UK "Prayer Temperature" Heating Up; Welsh Man Starts Community "Prayer Diary"
"Several years back I felt the Lord say that He wanted prayer for every person, in every place, for every issue, every moment of the day. Around 60% of the churches in the UK don't have a weekly prayer meeting. [The Community Prayer Diary] encourages people once a year to go and find out who the local chief of police is and your fire officer and your local doctor and so on and then write their names in [the diary] and then pray for them throughout the year."
(Stoke-on-Trent , England)—United Christian Broadcaster's recently appointed prayer mobilizer Carl Brettle has an ambitious goal to see prayer impact the entire population of the UK on every challenging issue facing the country today.
Speaking to me at the UCB broadcasting centre in Stoke-on-Trent, one of the UK's largest Christian media facilities, this humble gently spoken Welshman told me about this huge vision God has given him to mobilize prayer: "I came to UCB with a specific life goal in mind. Several years back I felt the Lord say that He wanted prayer for every person, in every place, for every issue, every moment of the day.
"I'm five years in trying to unpack that now and what I've realized after significant research, along with some of my colleagues, is that around 60% of the churches in the UK don't have a weekly prayer meeting. We also then discovered that although it says in Scripture pray for those in authority, in general life that's what gets done the least."
Carl explains that in response to a lack of Christians praying, UCB produced a Community Prayer Diary: "This brochure encourages people once a year to go and find out who the local chief of police is and your fire officer and your local doctor and so on and then write their names in and then pray for them throughout the year. With UCB's help we managed last year to distribute 40,000 of those booklets and there's space for 150 names per book.
"This meant if everyone used these and that's a big if, 5.5 million people in places of authority would get prayed for every week. So it's wrapping up those kinds of ideas and obviously with UCB being a media ministry and engaging with so many churches and so many people because of our daily devotional booklet the Word For Today, we want to investigate how we can involve prayer as a fundamental in everything we do.
"So we will be launching later this year a new publication called Prayer For You Today, which is a Word For You Today companion edition. It will also be free, but it'll focus on prayer for every issue in society, teaching on prayer, comment on prayer, Biblical verses for prayer for all kinds of needs that you may have. Our hope is that kind of publication will raise the awareness of needing to pray both within our private lives and within church life and we've got to be honest."
As the armed forces face some extremely challenging times serving in places like Afghanistan and Iraq , UCB launched a dedicated prayer line for service personnel.
"The really exciting thing is from May 1st, we have gone live on the military's own phone network. Anywhere in the world now service personnel can dial a short code to get into prayer line from wherever they are 24 hours a day and it's free. So we've been telling our volunteers that operate prayer line not to be surprised if they get a frantic phone call from a soldier who's seen a colleague wounded or even killed and is trying to come to terms with that and is seeking prayer. So that's a really good service. It makes you feel like you're doing something to repay the indebtedness of the service of the armed personnel."
Carl says when talk first began of the financial crisis the amount of calls to their prayer line ministry rose significantly: "Back in October the word recession was used for the first time by UK prime minister Gordon Brown and then the media picked it up and it was splattered all over the papers and on every television report. During that first week we saw a 50% increase on calls related to debt problems and job security. So our prayer line is a little bit like putting your finger on the pulse of the nation. It was as immediate as that. We were flabbergasted that there was that sharp change in numbers. So we're trying to get to a place where if we get that result in this week's prayer line we're trying then to run radio shows or prayers on the radio, which actually minister to the immediate needs of the nation as it's happening."
During the last decade a number of major prayer initiatives have exploded in the UK including the 24/7 prayer movement and one million hours of prayer in Manchester . Carl believes this is in preparation for some major challenges ahead: "I've been watching this for 7 or 8 years now and when I first got involved in the prayer scene in the UK there wasn't a great amount of prayer going on. You wouldn't get churches across the city or a town getting together for prayer at that moment in time. You do see that now. I think it's a great opportunity. The last 7 or 8 years has seen an unprecedented amount of prayer and at the same time the prayer temperature of the nation has increased.
"But at the same time the opposition to the Christian message and faith has increased, particularly in terms of what's going through parliament where religious freedom is being questioned. You can see there's going to be a showdown somewhere along the line and I hope and pray that the church of Christ in the UK will be alive and kicking enough in a prayer sense to be ready for that battle however it's fought."
