Pray With Us: London Estates 24-7 2015Jess Ford - 23 Jun 2015

"Yes, our estates are incubators of poverty, crime, loneliness, marginalisation. But they're also home to creativity, solidarity, patience, hope, kindness and innovation"

Starting on June 29th, London Estates 24-7 will be running a week of prayer across 7 different areas of London, praying in some of the poorest and most marginalised areas of the UK's capital city. Wherever you are in the world, get inspired by this awesome project below - and see how you can get involved in praying...

“What are you doing mate?” says the local and notorious man. “Urm, we’re praying here all of today, praying for the estate non-stop that God would bless it” says the young man who’s just moved into the area. “Sounds good, thanks, we need more of that."

For a week at the beginning of July in 2013 and 2014 we pieced together people praying for as many London council estates as we could. Prayer rooms, prayer walks, prayer meetings, it didn’t matter how - just pray for your estate or the one nearest you.

You see - for years, churches have had a presence on estates and have mobilised mission in all sorts of ways. Drawn by God and because these places have housed so much poverty, marginalisation and organised crime. That mission has been to change poverty, to bring help where there is need and to not forget God’s love of those who are broken or may break the rules. But that same mission is also a celebration of these most specific and unique communities. Here are the flats and streets that new UK music has poured out of, urban artists and community activists of the first degree. Our estates are incubators of poverty, crime, loneliness, marginalisation, yes. But also creativity, solidarity, patience, hope, kindness and innovation. These are our London estates.

Many of our neighbours on the estates are frustrated or hurting or are close to giving up. When we have connected to others across London to mobilise prayer we have heard the same is true across all the estates we know. We all want to see hope, healing and change for those people and we want to see them come to know the full transformation of the good news. We want these jar-of-clay places to have the light of Jesus poured into them fully!

So we pray. And we want to pray more. And we want to see more people pray, get mobilised to pray and get contagious in prayer for these places. What would happen if we saw a groundswell of God’s people praying for estates in London? Could dreams of new creativity, grass-roots transformation and Kingdom come be seen? We hear so many dreams that might come to fruition but we want to build on prayer that God might have his way through his plans for his estates here.

London Estates 24-7 prayer is really simple; prayer in all shapes and sizes for London’s estates.

This year the week will run from Monday 29th June to Sunday 5th July 2015 with an evening of celebration and joining up what God’s been saying and doing on Monday 6th. Every day will see a focus of prayer on a specific area from North to East, South to West. With the baton of prayer being handed on each day at midnight each area will get praying in lots of ways in lots of locations over their 24 hours.

What we want is to cover as many estates and hours in prayer as possible and that means above all we need you!

If you live in London - could you host a prayer room, attend a prayer room near you, plan a prayer walk, or even run a prayer meeting? If you don’t live in London could you adopt an area and pray that day from wherever you are?

Whatever you decide let us know and check out the website is www.londonestates247.org where there’s loads of information. Pray for and tell us what you feel God is saying for London’s council estates in 2015.

London Estates 24-7 prayer 2015 from London Estates247 on Vimeo.