Displaying items by tag: As One conference

ne of the calls we believe God has given us at World Prayer Centre is to act as Watchmen. We know that watchmen have to make sense of what they can see, but their role is to serve. In this role, we will give you strategic overviews from time to time. We’d love to get your feedback but we hope this will encourage and bless your prayer life and focus.

Malcolm Duncan spoke powerfully at our recent ‘As One’ National Prayer Conference. He made the powerful comment that people of prayer are the lungs in the Body of Christ. The Body needs the lungs to function. Malcolm and others have helped us identify five themes we believe are on God’s heart at this time. Download Malcolm's podcasts.

Be filled
God wants us to ensure our lamps are constantly full of oil. In WPC, we are continuously praying to be filled. “Breathe on us breath of God,” let us be equipped, refreshed, energised and led by Your Spirit. This is a time to pray for those close to us to be filled, and for our churches to be filled with His Spirit, His presence and His love. This is a time to see things changed, and renewed by the breath of God.

God’s extraordinary
Ian Cole, WPC founder, has a vision for God’s extraordinary. We believe God wants to equip us, in these times with extraordinary resilience, extraordinary intimacy with Jesus, extraordinary unity and extraordinary faith. As we pray continuously to be filled, we want to keep praying for God’s extraordinary. He is equipping us for a new extraordinary time. Let us keep praying big prayers, and wait on God for the faith to see significant change. Let our 2017 testimonies be about the extraordinary love, goodness and power of God. Read Ian's article on the extraordinary.

Word and Spirit
The Word and Spirit are God’s great gift to His church and to the world, but they have been neglected. We have now moved into a time when they have been powerfully combined. Our experience in WPC is that the Spirit of God is revealing more and more from the Word. The Word is alive and active. This in turn is triggering powerful, authoritative prayer. So our encouragement to you is – expect more and keep your Bible by your side!

Call the midwives
At our conference in March, Brian Mills brought a simple word “Call the midwives”. We believe God is doing something new and very special in the nation; these will be God’s new babies! For us the “call the midwives” word links to our long wait since 1992 for what we call our Isaac – a World Prayer Centre building which can equip and empower people of prayer. We believe God was promising us that the wait is over and the promise will be fulfilled in the coming years. Many others have long term dreams and visions and it seems God was saying “now is the time” to them as well.

R.T. Kendall also carries an Isaac burden, also dating back to 1992. He believes God is going to release the greatest revival the world has ever seen – and it is God’s Isaac. He describes it in his remarkable book, “Prepare your heart for the Midnight Cry”. He looks at the story of the wise and foolish virgins – both had the Word and Spirit, the lamp and the oil – but only half of them had kept the lamp filled. We have always believed that the WPC building and the great revival would be aligned. 2017 is a highly significant year – heavens strategies are being unveiled.

Be alert
We believe God’s word to people of prayer is - “Be alert”. We are being instructed to be on constant look out and engage in spiritual warfare. We need to know the enemies tactics – sickness, unbelief, tiredness, lost confidence, broken relationships and fear. We stand with faith and perseverance and take ground from the enemy. We believe that our God is able, that Jesus’ commitment to us is total and the cross is the place of victory. As God’s army we stand together on the alert – not alone.

Knowing the Times
Part of our role is to understand these fast changing times. On the one hand we can see chaos, uncertainty, tension, intimidation and fear. On the other hand we see Jesus, the Rock, the Everlasting One, the Redeemer and Restorer whose depth of love can change everything. So our decision in these times is to look to Jesus. We believe it is harvest time. God is mobilising people of prayer first to prepare the ground but He is also declaring “Awake” to His whole church. The bridegroom is coming, let us hold the lamp, the Word of God close and let us ensure it is constantly filled with the oil of God’s Spirit. Here we are Lord, use us.
The election is in that context. God is calling a Parliament that will enable the great revival; He is preparing the nation for change. In His great mercy we have ten days of prayerwith Thy Kingdom Come and the great expectation of Pentecost leading up to the election.

Standing shoulder to shoulder
God is calling an army of ordinary people into His extraordinary. Unity is high on God’s agenda, and we are called to stand shoulder to shoulder, ready for God’s call. 2017 is a year of God’s extraordinary and we want to encourage you to stand with us and

• Be on the alert – so much will be happening in the place where God has put us. We are watchers on our local walls. Alongside that pray for our nation as we approach the election of this important parliament it will be a time of real spiritual contention. We also believe God has made us spiritually interdependent across the United Kingdom. Pray for the flames of God’s Spirit to blow across each of our nations.
• Pray with expectation and authority – we are stepping up!
• Join us to pray – our monthly Saturday Prayershift gatherings are events where we expect to see God move powerfully. Our monthly Monday meetings – WATCH + PRAY are to stand in the gap for our nation and the nations. We believe the most powerful prayer engine can often be a local small group. Use our 3 Things prayer videos, sign up to receive prayer issues identified in the Pulse and Prayer Alert. Make your requests known to the Lord.
• Send us your stories and testimonies – part of our standing together is to bring God glory! Contact us on social media or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Enjoy God’s presence – “Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and I will praise you with the lyre, Oh God, my God.”(Ps: 43.4). Let us ensure we always have oil in our lamps!

