornings a week to pray with two people better than me at it, I learnt to pray to the beat of his Spirit, I fasted regularly (and sometimes stupidly) and prayed wherever I would go. I had a season at university where I was in charge of running 20+ weekly prayer groups for the world and I would visit as many as I could, and found praying for people you’d never met, and had no direct personal interest in, from the global church and ‘unreached people groups’ was a real accelerator in prayer life. I went to church prayer meetings before the services back home, at evening events, on Saturday mornings and caught as much as I could from those around me. I read great books on prayer, and hung the verse that begins ‘If my people will humble themselves and pray’ on my bedroom door. Crazy and intense as I may have seemed it scares me to remember the heights from which I have fallen sometimes to be honest…. Would my younger self have any truck with me now?

The Strength to Pray

In recent years, the thing that has helped me more than anything has been the realisation that prayer is best understood as a partnership activity with the Holy Spirit. A favourite prayer, drawn out of Romans 8, is to ask the Father (as almost all prayers in the NT are addressed to him):

Dear Abba in Heaven, Please would your gracious Holy Spirit who has already sealed my life and is here with us as we gather in Jesus’ name, come and pray in us, with us, for us and through us now, in the name of Jesus, Amen?   

The short-hand, is ‘Holy Spirit, (please) come’, but as with GCSE maths exams it’s important to show our working, or we can drift into thinking the Holy Spirit is a force we somehow control.

As Arthur Wallis has shown in an exceptional book, the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness…we provide the weakness, he provides the power… that’s why (and when) prayer meetings can go on all night and fasting can prevail beyond natural levels. Dear friends, don’t make the mistake of engaging in prayer as anything less than a supernatural activity that needs the wind of the Spirit to help you take flight. It’s so foolish to do it on your own, when your promised helper is Divine.

I was so moved by Wallis’ book I wrote some summaries of each chapter for New Wine Online. Here is the key introduction:

Suffering

You’ll have noticed that this power from the Spirit is given to us in our weakness.

Few of God’s saints and firestarters have not been touched by pain. Like many others I have watched the ‘Jesus Revolution’ film recently about the 1970s Jesus People spiritual awakening among hippies. It is inspirational to watch thousands of baptisms in the sea at Pirates Cove and see an angle on how God opened hearts in that era.

But dig just a little deeper and you’ll find that the inspirational and flawed character at the heart of it all was raped by a 17 year old baby sitter as an 8 year old child just two weeks after being born again. Lonnie Frisbee (played by Jonathan Roumie who also plays Jesus in ‘The Chosen’) had also been brought up by a violent alcoholic dad and then later by a step dad who hated him as his father had run off with that man’s first wife. Yet some wounds run very deep in all of us. Some of those wounds he probably never fully recovered from. And yet in his ongoing brokenness he was still used to spark both the Jesus Revolution in the 1970s and to help Wimber kickstart the Vineyard movement in the 1980s (see endnotes for more).

It is no surprise that many people have turned to the charismatic movement for therapy. There is a lot of pain that needs processing. 

It is no surprise that just a year after Frisbee died of AIDS his generation were still looking for an experience of the Father’s love. Hence the impact of the Toronto Blessing on so many people. There are a lot of spiritual orphans out there. Boarding school survivors, bullied kids, kids with fathers who are ‘absent, apathetic, addicted, achievement driven, authoritarian, abdicating or abusive fathers’ (to use Mark Stibbe’s categories. Stibbe’s book I am Your Father: What every heart needs to know remains incredibly helpful and although he was yet another minister who carried his own painful scars into a ministerial car crash he too has now told the story of his early pain that contributed to the later wreckage.

When these pains are surrendered to God they often become the ‘cracks that let the light in’. When we try and self-medicate them away they can destroy not just us, but those around us. 

It’s one of the reasons Dallas Willard started working with young leaders, trying to get them to process the dark side of their leadership style and personality and experience before it was too late. He dressed this up in a leadership course that has impacted many, but found that it was very hard to reach people later on in life if they hadn’t processed at least some of that brokenness before they reached 40. 

Some wounds don’t heal easily. 

