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Red Moon Rising: Rediscover the Power of Prayer
Red Moon Rising: Rediscover the Power of Prayer
Red Moon Rising: Rediscover the Power of Prayer
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Red Moon Rising: Rediscover the Power of Prayer

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From the Upper Room of Pentecost to Azusa Street in Los Angeles, God has used prayer movements throughout history to change the world. Over fifteen years ago, a group of students gathered for a prayer vigil in Chichester, England—and the prayers they started haven’t stopped. Out of that first meeting came 24-7 Prayer: an international movement of prayer, mission, and justice that has reached Chinese underground churches, Indian slums, Papua New Guinea jungles, ancient English cathedrals, and even a brewery in Missouri.

Red Moon Rising is the story of how that movement continues today—and how each of us can be a part of the miracles God is doing through a new generation.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherDavid C Cook
Release dateMay 1, 2015
ISBN9780781412872
Red Moon Rising: Rediscover the Power of Prayer
Author

Pete Greig

Pete Greig cofounded and champions the 24-7 Prayer movement, which has reached more than half the nations on earth. He is a pastor at Emmaus Rd. in Guildford, England, and has written a number of bestselling books, including Red Moon Rising, Dirty Glory, and How to Pray.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    AMAZING book... if you're interested in prayer or seeing how God's moving in exciting new ways, you have to read this. It's a book of stories... people's experiences... but most importantly, how God's moving. How He's becoming REAL and RELEVANT to people's everyday lives.

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Red Moon Rising - Pete Greig

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Pete Greig champions the 24-7 Prayer movement and leads Emmaus Rd, a ‘Boiler Room’ community in Guildford, England, where he lives with his wife, Sammy, and their two sons. Pete also serves as a director for HTB, a large Anglican church in London, and for Alpha, the ten-week introduction to Christianity which has reached more than 24 million people. He is an associate tutor at St Mellitus Theological College and has authored or co-authored a number of books, including God on Mute, The Vision and the Vow and Punk Monk.

Dave Roberts is a church planter, with a particular emphasis on France. He is known to many as a writer on prayer and revival, having co-authored The Grace Outpouring. He is married to Sharon and has two sons, Ben and Joel.

ABOUT 24-7 PRAYER

24-7 Prayer is an international movement of prayer, mission and justice, which began accidentally in 1999 and has grown virally to reach more than half the nations on earth. 24-7’s innovative approach to spirituality and culture has attracted the attention of the media from Rolling Stone to Reader’s Digest and was the subject of a specially commissioned Channel 4 television documentary. 24-7 prayer rooms have given rise to Boiler Rooms—a network of missional and monastic communities—and to many new ministries, including Prayer Spaces in Schools, 24-7 Ibiza, the Prayer Course and 24-7 podcasts which regularly reach number one on iTunes.

For all those who have ever done the 3 a.m. shift in a 24-7 prayer room and secretly found themselves wondering why.

And for all those spiritual parents and grandparents who have prayed for a fresh movement of the Spirit among young people. We reap where you have sown.

CONTENTS

About the Authors

About 24-7 Prayer

Foreword

Introduction to the 15th-Anniversary Edition

15th-Anniversary Edition: A Note to American Friends

1. ICANARMY

2. Shift Happens

3. Taking Jericho

4. Wild Goose Chase

5. Facing Frontiers

6. We Have Lift-Off

7. Viral

8. Holy Space

9. Red Moon Rising

10. Out of Control

11. The Vision

12. God of Small Things

13. Signs, Wonders and Red Bull

14. Pain

15. Threesixfive

16. When the Spirit Says ‘Come’

17. Ladies and Gentlemen, Church Has Left the Building

18. The Rainmaker

19. Third-Millennium Monasteries

20. In the Beginning …

Postscript

Journey Further

Discussion Guide for Small Groups

Case Study: A Week in the Life of a 24-7 Prayer Room

The Gospel of Prayer: Intimacy and Involvement

The Laus Perennis: 24-7 Prayer through the Ages

Living In Skin

The Moravians

Young People and the Purposes of God

Additional Resources

Notes

Extras

I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions. … The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood.

Acts 2:17, 20

FOREWORD

Bill & Beni Johnson

The first time I read Red Moon Rising, it was a breath of fresh air. I love how Pete Greig describes starting the movement ‘accidentally’, and his use of the arts in prayer not only changed my world but also opened up a whole new expression for many in our church. Together, we found a fresh liberty to express our hearts creatively to God.

