Friend Brian is writing some interesting stuff he’s entitled “Worship Invisible Dreams“. Commentary about traditional worship services, congregational life and small communities that will surely lead to more comments on his blog. I encourage you to go check it (and him) out.
And if you wanna come to Spain and serve Jesus in a significant place with wonderful people, consider Ibiza.
I wrote an article this week for the 24-7 Prayer Global Site.I think it’s pretty thought provoking and the stories involved are, to say the least, compelling. I am still very intrigued about the possibility of beginning to gather stories like these via audio and making them into a podcast. What happens throughout the 24-7 community on a local level is fascinating and could make for some excellent story-telling.At the moment, it’s just a dream. The only thing that we’re really lacking is some equipment. But if we had 3 tape recorders/mp3 recorders with quality external microphones, a Mac workstation and a couple more studio mics, we could put together something really interesting.
We hosted 48 hours of prayer in our shopfront this past weekend. I think it went well. It was stretching at times, but I think we all took advantage of the time to be able to pray and focus on God.We also had a great time getting everything ready this past week.We had a community work day on Sunday (pictures to follow). Then a few of us spent a lot of time down there throughout the week putting on the finishing touches.We ended up having the big front part of it covered in paper and offered different focuses (the world, Europe, Spain, Sevilla, Triburbana). Then in between we had a cross/communion station and a back bit for praying for specific friends and family. Hope to get some pictures of the weekend up somewhere at some point.A couple of mission teams from the US also participated. I hope they had a good time. I introduced them to the place and to 24-7 Prayer, but that was about all that I saw of them.We still don’t have electricity or water (good motives for prayer?) in the shopfront, but who needs those two things to pray, right?We’ll see what comes of it in the near future.I might post some more thoughts here if I feel a real urge to. I’ll probably also talk about it a little bit more in our next newsletter. If you haven’t already, you should sign up!
Some of you guys know that I’m taking responsibility for the 24-7 prayer website as of next month. I’ve got a lot of vision, plans and passion for making the current site work and work well. I’m also excited about redeveloping the site in the near future to make it more suited to building communities across the world and resourcing the movement in its actual form.
What I need from a few people is a little testing of the website. If you have never visited the site, you are a prime candidate. If you have visited the site, but haven’t looked around much, you are a good candidate too. This will seriously only take you about 20 minutes. And there are prizes involved. Here’s what I’d like you to do:
1. Register as a user of the site
2. Find out what 24-7 prayer is. Give me a summary of what you found out.
3. Try to register a prayer room (don’t actually do it, but just try and find how to do it).
4. Try to find 24-7 prayer activitists/communities/prayer rooms near you.
5. Please rate your experience of each. Was it easy? Why? Was it hard? What made it hard?
Send emails to me: jonah dot bailey at 24-7prayer dot com. In the subject line, write “24-7 website survey- gimme some candy”
Here is where the prizes comes in. The first person to jump through the hoops and send me an email which gives adequate answers to the five questions above will get a free 24-7 t-shirt of your choosing. I’ll even mail it to you for free.
But wait! The prizes don’t stop there. If I actually get more than one response, I’ll have to judge a best entry. I am the one and only arbiter, the buck stops here, no appeals. But if I deem your answer the most worthy from amongst the rest, you will get the huge privilege of receiving a music compilation CD from myself and a few of my friends. It will be a wicked mix and we guarantee very nice cover art. Definitely better than the T-shirt.
I’m going to give this a one month deadline. Show me some love folks!
There has actually been so much already written on this subject by different bloggers that I feel loathe to put out the effort to tell the stories that they have already so effectively told. For now, here’s a list of the links I’ve been able to find chronicling this years gatherings:
Explanation of what these two gatherings were meant to be here, courtesy of Toggers and the 24-7 UK crew.
Wardy’s take on the Roundtable here and here.
::–> Honestly guys, Shmuel did a majority of the work on the presentation. I watched and learned- a ton. Working with him really helped me get clear in my head some of the structural changes we are making this year. There is a long road to walk until we get it right, but we’ll get there.
Togger’s take on the entire week here. Lots and lots of links and pics.
Adrian gives us the irish perspective here and here.
And even though he never got around to really saying anything on his blog about the Roundtable and ILG, I’ll throw a link in here to Brian’s blog. He’s pictured above, bald guy. Such good entertainment value. I know its your life Brian (if you’re reading this), but you are so gosh darned interesting.
The first couple days of our time here in Germany have gone really well. Although it has rained a lot and been quite cold at night, camping has been made pretty enjoyable by sun and nice daytime temperatures.
Everytime I come together with the 24-7 crowd from across the globe, I am more convinced that God is real and he is definitely up to something. We all live in different parts of this chaotic world, have very different cultures and backgrounds and yet there is some sort of order in the happenings of each of our lives. It would seem that in some instances,God is doing things in all of our lives that are really similar. In other ways, we are all at different places in our journeys through life but there is such syncronicity amongst us. When one person flounders, another is at just the point where they have overcome what the other is struggling with and is able to led a hand. I guess this is just the reality of God in us working through us in one another’s lives.
The camp that we are at is not entirely able to subsist by hosting groups and conferences. The make ends meet by farming apples. The funny thing is that they have all sorts of products derived from apples: apple juice, apple sauce, plain old apples and even apple chips (crisps)! I’ll try and snap a pic of a bag of them. They’re actually really good, but amazingly addictive. Thr other problem is that you eat about 3 bags of them and then don’t pee for a week (apples are a natural astringent, dried appes moreso and 3 bags is probably equal to a bushel!).