Spirit-led prayer

A vision of a vine with dry roots and withered branches radically changed the way the people at Kensington Temple prayed.

In his book Prayer Explosion, Colin Dye says he heard of the vision by a woman in his congregation at a time when the church "had begun to backtrack from our early prayer emphasis".

The church in London, England was growing rapidly but busyness was beginning to replace prayer.

Pastors were skipping the Wednesday prayer gathering to counsel people.  The Bible study which followed the prayer meeting was the main emphasis, so people arrived just before the study.

"The interruptions were just a symptom of how much our prayer life was sliding away; we were losing focus, direction, fervency and power."

Leadership of the prayer meeting was delegated to an elder and pastors focused on other important things.  The prayer gathering dwindled.

Then, Colin Dye heard about the woman's vision and it struck him to the heart.

"It is sometimes easy to disregard the word of God because of the abundance of it," Dye writes.  "But this is dangerous.  If God is speaking to us and we are living in him, the Spirit will witness his truth in our hearts."

The Holy Spirit spoke to Dye through the woman's vision and he knew it was a word intended for Kensington Temple.

"Our roots were dry and we were overextending beyond what we were able to sustain spiritually and organisationally as well.  We had to repent."

The senior leaders in the church responded by once again taking leadership of the prayer meeting.  But they went well beyond that, making prayer permeate everything the church did.

Here are some of their measures:

• The daily staff meetings began with prayer and Dye called on people to share what the church should pray about that day;
• He spent the entire afternoon coming before God in prayer over these items, sometimes calling staff members in to shed more light on what was going in their departments and the problems they faced; and
• The prayer meeting focus changed to "taking the city", inspired by the battle of Jericho in Joshua 6.  The idea was to pray about "the real issues God had given to us".

The prayer gathering was the "spearhead" for everything the church did.

"We felt engaged in a heavenly battle and had a real sense of moving forward in God's plans for us in the city," says Dye. "We allowed the Spirit to lead us in everything."

The prayer meeting no longer covered every aspect of church life.

"Instead, we used the meeting as a spearhead.  Just as soon as we began to break through in prayer, we would move on to the next topic," he says.  "We would push the prayer emphasis out into our smaller groups and our own devotional times."

People began coming to the prayer gathering to get the agenda for prayer to inspire them in their own prayer lives.

"Our prayers became specific, personal, powerful.  The numbers doubled and doubled and doubled again until the spearhead became the most dynamic meeting of the week."

As Dye says, "prayer is relationship and communication is as vital in our relationship with God as it is in any other relationship we may have".

And, without a close relationship with the Lord, we will not see fruit as Jesus tells us in John 15.

Dye's church has had a big impact on the community around it.

That can happen everywhere people are led by the Spirit in prayer and action.