We began running what our oldest son labeled ‘48 hops’ (forty-eight hours of prayer). Using the 24-7 model, we would worship and pray for forty-eight-hour blocks. Setting up different prayer stations with creative arts was a new concept, but it worked beautifully. On one occasion, an entire class of first-graders walked into the room. Their teacher sat them down on the floor and quietly instructed them on what was going on. She then had them lie on the floor and soak (rest) in the presence of the Holy Spirit for just a few minutes. Next, she told them that they could go to any prayer station they wanted. Many of them went to the art table to draw or paint. It was so exciting to see our little ones involved and enjoying this special moment. The Lord gave them very specific insights as they prayed creatively for the nations. It was both enjoyable and profound.

Reading this revised version of Red Moon Rising has been exciting. It’s reminded me of something surprising that happened here at Bethel in Redding several years ago. We have pre-service prayer before our Sunday-night meetings, and one night as we were praying, we noticed that there was a roadrunner with a lizard in its mouth standing outside the glass door. I’d never even heard of these birds living in our area because Redding is not a desert part of the country. But there it was, jumping at the glass as though it wanted to come inside. What is so strange is that for months it came to our prayer meetings in this manner. This roadrunner became a part of our life and, crazy as it seems, we sensed that God was trying to say something to us through its visits, and yet we just couldn’t quite figure out what. People began sending us all kinds of information about this unique bird, but none of it satisfied our quest to understand what God might be conveying to us.

Then one day a member of our maintenance crew was cleaning our upstairs room at the church and he came across the roadrunner, which had finally made its way into the building. He knew the bird had been puzzling us, and so instead of trying to chase it out, he stopped to worship and pray, and this had a notable impact on the roadrunner. Eventually the maintenance man went down the stairway to the bottom floor, and the bird followed him. Reaching the hallway, someone stepped out of a room and startled the bird, causing it to take off flying down the hallway straight into a window, and it broke its neck. It was so sad to see this beloved bird, which had been with us for months, dead on the floor. It may seem silly, but we tried to raise that roadrunner from the dead. It didn’t work. I went to my office and asked the Lord what was up. He spoke rather clearly: ‘If what I’m bringing into the house doesn’t have a way of being released from the house, it will die in the house.’

It was a very direct warning because at that time many signs, wonders and miracles were taking place within the walls of the church building, but God was telling us to release out to our city and to the wider world the blessings he’d brought into our house. The miracles weren’t just for us. God had been speaking to us through that bird over a period of months, and we have sought to obey this message ever since. In fact, these days there are more miracles and healings outside our walls than there are inside.

Red Moon Rising presents the raw power of a loving God, and yet it also shows that there can still be pain in our everyday lives. God brings his presence ‘into the house’, and we are called to release it back out into the world or the blessing will die. Our world is waiting for us to love and show God’s heart through his powerful presence. As you read Red Moon Rising, you will be blessed and challenged to go into all the world and to let God shine in creative ways. We must take out into the world what we hear and receive from him in that place of prayer.

Thank you, Pete, for being who you are—an open vessel who lives in the real world and loves well.

Pastor Bill and Beni Johnson

Bethel Church, Redding, California

INTRODUCTION TO THE 15TH-ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Earlier today, just as I was wondering how to introduce this new, updated edition of Red Moon Rising, I saw a tweet about a man who’s reading the original version in London’s infamous Brixton prison. Five other prisoners apparently read the same well-thumbed copy before him, and are now praying together regularly as a result. It never fails to surprise me how God continues to use this simple book, written more than a decade ago about a movement which began accidentally at the turn of the millennium.

That tweet got me thinking about how wonderful it would be if the world’s prisons could become houses of prayer for the nations. Wouldn’t it be just like Jesus to liberate prisoners to change the destiny of nations without even leaving their cells? God has been surprising us with exciting new possibilities like this for fifteen years. Along the way we’ve discovered that prayer—the spiritual discipline which plagues us all with boredom and guilt—is in fact a laboratory of new possibilities, a launch pad for the wildest and most preposterous of dreams. Again and again, night after night, in twelve thousand prayer rooms from the streets of San Antonia to the slums of New Delhi, we’ve encountered God and experienced the reality that he ‘is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us’ (Eph. 3:20).

That’s actually the verse I chose to conclude the original version of this book, and here I am using it at the start of this revised edition a decade later. Why? Because as that tweet this morning shows, God is still doing ‘immeasurably more’ than we could possibly have asked or imagined in that first, unsuspecting prayer room way back in 1999—before Facebook, before Candy Crush, before Justin Bieber started shaving.

