I’m sitting in Pete Greig’s lounge and my brain is running at 100mph. The International Team I’m part of are taking two days to prepare for 24-7’s Round Table, the one time in the year when 24-7 Leaders gather Internationally to steer the movement for the coming year…
We’re getting to a stage where 24-7 is growing faster than we can keep up with and we’re asking questions about what our aims are and how do we build an effetive skeleton to acheive them? Are we building and/or blessing? Do we need to separate them? How do we get organised without squeezing the life out of what we’re doing.
What is 24-7 here for? What is that God has asked us to achieve? How has he asked us to live? If prayer rooms aren’t there to equip us to pray in our everyday lives then they’re just the latest WWJD bracelets. If mission doesn’t move from a team experience to a mind set then we won’t change the world, we’ll become the Christian equivalent to 18s – 30s holidays. What's so important about unity? Why do we bother to work with people who though believe in the same Christ dissagree about how to follow him. Why is it worth the effort of conflicting ideas or cultures? Because diversity is beautiful. Because if you only listen to people you know you already agree with then you’ll never grow. Because we’re related even if we do have family dramas.
I am part of 24-7 Prayer because it is the one community I feel challenges me to take my faith seriously. I need to pray, and I need to do it everyday. I need to grasp the imperativeness of mission, do I truly want Jesus to come back in my lifetime or am I just looking for comfort and fulfilment.
24-7 is a unique community. I love it. I’ve found the transition from grass roots to grass roots + administrative and structural responsibility a stretch. "The vision" purports that we laugh at our nine to five little prisons, but the actually way I serve the movement is nine-to-five in front of a computor. I have to consiously make it more. I don’t have a Boiler Room, sometimes I feel like there’s a chasm between my Chi community and the values I so prize. No criticism more a dislocation.
As we look at organisation, community, leadership and empowerment I love that I’m in a room of guys that are desperately trying to do what God wants and honour the people working with us. There’s no sense of control here. There’s no need to keep our positions. Each of us would resign from our “role” on the International team tomorrow if it would release resources more effectively.
We really are sitting before God and asking how we can best do what he’s asked. We’re spanning the breadth of this movement the spiritual and the practical and trying to find the best way to empower the Round Table and the wider movement to listen to God and reshape us.
I’m scared and excited and feel woefully under prepared… xc