Zimbabwean Prayer Room at the Heart of Peaceful Elections - 10 Sep 2013

Joel Bird left England in June to spend three months working with a church in Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare. This is his story of how God turned an otherwise-exceptional summer into a life-changing adventure in prayer.

Zimbabwean Kylie, her English husband, Mark, and I all felt burdened to mobilise prayer for Zimbabwe, but weren't really sure what to do about it. All three of us were in Zimbabwe with elections coming up. The last elections saw lots of violence and corruption. We felt it was so important to be praying now for peace, reconciliation, justice and for the leaders, especially as what seemed to be an already decided outcome hung in the balance. During the elections suspicions are high, and although a week of 24-7 prayer should be safe to do, anything could be perceived as political opposition. So in this climate we requested prayers of support and protection and began to organise a week of prayer. Well aware we didn't have a room or any resources, we wondered if we would end up splitting 168 hours of prayer between the three of us.

We wanted the prayer room to be somewhere safe, secure and central where people wouldn't mind turning up at 3am. We also wanted it to be ‘church neutral’ so anyone could come spend time with God. No available room had the essential combination, yet we made a Facebook page, registered our ‘prayer room’ on the 24-7 Prayer website and made announcements. We invited people to come and declared it was happening, even though we weren't completely sure it would.

"You can use this room, it hasn't any windows yet". When the word room was used in this sentence, it was redefining the word room. And yet, this ‘room’ made it real. This was happening! From here things started to grow and the Facebook page gathered likes. While we waited for builders to give the room windows and clear the assortment of clutter and rubble we spent the days frantically shopping and preparing the room, all the while posting encouragement on our Facebook page and collating resources. But the number of available prayer slots was still close to 168.

Amazingly the room was ready by the time we needed to kick it off. I'm not going to lie, I wanted things to be a mirror of every prayer room I've been in, every slot filled with people coming to the room to pray. But that way doesn't work here. Mark and Kylie understood the identity of this room needed to be prayer for Zimbabwe, and after spending the first 2 hours in the room, I knew we had it right. It had personality and an obvious presence of God. "It smells like God" has to be my favourite comment on the room.

On Election Day Harare was ghostly quiet, but the prayer room was crammed and the Wailing Wall had overgrown. Not only had the prayer room slots filled most hours of each day, but people were turning up and praying unannounced whenever they had a free moment. The polling stations were full of people queuing, an air of peaceful optimism in every location and people from both sides were praying in the room. We considered a notice asking for no political party statements in the room, but found we didn't need to. This movement of prayer for Zimbabwe was exciting, incredible and unstoppable. However you feel about the outcome of the elections, they remained peaceful, which is miraculous considering the violence that surrounded the 2008 elections – resulting in the deaths of 200 people.

This prayer movement was getting too big for our week and we realised that we were involved in the process of starting a prayer room, but were removed from the decision to stop it. A number of people petitioned the elders of the church to keep the room open.  The original plan for the prayer room was a men's toilet. We joked about the toilet being a place people would experience God, imagining testimonies of becoming a Christian at a urinal. However the popularity of prayer room meant the toilet would have to be delayed, and a new room built for a permanent prayer room. While we made plans for the prayer room to be there for a week, God had slightly different plans. So if you're ever in Harare with an hour or more to burn, make your way to 100 Enterprise Road.

All images are used by permission in accordance with commons copyright license terms:
Feature image is a derivative of the image 'Zimbabwe Grunge Flag.' by Nicolas Raymond.