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Wild Thinkers
“Dirty Glory” by Pete Greig
Pete Greig is now senior pastor at Emmaus Road church in Guildford, so not a million miles away.
Dirty Glory is a sequel to ‘Red Moon Rising’ with which you may be familiar, and both books describe aspects of the ’24–7 Prayer Movement’. This is a worldwide movement of continuous non-stop prayer, as 24-7 implies. As with so many of God’s initiatives, the movement started simply. About 20 years ago Pete and a few other teenagers decided find out for themselves whether Christianity was true. They gathered in a garden shed with no clear idea what to do. Quote:
‘We sang songs, read Michael Quoist poems meaningfully to each other, chatted to God about things, tried having communion once or twice. We really didn’t have a clue what to do, none of us knew anything about the Holy Spirit…we just did anything to try and attract God’s attention. It was truly terrible and half of it was probably heretical. The local vicar heard about it and told me to stop. And of course that was when I knew we were really onto something…….. Then one day the Holy Spirit turned up and started to do amazing things…..’
‘For more than 15 years we have lived in a fairly constant state of bewilderment at the places God takes us, the surprising new things the movement becomes’.
That last quote pretty well sums up how Pete and his teams around the world are experiencing the results of non-stop prayer, giving God space to work, when they just say ‘yes’ to his promptings.
Praying, whichever way you do it, inevitably leads to action and mission.
Dirty Glory in particular chronicles striking incidents and outcomes arising when people have said ‘yes’ and got involved in praying for their local community, under loose themes of
Presence, Prayer, Mission, Justice & Joy.,
The mixture of Bible teaching, accounts of the Holy Spirit’s work around the globe and in the UK, musings and encouragements to us ‘his ordinary people living in dirty circumstances’, turned out to be quite difficult to summarise and discuss. In the end it separated itself out into the first session on what it might mean to be part of a global prayer movement that never stops and how we, our church and Aldershot Churches Together would fit into that. People variously commit to an hour each in a designated prayer space for a defined period of anything from 12 hours, say, to several weeks or more, or in some countries multitudes of Christians gather together in one place and just keep praying.
24-7 happens in prayer spaces – a garden shed, a room, a barn, a warehouse, a classroom at school, wherever. The point is made that prayer is not only talking to God, with lists of requests, but is also listening, playing music, meditating, or whatever, in effect, making space for God to speak to us, so that we can say ‘yes’ to him. Then he expects us to go and get our hands dirty for his glory.
Some questions from the book:
‘To reach the unchurched we will have to leave the church and visit places and people we might previously have considered ‘unclean’. Reflecting on the witness of Jesus to the ‘unclean’ people of his day, who do we think is ‘unclean’ in our neighbourhood? How could we reach out to these people?
How might we grow in both axes of coming to God in prayer (vertical) and going out to our neighbourhood (horizontal)? Even some weird and dark places?
Has God ever broken our hearts for a particular place or people?
Dirty Glory is peppered with succinct quotes set out in capitals, thus breaking up the print and making it overall easy to read. Here is one of them to leave you with:
YOUR POWER IN PRAYER FLOWS FROM AN
INNER CERTAINTY THAT
THE ONE WHO MADE YOU LIKES YOU, HE IS NOT SCOWLING AT
YOU.
HE IS ON YOUR SIDE
Get the book, or borrow one of ours…
Marg Stratton & Brian Graham