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PrayerHouse Update Autumn 2024
Our 10 year journey
This year we celebrate 10 years since we began the PrayerHouse, which we officially launched in January 2015 with the blessing of churches across the city.
Since then, we have held monthly prayer times for the City of Cardiff and lately beyond into Wales, prayer Events and a weekly rhythm of prayer.
One inspiration came from Moses who didn’t feel able to move forward with the people of Israel unless God’s presence went with them, even though he was offered an angel instead (Ex 33:1-15). Likewise, we felt the need for more of God’s presence than we were experiencing and without that continuing presence of God we didn’t feel able to move forward.
The Hebrew word for presence is literally ‘face’. I can learn a lot about a person without meeting them, especially if they are well known: what is said of them, what they’ve done, what they’ve written, their social media profile etc., but knowing someone face-to-face is a whole different level of relationship. Moses would meet the Lord ‘Face to Face’ and the ancient Hebrew Blessing includes the beautiful phrases ‘may the face of the Lord shine on you’ and ‘lift up his face towards you’. The people of Israel were in deep need of repentance but still longed for his presence. This was and still is our deep desire for ourselves and also for our city and nation
Another inspiration came from Jesus Himself who called a wider group of his disciples to prayer to the ‘Lord of the Harvest’ (Luke 10:1-12)
There are some key points worth noting in this.
- Prayer came before mission and action
- The word for Prayer is a strong one, literally meaning to plead, beg or beseech
- He is the Lord of the harvest, it is his harvest, his mission, his workers
- The word for send is again a strong one. Literally meaning to ‘cast’ or ‘throw’ workers into the harvest. At harvest time it’s all hands-on-deck for workers go where they are sent, to do the jobs that are needed for the sake of the harvest.
- We pray to the Lord to send workers, and he chooses who and where.
- Jesus sent his disciples to the places he was about to go to. In prayer, we discover what is on the Lord’s heart, the answer may surprise us
For us this has meant building relationships for prayer across denominational boundaries, exploring the richness and diversity of the Body of Christ as we seek God together. More surprisingly it has led to some amazing open doors into our local schools. This is a whole other story in itself but suffice to say that we literally felt like those workers thrown into the deep-end but knowing He was going before us.
So where now?
This year as we approach our 10th anniversary, we are in that place of seeking His Face once more. The place of waiting on the Lord to hear from Him.
We will be sharing more on the theme of waiting on God in future posts but as we have sought to ‘Be still and know that He is God’, we have become aware of a fresh tide of life-giving prayer arising among a new generation of leaders and also in ourselves. It is so exciting to see that the ‘cloud and fire’ of God’s presence is on the move