A small group of us gathered to pray and eat together in March 2010, and in all honesty, we were meeting out frustration with our prayer lives. We’d all been sent from churches and hometowns to be part of a boiler room community in our desire to live this out, but realised that our rose-tinted aspiration was far harder in practice.

 

We knew that we had to stop talking about when, where and how to pray, and just get on and pray. So we sent an email round along with a scribbled list of things we were going to pray about.

 

I’m not sure what we were expecting, but it certainly wasn’t what happened that night, or what grew out of this weekly gathering and what is still growing nearly 18 months on. As we brought our prayers to God for our friends in various parts of the world and particularly Europe, for our community and local area, God’s presence showed up in that living room. 

 

We weren’t simply praying through the list, we were shedding tears for nations we didn’t know much about, seeing visions of cities transformed, and singing spontaneous choruses over specific nations and people. This was not a group made up of what you would call naturally loud or extrovert people, yet it felt entirely natural as we cried out, knelt, danced, wept, and sang our way through our prayers and the burdens that God gave us to intercede for that night.

In the cold light of the following day, part of me wondered if it had been a one hit wonder, and not to get my hopes up too much for the following week when we had planned to meet again. As we met each week, the Holy Spirit continued to be present and only increased our desire to pray. 

 

For the first time in my life I actually looked forward to a prayer meeting, and for many it was the highlight of the week. We became more and more expectant, and over the coming weeks and months, we saw spiritual gifts being increased and nurtured, but most significantly and surprisingly, our level of accountability and honesty with each other also grew. After a few months the core group that was now meeting regularly decided to do 24-7’s Virtual Prayer course, which we also extended to anyone else in the community who wanted to do it with us. 

 

Despite the growth in confidence we’d had through our journey of corporate prayer, the course helped us realize some false truths that individually we’d still had about prayer and our own prayer lives. Although we were having times of incredible depth and intimacy during our Tuesday Prayer evenings, we realized our personal responsibility in our own prayer lives as well as the importance of accountability for each other’s prayer lives as well. 

 

During this corporate prayer journey that we’ve been on every week since last March, we’ve brought our partitions to God, for the people and nations that don’t know Jesus, for our city, our workplaces, our families and homes. God has often hijacked our well-intentioned lists and implored us to seek His face, wanting us to have greater intimacy with Him, and with that, personal wholeness and restoration. There have been times of real joy, painful tears, breakthrough and even gold dust landing on us. We’ve been blessed by the many visitors who often pass through Guildford to visit the boiler room and end up round our dinner table for Tuesday Prayer – and have been able to pray with them and them with us. 

 

Most significantly, what impressed upon us all was something so utterly simple but seemingly so illogical in the day-to-day busyness of world we live in: that prayer has to be at the centre of everything. For me, this meant a complete rewiring of my brain. As someone who defaults to brainstorming ideas, coming up with a list of to-dos and then producing a vision that should work, to have prayer as the first and primary influence over a project, strategy or vision was a huge mind-shift, as the often quoted phrase says: “if we could see what happens in heaven when we pray, we’d do less and pray more”.