Displaying items by tag: WPC conference feedback

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