March 2004

Praying in London

Corporate Prayer in the Local Church

This year, there are some wonderful opportunities to pray for London on a large scale. With events like Soul in the City, Just 10, the Alpha Initiative and many others on the horizon we surely need to grab all such occasions with both hands whenever they arise.

I am delighted that we have been invited to join the London Festival of Life on Friday, March 26 at the Excel Exhibition Centre, Docklands. This event is a biannual all-night programme of prayer, praise and worship organised by the Redeemed Christian Church of God and is one of the largest non-denominational gatherings of its kind in the UK. The programme starts at 8pm and includes worship led by the Soul Survivor worship team and the Festival of Life Choir. Mike Pilvachi will be speaking and I do encourage any who can to vote with their feet by coming and standing with thousands of others before God in prayer on behalf of this city.

Beyond that, we are already beginning to make plans for the London Alpha Initiative Prayer Meeting we will be organising in conjunction with J John’s outreach Just 10 in a 5,000 seater tent on Clapham Common in September.

This will be this year’s equivalent of the prayer event we held in St Paul’s Cathedral last year and I hope it will prove possible to fill the tent to overflowing with Christians from all denominations and from all over London again in the same cause.

The above events are, of course, in addition to the continuing programme of prayer and worship meetings in the life of the church here, including our plans for a week of 24-7 prayer at Home Focus with London as the theme again, so we are actively engaging in a whole variety of corporate prayer for London to complement all the significant Christian events coming up in London throughout the year.

There will also be many hundreds of Alpha Initiative Prayer meetings in September and other prayer events across the nation throughout the year and together with the London activities there is an exciting sense of promoting change for the better in the life of our nation.

The words of 2 Chronicles 7:14 come to mind: ‘…if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and forgive their sin and will heal their land.’

Amen.
This article was first published in Focus Newspaper. Reproduced here by kind permission.