But we charismatics have a contribution to the church here. We have a power from the Spirit, it is true. We have experience of seeing the Kingdom break in here and now, often in extraordinary ways. Cloudless skies do break. But we also know something of sharing in Christ’s pain, that St Paul often alludes to. 

Broadly speaking charismatics are often the ‘feelers’ in the church. It’s not universally true but if you go to a town with a range of student churches if’s often the case that you could pick what church you reckon a new student will end up at based on their personality profile. Some just like it straight, hard hitting and factual. Others like to be teased intellectually and get to think great thoughts. Many like to be embraced in a warm community bubble. Others want to feel that it is real.

To sit through 30 minutes of guitar based ballads playing the same lyrics on repeat and starring into space with ‘arms high and hearts abandoned’ takes a certain sort of personality.

Sometimes it is thinkers who have found they connect to God best through another angle, bypassing their brain.

Often times it is deep feelers like the pop artist and lyricist Robbie Williams who sang: 

I just wanna feel real love | And life ever after | There’s a hole in my soul | You can see it in my face | It’s a real big place

[Feel, Robbie Williams, Guy Chambers] 

But the pathos and the pain are an invitation to come to God, to share in Christ’s pain for the world, to intercede and pray in the coming Kingdom. You almost need the pathos to carry the power. A love/compasison for the lost and broken to bring the health and healing. An inner brokeness to know that this treasure is not from us, but from Him, to carry around your jar of clay. 

The enemy of turning pathos into prayer is distraction. Neil Postman wrote back in the 1980s about ‘amusing ourselves to death’ when we just had 4 channel television. Now we have dopamine anaesthetics in our pockets and tap the screens of our mobile phones to get a hit thousands of times a day. We self-medicate on social media, on games, on screens, on anything that distracts us from the pain, tedium, boredom, difficulties which are all supposed to be signposts to prayer for a people who know that the Kingdom they have experienced is still breaking in and forceful people are supposed to lay hold of it and bring it’s power to heal the planet and its people in the here and now. The pain, as CS Lewis said, is a megaphone – not just that we need God, but that He needs us (or at the very least wants us) to pray, pray, pray until something happens. 

The pathos is the way into prayer. 

If we inoculate from pathos there is no prayer. 

Because the Spirit is waiting to help us in our weakness. Our strength is seen where we are weak.

A final word

Charismatics had never felt so strong in the Church of England until a year or two ago. Now, those who are going to hold the line on biblical teaching on human sexuality have a choice. Behave as though we are strong and throw our weight around, or remember we are weak and use this season as a time to ‘go into the desert’, find our (new/alternative) spiritual overseers – our ‘Abbas’ and work on some of our own ‘stuff’ as we do so.

I’ve written about a ‘Jacob and Rebekah’ moment here from my reflections of being at General Synod. It feels to me like a time pregnant with opportunity to re-find the way of the cross and walk the ancient paths. I hope we can choose the way of the cross once again and find our God in the desert teaching us the way of strength through suffering, and how he can work through weakness. As seen above when we forget our weakness and cling on to power it can derail us completely.

I’d rather be weak and filled with the Spirit.

At the end of the day: What profit it us if we gain the whole world, but lose our very soul.

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Endnotes: Frisbee: All this despite being expelled from and edited out of the Jesus Movement story and later being expelled from and edited out of Vineyard story after lapsing into cocktails of troubles and difficulties including a promiscuous homosexual lifestyle. Frisbee eventually died of AIDS. see https://www.charismanews.com/culture/91715-god-used-lonnie-frisbee-powerfully-despite-his-flaws and see further: Paul Fahy “Lonnie Frisbee The problem of Charismatic hypocrisy” http://www.understanding-ministries.com for a comprehensive investigation into Frisbee’s life (albeit one that reveals as much about the author’s biases as about Frisbee). 

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Previous Posts in this series: Foreword | introduction | Remember The Baby | The Bathwater Needs Flushing | Driven to Distraction by Success | Whoever Pays the Piper | Losing My Religion | Spiralling Out of Control | Look to the rock | Here Come the Generals | You Will Receive Power | The Swamp | You See Dry Bones? I See An Army

HTB Network Thesis in 30 Parts: Featuring: Origins | Renewal | Success Culture | Managerialism | Theology | Trajectories.