Flippin city prayer

When I first went to the 133 church leaders monthly breakfast it was led by the senior pastor of Folly’s End Church in Croydon. Folly’s were connected to ‘Partners in Harvest’ which was the movement headed up by John and Carol Arnott who led the Church in Canada where the phenomenon of the Toronto Blessing came from. 133 held celebrations at the Folly’s building and we were always invited to the many conferences held there which had people like the Arnotts and other US leaders as guest speakers. I was excited that this could be the way that unity would come to Croydon, but our relationships weren't very deep. In 1999 I suggested that instead of a monthly breakfast, we commit to meeting for a couple of hours every week and so we deepened our commitment to one another. Meanwhile there were some major struggles in Croydon, one being the proposed opening of our first lap dancing club. No one wanted the club, but no one seemed to be able to stop it happening. So the 133 leaders got a group of praying people together from several churches and they led a successful Croydon wide prayer campaign against the opening of a club. Flushed with success we decided that we would hold a monthly prayer meeting called ‘Prayer in the City’. Our group of 7 intercessory prayer warriors led and planned the meetings and ran them for a few years under the leadership of the Folly’s prayer co-ordinator, Heather Dean (Now Heather Andrew). Heather is an excellent woman of prayer and an inventive leader and motivator of others in prayer. However there was fault line in the way we had built the prayer meetings. There was no real way of reporting back to the 133 group as a whole and no church leaders were involved in the prayer meeting planning team. Over the next few years it pains me to remember that the prayer nights became less inclusive and those on the planning group took a beating in health and well being. It was then that I was asked by the 133 group to oversee the prayer team. Now let me confess something to you, I am no prayer warrior. I know that you are shocked by this confession, you thought that someone writing with this depth of spiritual insight was a cross between Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Theresa, but sadly no. 

But, yet again, God had other plans. One of my first encounters with the folk at Follys’ End was at one of their conferences in 1998. I was unknown by most people there, but a strange bearded man (Martin Richards) wondered around the auditorium playing a baritone saxophone. He stopped playing and came up to me and said “I see you with a Field Marshall’s baton in in your hand and you are conducting intercessors. God is calling you to be a Field Marshall of Intercessors”. Within 18 months of being in Croydon, I was overseeing these amazing people of prayer. Sadly one of the things I had to do was draw this monthly prayer meeting to a close. We ended ‘Prayer in the City’ very reluctantly, but knowing that we weren't where God wanted us to be. Thus, confused, I felt that the Ed Silvozo book and the Transformations videos were really calling us to city wide prayer and church unity, but we had a fractured church with 133 and the formal ecumenical body not getting along and no more city wide prayer.

A short while later I was asked to take over leading the 133 group. I had also taken up the role of chair of the Ecumenical Borough Deans for Croydon. The Deans were set up to have a representative from each denomination to meet with the local authority leaders on a regular basis to discuss social and economic issues in our town. In truth we just seemed to meet as church leaders to go over the same things as the CTBC committee, and most of the members were the same people. Wading through treacle comes to mind when I think of those times!

I suggested to the 133 leaders that we hold a breakfast in a hotel and invite every church leader in Croydon. The meeting to discuss this breakfast brought to light part of the problem. Twelve 133 church leaders chatted about who we should invite. One counselled that we shouldn't invite Catholics as they didn't agree with our doctrine, another was dubious about theologically liberal ministers, another didn't want a Quaker there, and so on. After a couple of hours we concluded that the only people we all agreed we could invite were the twelve of us in the room! Did I mention that we were men seeking unity!! The guys graciously allowed me overrule and we invited about 140 ministers to our first breakfast. On the morning, amazingly over 60 leaders turned up. I carefully introduced a Brethren church representative to a table, where I sat him between a Roman Catholic Priest and a Black Pentecostal Minister. In my head I reckoned that in his mind he sat between a representative of the Anti-Christ and someone demon possessed. Nevertheless, after the breakfast, this dear brother thanked me for introducing him to two wonderful men of God. I believe that that was the first day in Croydon when we began to see the answer to Jesus prayer in John 17. It wasn't unity of those who could agree on most scripture and doctrine, but of all who loved Jesus. A huge fire had been lit. 

One of the original ‘Prayer in the City’ team members (Judi Lane from Purley Baptist Church) had been living abroad for a year and had returned to Croydon asking God what he wanted her to do next. We bumped into each other and quickly agreed that we needed a city wide prayer meeting again, but this time with oversight from a team which had church leaders in it from the outset, with the Borough Deans as a council of reference and submitted to the oversight of the 133 group. Three of us went up to Manchester to meet with Deborah Green from ‘Redeeming Our Communities’ to look at their prayer network and were impressed that they prayed for aspects of their city by inviting leaders in the community to come to be interviewed and give three of four areas where they wanted to see change. They also had a city wide church website. My only concern was that the unity in Manchester seemed to be mainly amongst the evangelical churches.

We now had the church in Croydon coming together three times a  year to pray for the needs of our town as revealed by civic leaders.