Farewell 2014, and thank you!Adam Heather - 7 Jan 2015

2014 – what an incredible one for the 24-7 Prayer movement.

To celebrate such a fantastic year, we thought we would give you one of the highlights from each month.

Thank you for coming on the journey with us…

January: To start the year, we were very excited to have new members join our International Team. Nick in Comms, Rachel in Prayer Spaces in Schools and Jess in 24-7 GB. These guys do a fantastic job in helping us to keep up with all that God is doing.

February: In February we hosted our annual training weekend with 24-7 community leaders from across Europe to dream, scheme, equip and pray for our continent. As expected it was wild, wonderful and (as it was the UK in Feb) very wet.

March: Last year we commissioned our very first Boiler Room in South Africa and in March we celebrated with them as they successfully raised £25,500 to launch a community house to help shelter drug addicts and gang members in the heart of their community. The work they’re doing out there is really remarkable – and they’ll be opening the new building very soon - so watch this space!

April: Prayer Spaces in Schools has seen hundreds of thousands of students experience prayer in their schools - many experiencing prayer for the very first time! Having started in the UK, Prayer Spaces in Schools has started to go international and in April two Prayer Spaces were run in Vienna, Austria. 

May: Each year we run the Vision Course in both Guildford, UK and Kansas City, USA – training young leaders in the ways of prayer, mission and justice. In May we launched our brand new promo video to 20,000 people on the main stage of Big Church Day Out, one of the UK’s biggest festivals. You can watch it here. 

June: What if Cathedrals become houses of prayer again instead of just centres of tourism? In June we were able to run a Prayer Room in one of the most iconic buildings in the world – St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

July: After eight years of frontline prayer and mission on the party island of Ibiza; in July, Brian Heasley released his first book: ‘Gatecrashing – The Story of 24-7 Prayer in Ibiza.’  If you haven't read this book then be warned - it will wreck your life (in a really good way!). 

August: Every year we send mission teams around the world. In the summer of 2014, teams travelled out to work in Lebanon, Iceland, Germany, USA and Ireland (to name a few). The stories they came home with were amazing - you can catch a few of them on the mission teams blog.

September: This was a big one! In September we celebrated 15 years of non-stop prayer since the very first Prayer Room in Chichester. We had this little infographic knocked up with highlights of some of the adventures we’ve had since.

October: Hundreds of friends and family of 24-7 Prayer joined together for an explosive time at our Gathering in Madrid.  As ever, it was incredible to have so many wild and passionate Jesus-loving friends gathered together in the same room.  But even the wildest amongst us could not have imagined the many mind blowing ways God would move at this gathering.  It's hard to do justice to what an incredible time we had - if you were there, you know what I mean - if you weren't, at least you can catch up on all the profound teaching from the main sessions - and book on for Vienna later this year!. 

November: It would seem that God is igniting prayer in all sorts of unbelievable places - In Nov we launched our Prayer in Prisons course. The vision? to see prisons become houses of prayer! Sounds unrealistic? We disagree...

December: For 6 days our Advent Podcasts sat on the top of the iTunes video Podcast chart, following on from similar success of the Lent series earlier in the year. To date, episode one has been viewed over 65,000 times. You can catch all of our Podcast series on the Podcast pages.

There is so much more we could say, but now it is time to look forward to 2015!

We are already working on a new Prayer Course for Young People, planning our International Gathering in Vienna, inviting a new intake radical young leaders on the Vision Course, new exciting mission team opportunities and scheming for a new series of Podcasts (to name but a few).

If you want to keep up with 24-7 Prayer then why not sign up to our weekly Re:wind newsletter.

Thank you 2014 - you were really great!

All images are used by permission in accordance with commons copyright license terms: 'DC Hero Minifigs (most of them)' by Julian Fong, 'European detail map of Flickr and Twitter locations' by Eric Fisher and 'Prison' by JoshuaDavisPhotography