When I wrote Red Moon Rising, I was pretty sure that no one except my mum would ever read it. Who buys a book about a bunch of nobodies deciding to pray a lot? As a pitch, it’s not exactly blockbuster material. But somehow these stories took on a life of their own. My mum turned out not to be the only reader, and she once came across a Czech-language edition in a remote country church. My friend Lucy found Red Moon Rising abandoned in a Hong Kong airport lounge. And today it’s apparently being passed around Brixton prison. This is bewildering to me because, in the words of my forthright New Zealand friend Andrew Jones (aka The Tall Skinny Kiwi), ‘It’s not actually that well written, Pete.’

I guess it must be God.

So here I am introducing the fifteenth-anniversary edition, and reflecting that maybe it caught on for two reasons. Firstly, it’s serendipity. God is calling his people to pray and Red Moon Rising got lucky—found itself surfing that particular wave.

Secondly, maybe it’s a zeitgeist thing, baby. Maybe my story is a lot of people’s story. We all want to change the world, and wonder how to do it. We want to experience the power of prayer and find it hard. Secretly we are weary of revival stories from other places in the world and other times in history, and long for something to happen today, in our lives, our friends, our churches and the streets where we dwell. We’re tired of a vicarious, recycled faith, and long to hear the voice of God for ourselves. We would like Christianity to be the kind of white-water adventure that we read about in the book of Acts; the kind of great adventure upon which you embark with friends and about which you will one day tell stories to your kids without boring them stupid. ‘Did I ever tell you, son, about the time God empowered me to upgrade my Volvo to a Toyota hybrid?’

People often sidle up to me to say that this book convinced them that if God could use someone as ordinary and boring as me, that he could almost certainly use them too. And then, more often than not—just before I can get offended—they tell me about some wild new thing they’re doing because of an encounter with God in a prayer room, or about a brain-frying answer to prayer they have experienced as a result. When I hear their stories, all I can do is grin and say ‘wow!’ because we did a simple little deal with God way back at the start: it’s entirely his problem if 24-7 fails; it’s entirely his glory if it doesn’t. The day we start taking credit for the fact that he answers prayer we are in deep, deep trouble.

Obviously, we can’t take credit for the miracles that have taken place and the new ministries that have been born in 24-7 prayer rooms. Birthing pools don’t make babies. It is intimacy with God, like intimacy with a member of the opposite sex, which creates new life. Soli Deo gloria. The 24-7 prayer room where the church was born two thousand years ago has long since disappeared, thank God. But the three thousand who were saved that day are with us still. And the church herself, born by the Spirit, the body of Christ for the glory of the Father, will never disappear.

RED MOON

According to both the prophet Joel and the apostle Peter, God’s heavenly logo for the days in which we live is the harvest moon, rising blood red and pregnant with possibilities. A red moon rises over every generation, awaiting the one who will finally fulfil Christ’s Great Commission to convey the gospel of the kingdom to every tribe and tongue. In this generation we are witnessing the Holy Spirit being poured out upon ten thousand upper rooms, mobilising young people onto the streets, intoxicated with vision. Sons and daughters are beginning to speak prophetically to the culture. Older generations continue to dream. And many people are crying out to be saved.

For two thousand years Christians have stared up at the harvest moon and expected the return of Jesus in their lifetimes. Whether or not you believe in his imminent appearance, we are all called to live with a sense of urgency. The apostle Peter puts it like this: ‘The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray’ (1 Pet. 4:7). Elsewhere Jesus says that before his return ‘this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations’ (Matt. 24:14). Has the gospel reached every tribe and tongue? Not yet! There are still cultures which have not had the opportunity to receive the good news of Jesus. Could it happen soon, in this generation? Definitely!

A big red moon rose in the winter sky above the nightclub here in Guildford, England, where we gathered to launch 24-7 Prayer in the year 2000. For us it was a sign, reminding us of Joel’s prophecy, Peter’s great Pentecostal sermon and the two-thousand-year relationship between prayer, proclamation, innovation and salvation.

Of course that red moon was just the start of the story. The trouble with genuine movements is that they keep moving—new things are always happening, and it can be tricky finding the time to write it all down. Fifteen years pursuing continual prayer, mission and justice has been the wildest ride of our lives. We’ve grown up a lot, laughed and wept a lot, spread into almost every denomination and more than half the nations on earth and morphed into a global family of missional and monastic Boiler Room communities.

