Mission in Ibiza: Not for your average party animalTheresa Stone - 18 Jan 2013

Thoughts Magazine interviewed Lucy Hardy about experiences on mission with 24-7 Ibiza. After reading the feature, 24-7 Prayer couldn't resist sharing it... 

"Every year thousands of young (and old) people head out to the sunny coasts of Ibiza for the super clubs, cheap booze, sex, more cheap booze and sun. Lucy Hardy has also spent her last couple of summers out on the main strip in Ibiza, but she is not your average holiday party animal..

F /t: So you’re an intern with Third Space Ministries, tell us what it is and what you do?

L.H: Third Space Ministries is all about sharing God’s love in third spaces of society which are places such as night clubs, gyms and coffee shops. Part of our work is to go into our local gym, where we are doing an Alpha course, we organise socials for the members and we are just in there if people ever want to talk to us about anything.

F /t: You have also spent your last couple of summers out in Ibiza with 24-7 Ibiza. Tell us more about how you got into it?

L.H: So Ibiza 24-7 Prayer is amazing! A couple of my friends went there one year and they came back and they were just filled with so many stories of what God had done there in Ibiza and I wanted to get involved. I wanted to see what God was doing on this island, to see God’s heart for the island.

F /t: What do you do out there?

L.H: Ibiza is the clubbing capital of Europe and San Antonio is the main clubbing strip so the majority of the work is based there in the evenings to early hours of the morning. You all meet as a team at half eleven and you’ll pray, worship together and then at 12:00am you’ll split into two groups. One group will go out on to the streets and one group will stay in the prayer room. You walk around in pairs down the main clubbing strip, praying like “God, who do you want us to go to? Who specifically do you want us to talk to?” And we pray for people in our pair (or in our heads) we see as we walk past, smiling and engaging in conversation. We’ve got a great relationship with all the bar-owners over there and all the people that work out on the streets – the PRs who are trying to get you to come into the clubs. They will phone us up if they have got someone in their bar that needs help, has drunk too much or who needs help getting back to their hotel. So we go over to them and assist them. 

There is a vomit van and a wheelchair so we either put them in the van or we get them in the wheelchair or we have them hanging over each of our arms and we walk them back to their hotel, that’s if they know where their hotel is! If not we might end up sitting with them for two hours, trying to get them to drink water until they sober up enough so they can say if they want our help so we can hopefully get them back to their hotel.

F /t: Ew a ‘vomit van’, what is that?

L.H: It’s a van and inside it has got the ‘dreaded’ bucket – it’s held under people’s chins just in case they are going to be sick into it. We encourage people to get taxis but where the taxis won’t take people because they are too drunk, we are able to offer them a free ride. And we also have got a great relationship with the medical centre so we quite often get calls from them for people who have been dropped in and we will go and pick them up. We will also take people there too if they need to get checked out in the medical centre.

F /t: Have you got any cool stories of when you have seen God answer prayers?

L.H: You see God doing amazing things out there because the whole evening is covered in prayer!  The hour that you are out on the streets you know that people back in the prayer room have your back in prayer, then you swap over and the people from the prayer room go on the streets.

It’s great, that few minutes of swap over time, because you find out what the people in the 24-7 Prayer Room have been praying for and what has been going on in the streets. That is really what shocks me and makes me realise just how powerful prayer is because so many things that are prayed for in the Prayer Room happen on the streets. There was this one time, before we went out and we were seeking God and we were praying “God who do you want us to find tonight?” This one boy said “ok, I think God is saying there might be a boy called Daniel* who will be sitting by the docks and he really needs to know that God loves him.” So then the next hour, a few of us were in the Prayer Room and we were praying that our team on the street would find Daniel.

Two of our team went out and wandered down by the docks and they saw this guy sitting by himself so started talking to him. He talked about a fight he’d just had with his girlfriend.  He asked what these guys were doing and what 24-7 Ibiza was (reading it on their t-shirts).  So our team explained and the guy started talking about how he used to be a Christian, but he’s not anymore. His mum is and she still goes to church but he doesn’t get it.  They then asked him; “mate, what’s your name?” and he said “It’s Daniel*” The team were like wow ok, then they said; “mate, I think we were meant to be talking to you. We just want to tell you God really loves you, for who you are.” He started crying and then they said, can we pray with you and he said “yeah”. So they got to pray with him and they gave him a Bible to read and take home.  It was so cool.

F /t: That’s amazing. What other work do the 24/7 Prayer do out in Ibiza?

L.H: The long-term team who are out there run a centre which is open for people that are working on the island, the bar owners and PR people. This centre is just a place for people to come and chill out; there are free computers, free table-tennis and free Wi-Fi.

People can just come in, hang out and it’s great because the workers come in each day and you really start to build relationships with them, and from that people start to ask questions about why we choose to come to Ibiza and do this and become interested in wanting to know more.

There was a girl who just came along to the centre because she wanted free internet. She didn’t realise we were Christians and then she found out we were Christians and she kept asking more questions and then from that she wanted to know about the Bible because we had these really cool ‘Jesus Loves Ibiza’ Bibles, so she picked it up and was like, “can I take one home?” and we were like “yeah”! The more she came in, the more interested she was and then she started wanting prayer and then started coming to our Church services on Sunday. Its great how it is building up relationships, not forcing it on people – it’s just being around people, hanging out with them and being natural.

F /t: Is there a certain age group involved in Ibiza 24-7?

L.H: Any age can go out and it’s really great when we have teams made up of different people, young and older people. I think that a mix is really important because there is such a mix of different people out partying in Ibiza, therefore different people can respond to different people on the team.

 F /t: And you mentioned Third Space goes in to clubs, which we’re guessing is back in England. What do you do?

L.H: We’ve started something called ‘Club and Pray’. We have dinner together, just enjoy hanging out and then we spend some time praying for the evening ahead. We then go into a local club, with the intention again to have a good time, to just celebrate friendship, celebrate life and go in and worship God. Rather than being like “okay I’m going to be a Christian but clubs are wrong, therefore I’m not going to go clubbing or I’m going to be a Christian but how can God be in these clubs therefore I’m going to leave God outside” no – God is already in the clubs so we go in and enhance His presence by being in there. We’ve started doing prayer walking around in twos while everyone else is dancing. If we see someone that might need some water, we will go and get them water, or if we see someone that is alone, we might go and talk to them, or if there is a bottle on the floor we might pick it up. We go in to hopefully be good news in there and have a good time.

*The real persons name has been changed to Daniel for privacy purposes.

 www.24-7ibiza.com have just opened team applications for 2013 summer mission.  Follow Third Space Ministries, on Twitter: @ThirdSpaceMin