Politics, Podcasts & Poverty: The Endless Possibilities of PrayerPete Greig - 2 Apr 2008

Today I watched my kids, Hudson and Daniel, playing with forty African AIDS orphans. Depressingly, to be African and to be orphaned by AIDS has become a cliché. Trips so easily off the tongue and onto the keyboard: African. AIDS. Orphans.

(God help us).

So I wish you could have seen those forty, smiling children dancing around my two blonde boys singing ‘White boy in da ring, tra-la-la-la-la’ (apparently it was a traditional African song long before Boney M made it a hit in the 80’s) . I watched as Hudson and Danny’s innate Western suspicion (where did that come from?) began to evaporate in the Zambian sun and before long they too were dancing, singing along and laughing without worrying about looking cool (they didn’t!) It was a beautiful sight for a father to see, and it dawned on me that my children were being given permission by these children simply to be children again. ‘Who needs who?’ I wondered.

Stolen Water

It’s hard to feel sorry for people who don’t feel sorry for themselves. These Zambian children find themselves alive without parents, living from day-to-day in a compound called Koloko, where there is no water and no electricity and precious little hope. But they are joyful! They search the rubbish dumps for tires which they burn to extract valuable wires. They also trudge back-and-forth to the fractured, mains water-pipe to fill jerry-cans full of precious, red, muddy, drinking water. Stolen water.

I watched an eight-year-old girl called Gracious carrying her baby brother on her back. I’d heard about orphaned children who have to raise their younger siblings; I’d even studied the statistics about them (they’re shocking), but it all comes home when you’re singing ‘Boney M’ hits with a girl like Gracious who’s the age of your own children and yet a mother too.

Those forty kids dancing round my boys are being given free education at a simple little school set up in Koloko by my wife’s parents. Next door they have also started an AIDS counselling service. It’s run by a local bishop called Dixon whose own daughter died of an AIDS related illness last month. Come to places like Koloko and you quickly realise that the church really is the only hope for the world’s poor.

A verb, not a noun...

But you may be wodering what African AIDS Orphans have to do with 24-7 Prayer?
Prayer is like pregnancy: it gives birth to miraculous new life (mission, innovation, community, creativity, social justice - you name it.) Many people I meet define 24-7 as a particular model of prayer, but we actually don’t mind how people pray as long as they pray! Prayer rooms are certainly a brilliant way of engaging with God, but they aren’t the only way. And although prayer is the heartbeat of everything we do, you’ll have noticed that it isn’t the only thing we do. A friend in Scotland recently explained it like this:

24-7 is meant to be a verb – an action, and not a noun – an object or organisation. We are friends giving permission to one another to do creative, courageous, Kingdom things.  Prayer propels us out to make a difference in the world. How can we NOT respond to situations like Koloko when the bible so clearly links prayer with our attitude to the poor (Isaiah 58)?

From Zambia to Uganda, prayer is propelling us out to make a difference. I was so excited to read the story on this website about an island on Lake Victoria which was recently evangelised thanks to a Ugandan 24-7 prayer room! In the place of prayer God commissioned these intercessors to go to a particular island. They arrived and found a totally unevangelised people group (with a 90% HIV infection rate). They preached the gospel and, as a result, a church of fifty was born amongst some of the poorest people on earth!

It’s because prayer is a pregnancy that the 24-7 community has also recently given birth to an exciting new devotional resource. Our funny little podcast, recorded in my front room for the price of a take-away curry, has somehow gone straight to the top of the iTunes religion and spirituality charts ahead of sophisticated, expensive (and frankly much better) downloads recorded in proper studios by people who actually know what they are doing. We’d always assumed that 24-7 Prayer Spaces would start small and build slowly so (as you may have noticed) the recording is pretty duff and we’re only just working out how to do it properly.  Life happens.

Sitting here in Africa yesterday I was reminded of another sign of life: it came in the form of a text message from Phil Anderson, author of the 24-7 Title Lord of the Ring and one of the pioneers of the Boiler Room in Corringham, near London. Phil now works in the British Parliament and was asking us to pray for a key meeting of political leaders yesterday afternoon. From the poor of Zambia to the politicians of Britain via podcasts on iTunes, I’m convinced that stuff like this only happens because of our commitment to prayer. We certainly never planned it this way, and even if we had, we could never have made all these exciting things happen.

God of the (im)Possible

Satan HATES it when we pray (ever wondered why it’s always such a struggle?). He HATES it when we discover the mind-bending truth that ‘Everything is possible for him who believes’ (Mark 9:23) and that ‘all things are possible with God’ (Mark 10:27) and that ‘My Father will give you whatever you ask in my name’ (John 16:23). Satan wants us to despair about these kids in Koloko. It’s God alone who enables us to look at their situation with eyes of faith.

Did you know that Satan has an agenda for your life? He wants to hurt you. He wants to intimidate you. He wants to undermine the absolute self-confidence with which you were born. He knows that when humans get wounded they tend to seek safety instead of adventure, they default to an ‘I can’t do that’ outlook and they water-down their prayers. No wonder the most frequent commandment in the bible is ‘Do not be afraid! Be courageous! Don’t fear!’ How do we get such courage? We get it from the One who made heaven and earth, the One who overcame death, the One who invites us into the place of prayer.

The other way Satan tries to stop you believing is by turning your relationship with Jesus (which is – let’s face it – the most exciting thing about you) into a rigid set of religious rules that restrict, suspect and protect instead of releasing you to start fires. Satan wants to turn every Jesus-verb into a religious-noun, every permission into a restriction, he wants to reduce ‘now’ stories into ancient histories and possibilities into apparently insurmountable problems.

Last night as I prayed with my kids, Hudson announced that he wants to give half of his pocket money to the orphan kids in Koloko. If we keep praying, who knows what’ll happen next?