Wherever you’re reading this now, in a prison, in a coffee shop, on a flight or even—lest we forget—in a church, my prayer for you is that these simple stories will defibrillate your soul. God has more in store for your life than anything you’ve so far experienced. He’s put this book in your hands because he’s calling you to obey unconditionally, to pray with all four chambers of your heart, and to fight with muscles you never knew you had.

It’s been fifteen years and a lot has changed, but I am still obsessively, dangerously and undeniably fascinated by Jesus. He is the vision. Always will be. No one and nothing else comes close.

C’mon!

Pete Greig

Guildford, England

@PeteGreig

15TH-ANNIVERSARY EDITION: A NOTE TO AMERICAN FRIENDS

Dear American friend,

My Colorado publishers have carefully weeded from the pages of this book all the befuddling English expressions, whilst retaining the ‘quirky’, old-world weirdness of the way I spell. Of course, this may well have been a terrible mistake. As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw observed, ‘England and America are two nations divided by a common language.’

When we lived on the great midwestern plains, we certainly encountered endless subtle, occasionally hilarious, cultural and linguistic differences between your version of English and ours. For instance, when you say ‘pants’, we hear ‘underwear’; when you talk about your ‘purse’, we picture a wallet; and when you say ‘football’, we assume you mean a game involving a foot as well as a ball. You say to-may-toe and we say to-mah-toe.

What else? Well, when you talk about falling on your fanny or introduce yourself as Randy, we hear something very different. And should you ever intercept a British person ‘popping out to smoke a fag’, they definitely, emphatically don’t mean they are going outside to shoot someone with a same-sex orientation. You don’t need to dial 911. Which is 999 for us anyway.

You give us Kanye, Frasier and 24. For these we are grateful and offer you, in return, Coldplay, Top Gear and Downton Abbey. We appreciate the fact that God has blessed you with Abraham Lincoln, perfect dentistry and Chuck E. Cheese, whilst giving us the lesser-known delights of haggis, cricket and the ultimate ability to make a decent cup of tea.

Over on our side of the pond, you’ll find that we are generally more relaxed about alcohol, socialism and royalty than the majority of our American cousins, but considerably more concerned about gun control, Halloween, and free health care.

For us the word route does not rhyme with doubt but with boot, toot and loot (blame the French). We also spell things differently, such as aluminium (notice that extra i?), colour and honour—for most of these offences you can also blame the French. We call diapers ‘nappies’, baby strollers are actually ‘prams’, sidewalks are ‘pavements’, the trunk of your car is the ‘boot’ of ours, a truck is really a ‘lorry’ and a highway is a ‘motorway’.

And while we’re on the subject of driving, we do it on the left for a very good reason: to ensure that our sword hands are free to attack approaching enemies (you are, as a nation, currently in grave danger from approaching knights).

God bless America and, while you’re at it, God save the Queen!

Pete

P.S. If you are Canadian, South African, Australian or from New Zealand, this—like most things in life—only half applies to you.

1

ICANARMY

(PORTUGAL, GERMANY)

To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

Karl Barth

On the spectacular cliffs of Cape St Vincent that night, I had no idea my life was about to change forever.

For days Nick and I had been hitchhiking west along the coast of the Portuguese Algarve, camping on clifftops, swigging local red wine from the bottle and cooking fish on an open fire. By day we would hit the beaches, often leaving our backpacks on the sand to plunge into the mirror-ball sea.

Having recently graduated from university in London, our futures stretched out before us like those long, straight, empty roads you see in photographs of Montana. We were tanned and dirty, the sun had bleached our tousled hair, and we were having the time of our lives.

After so many days hiking west with the ocean always on our left, it had been exciting to catch the first glimpse of sea to the right as well. Gradually the land had tapered to the point where I was standing, where a solitary lighthouse puts an exclamation mark on Europe, and two seas collide in rage.

There is something absolute about Cape St Vincent: its lunar landscape, the ceaseless pounding of the waves against nature’s vast battlements and even the black ravens circling majestically below as you look out to sea.

People have been drawn to this rocky peninsula for thousands of years. Bronze Age tribes buried their dead here and erected standing stones. In

AD

304, grieving monks brought the body of St Vincent the martyr here and, according to legend, the ravens first came here to guard his bones. The place took on the martyr’s name and became a destination for Christian and Muslim pilgrimage for centuries to come. The Romans quite simply thought it was the end of the world. Here, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, their maps ran out and their empire marched into the endless sea. It would be centuries before Europeans ‘discovered’ the Americas beyond the blue curve of that inscrutable horizon.