Steve Botham, Director of World Prayer Centre

The World Prayer Centre’s As One National Prayer Conference was held at The Hayes conference centre, Swanwick from 13 – 15 March. It was a rich mixture of inspirational teaching, powerful prayer, heartfelt worship, great fellowship and an awesome presence of God. Out of it, we enter a period of tremendous promise and challenge for the Church. Our focus was AS ONE. We believe this is a time when God is building a new level of unity in His Church so that the world can see Jesus through our love for each other, our respect and generosity. We were reminded of the Roman testudo (Tortoise) – which fought and moved as a unit as soldiers interlocked shields and moved as the centurion shouted “As One”.  Here’s some of the key themes from the conference:

• 2017 is an extraordinary year of anniversaries – 500 years since the Reformation, 70 years since Smith Wigglesworth’s prophecy, 50 years since Jean Darnall’s and many others. We believe it is a year of extraordinary promise. We see 10 days of prayer in the Thy Kingdom Come call from the Anglican Church, unprecedented unity between the key Christian events with a common call to pray and stand together, and large evangelistic initiatives. Cities and towns are working together to pray for their place, many Muslims are coming to Christ and Christians are seeing a significant response when they take prayer, evangelism and healings onto the streets.
• Call to people of prayer – our hope is that the whole church will learn to love prayer! However we recognise there are many with a particular passion and calling. Our speaker Malcolm Duncan refers to them as the lungs – refreshing and energising the body. We will cover this in more detail with an article in the next Pulse.
• Call the Church – we have a love relationship with Jesus that is expressed in prayer. God wants to change our world through a revived and awakened church. We need to take personal responsibility – how well have we prayed for our leaders to be filled with the spirit and our church events to be filled with his presence? The church is not called to be a bucket – being self-absorbed and focused inward, but a whole series of drain pipes filling up with water and letting the water gush out of us. The church must be distinct – full of love, mercy and compassion and reflecting Jesus. Leslie Newbiggin said, “The local church is called to be an explosion of joy in the community.”
• Call the midwife! We believe a number of key things were birthed at Swanwick, for the nation, for WPC and for many individuals. The promises and prophecies are coming to fruition. On the final morning fifteen midwives came to the front and prayed for the new birth for it to flourish and grow.
• Call to witness – Yinka Oyeken from Reading shared his experience of praying to God for his city before a mission and seeing a tremendous change in the spiritual atmosphere with hundreds wanting to find out more about Jesus. His church has pursued the presence of God since 2008, it went through tremendous tensions and strains but there was breakthrough and a heaven to earth enabling in 2016. Yinka gave us this challenge – the church will never know multiplication until ordinary people lead others to Christ. We need to pray passionately for God to release people to witness – and it starts with praying for ourselves.
• Call to openness before God – Jesus did not come to save super heroes. He himself was broken so we can be changed, not from perfect people but from our own brokenness. We need to be open if we are to be filled to full measure.
• Prayer for the UK –We need to pray for God’s breath in his church, and His presence and fire to move across every part of the UK. We are praying for the seven spheres/seven mountains – politics, economy, children, arts etc. – so we can say – Your Kingdom Come.
• Prayer for Europe – God has called the UK to bless Europe with the gospel. In this year of Reformation we felt God was creating a strong spiritual bond between the UK and Germany this is the moment to reclaim our joint call to send the gospel to the nations.
• Prayer for WPC – we are now in the 25th year since God gave Ian a vision for a Prayer Centre. It was after 25 years of promise that Isaac was born to Sarah. We believe something very significant happened at this Swanwick that causes us to pray for the centre with renewed faith and expectation.

Our call and our commission

Swanwick is not just a blessing for those who attended. It releases something important into the nation. This Swanwick was a spiritual tipping point – all of us are impacted.
We have had a period when we believe God was telling the church in the UK to get ready, now we believe we have been called and mobilised. It is time to

• Be continually filled by God’s Holy Spirit
• Have a deep hunger for his presence
• Expect God’s extraordinary to be released in you and around you
  o His extraordinary resilience in times when the storm blows
  o His extraordinary faith – God can work miracles through you
  o His extraordinary unity – let us passionately promote unity, praying generously for others success, and wanting Jesus to be seen in his church.
  o His extraordinary love – that we might know a deeper and deeper intimacy with Him and have a revelation of how much He loves us.
  o His extraordinary promise that the church will be awakened and our nations will be changed – by his overwhelming mercy.

We are being mobilised. The command is simple – be filled with the Holy Spirit, be ready for action.

Download a PDF with all the dates and anniversaries for 2017

Steve Botham

Director of World Prayer Centre