Nick and I had pitched our little green tent right on the cliffs of Cape St Vincent, laughing that we were to be the most southwesterly people in all of Europe for a night. But, unable to sleep, I climbed quietly out of the tent, leaving Nick gently snoring. A breathtaking sight greeted me: the vast, glowering ocean glimmering under an eternity of stars. It was like being lost in the branches of some colossal Christmas tree.

To the south of me the next great land mass was Africa. To the west it was America. But I turned and, with my back to the ocean, imagined Europe rolling away from my feet for ten thousand miles. From where I stood, the continent began with a handful of rocks and a small green tent, but beyond that I could imagine Portugal and Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany eventually falling into Russia, China and the Indian subcontinent.

Visualising nation after nation I raised my hands and began to pray out loud for each one by name. And that was when it happened. First my scalp began to tingle, and then an electric current pulsed down my spine, again and again, physically shaking my body. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I was afraid. I could hear a buzzing, clicking sound overhead, as if an electric pylon was short-circuiting. I wondered if I was being electrocuted, and it occurred to me that a clifftop at night is pretty much the worst place to start shaking violently. And then, as these strange sensations continued, I saw something. My eyes were open and I could ‘see’ with absolute clarity before me the different countries laid out like an atlas. And from each of these nations I watched as young people arose out of the page, crowds of them in every nation, a mysterious, faceless army silently awaiting orders.

I have no idea how long that vision lasted—it might have been minutes or much longer—but eventually I climbed into my sleeping bag, and with my head still spinning, I drifted into a deep sleep.

My life would never be the same.

Two years earlier, in the city of Leipzig in communist East Germany, a 13-year-old was looking around in amazement at all the candles and people crammed into St Nicholas Church to pray for peace. There were barricades in the streets outside, beatings and death threats from the authorities, and hundreds of armed police expecting a riot. Markus Lägel felt like a small part of something very big—anonymous and special, excited and nervous at the same time.

He glanced nervously at his father, a burly miner who worked in one of the open mines nearby. With his minimal wage supplemented cynically by daily bottles of vodka from the government, and with almost nothing to do after work but drink the stuff, Markus knew that his father belonged to a broken generation of men reduced to alcoholic dependency on their jobs.

And of course, it was especially hard to be a Christian under one of the most repressive regimes in the world. The ever-present fear of conflict with the West weighed heavily on everyone. Germany had become the front line in a Cold War stand-off between nuclear powers. The prevailing feeling was fear. So the pastor of Leipzig’s most dignified church, a man named Christian Führer, called people to pray for peace every Monday night. At the start there were often fewer than a dozen people huddled together in this cavernous Gothic barn where Johann Sebastian Bach had premiered some of his finest choral pieces.

But they had persevered and now, seven years later, Markus looked around in amazement at eight thousand people crammed into the church. Outside in the streets and in other churches there were as many as seventy thousand people—the largest impromptu demonstration ever witnessed in East Germany since it had been formed after the Second World War.

With so many people expressing their protest in prayer, the State was preparing for anarchy. In fact, they had threatened to shut the prayer rally down that very night, Monday, 9 October, adding ominously ‘with whatever means necessary’. Markus heard that doctors were setting up emergency clinics, expecting a bloodbath. On the way in he’d glimpsed shadowy figures on the rooftops with guns. It was terrifying. He studied the tiny flickering candle in his hand and thought about the tanks in the street outside. Surely this was crazy; attempting to fight military hardware with prayers? He looked up at his father, at the crowds cradling candles like stars, and for a moment their voices crescendoed. Yes, there was power in this too. Perhaps it was the authorities who were crazy to fight prayers with guns? One way or another, they would soon find out.

For those who never lived in its shadow, the demise of the Berlin Wall, which separated the communist east from the capitalist west for thirty years, may seem to have been inevitable. But for Markus Lägel and thousands like him who knew nothing but the concrete realities of communism, and were armed only with prayers, nothing seemed more inevitable than guns, tanks and vodka.

After about an hour the pastor led the congregation out onto the Augustusplatz. Still clutching their candles, they marched past the headquarters of the dreaded secret police, chanting ‘no violence’ and praying that it might be so.

Surprisingly the police never

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