Are You Listening

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd sang: "You are only coming through in waves, your lips move, but I can't hear what you are saying"


One of the biggest things we do is listen, people don't always feel heard. We try really hard to listen, theres a lot of background noise and a lot going on and sometimes it can take all your concentration to stay focussed, mix that with drunken accents and it is a real challenge.


James the brother of Jesus said: "My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak....."


We don't live in a culture that is quick to listen.


David said in Psalm 40: "I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry"


I am glad that God hears us.

I once heard someone say that "the number one leadership skill is listening" I agree.

Jump Right In

I was mentored by a guy who said "He who hesitates has lost"  I like that

I have been listening to the Eminem song "Lose Yourself" from the film 8 mile, I think Eminem is a poet of some note.

The opening line of the song is this: 

"Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity,
to sieze everything you ever wanted,
one moment,
would you capture it,
or just let it slip"

There is another similar quote in Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar, Act 4 scene 3:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted all the voyages of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

They are both saying the same thing.

Maybe prophetically they are telling us something about moments in time. Those moments where we hesitate when we should really jump in.  Those moments were we find fear replacing our desire to risk, to live, to embrace the moment and go for it.


Ask yourself "Whats the worst that could happen?" remind yourself "you only live once" think to yourself "How would I feel in a years time if I didn't do this?"


Life's for living, not for waiting.


Jump right in.

Book Munch

I see a few people out there have been trying to read a book a week or something like that so thought I would pop up what I have read this year so far.

Mad Bad and Dangerous to Know Ranulph Fiennes

Enjoyable read, although determined explorers can be a little self absorbed, enjoyed reading about persistence and dogged determination.

Tribes Seth Godin

Interesting book, very well written, found it helpful when thinking about 24-7prayer and other movements.

The Making of Pink Floyd the Wall Gerald Scarfe

One of my favourite albums of all time, great book fantastic art work and great behind the scenes insights.

The Arabs a History Eugene Rogan

Bought this on the way back from Dubai, very comprehensive although I felt it didn't deal so well with earlier history.

Mark The Daily Study Bible  William Barclay


I am trying to read mark every few weeks this year and found Barclays knowledge and thoughts on this wonderful book extremely helpful.

The Knowledge of The Holy AW Tozer

Excellent for giving you a sense of Gods greatness and His majesty, timeless truths excellently explained.

Voices of Dunkirk Joshua Levine

First hand accounts of the retreat and evacuation from Dunkirk, I love history especially first person details. Engrossing and thorough.

Soul Salsa Leornard Sweet

Didn't like this book, Sweet trying to hard to be post modern.

Six Wives The Queens of Henry VIII David Starkey

At over 750 pages my most challenging read to date, it's good to understand where we came from and the various influences on our nation. I love history.

Prayer the Real Battle Brother Andrew

Wonderful short book, I think this should be pushed out to prayer networks around the world, I am getting copies for our entire team. You could read it in two hours.

Pray in the Spirit A.Wallis

Just a personal read as I want to be more sensitive to the spirits leading in prayer, thought I would give this a whirl as Mr Wallis book on fasting "A chosen fast" is the best I have read on the subject.

Celtic Saints, Passionate Wanderers Elizabeth Rees

You've got to love the celts.

Life and Laughing Michael McIntyre

Funny book, hardly a biography but a nice little chuckle of a read.

Community 101 Gilbert Bilezikian

Love this book was prompted to re-read it because of his excellent chapters on oneness and the role of women in leadership.


Current books

I'll let you know how I get on with these next two.

Approaching God Lisa Repko Borden
Love Wins  Rob Bell

Poured Out

In 2 Timothy 4 Paul said "for I am already being poured out like a drink offering"

I sometimes wonder if I am really pouring myself out or just dribbling!

Just got in from the streets, it was a quiet night but only in terms of drunken action. We had loads of great conversations and a number of people wanted prayer on the streets.

It takes effort, I'll be honest and say that I felt drained tonight before we went out, I almost pulled a sicky. Sometimes I feel the weight of our 7th summer stretching out before us and feel daunted by it. Knowing what we will see and experience is exciting but also challenging. I want my heart to remain soft but sometimes it's just a tired heart. Don't get me wrong I am excited and do live with anticipation and hope, I am also positive about the summer, you just have these little moments.

We do have to remind ourselves that we will experience opposition and it comes in all shapes and sizes, sometimes it can be lethargy, sometimes self pity, sometimes illness, sometimes hardness. You just have to be on your guard.

I still want to pour myself out.

Be the prayer, the new vomit van

Well here is the new vomit van, the only disturbing thing about it is the slightly effeminate ankle sticking out from under the door!

I love that line in Exodus, where God says to Moses "what have you got in your hand?" when we first started to spot drunks we prayed and I feel that is what God said to us. All we had was our normal cars, so we used them to pick people up.

We noticed the mess and then became the answer to our own prayer. Be careful how you pray.

Then of course someone else became the answer to our prayers by donating money for the first van and then when it broke down someone else stepped up to the mark and donated money that we could keep going. It's funny but they in many ways became the prayer.  I love that the church is so wide and that someone sitting at home in another country can become the prayer and by doing so they buy us a van that enables lives to be saved on the streets. In the last 2 weeks we have already got about 6 people home and we know that this will increase.

One last thought on being the prayer: Don't pray if you don't expect it to change your life, don't pray for your community if you are not willing to be led out of your comfort zone into your community, it can sound harsh but I am convinced that if you take your prayer life seriously you cannot help but become the prayer.

Persistence and Perseverance

We live in an instant world. 

I want to change the channel on my TV I hit the button it happens, I want to book a flight I do it, I want to buy a book I can find it in seconds, I wait for more than 3 minutes for my coffee at Starbucks and I am stressing, if a web page takes more than 1 minute to load I am tapping my fingers and thinking about going elsewhere, I can take a photo and everyone can see it in minutes, we receive live news updates and events streaming from anywhere in the world almost as instantly as stuff happens.

We live in a culture of immediacy. 

Freddy Mercury once sang "I want it all, I want it all and I want it now". Has this culture of immediacy permeated the church? I am pretty sure it has. Sometimes in subtle ways other times in blatantly overt ways.

I believe immediacy affects discipleship, it affects our worship, it affects our acts of service and at a very deep level it affects our prayer lives.

The persevering prayer and the persistent prayer are one of the hardest prayers to keep going. Year after year here in Ibiza, even night after night I pray repetitive prayers, sometimes I find it very hard. Yet I understand that I need to keep going. I sometimes struggle when you get people on a two week team here in Ibiza and after the 1st week they will say "I don't know what to pray anymore" I understand where they are coming from but normally just encourage them to pray the same prayer again. There is power in repetition.

We did not have a single connection with a prostitute here for 4 years, but we kept praying. We have been wanting to develop a Spanish speaking community mixed with an international community for 7 years, it only started this year and it's only been happening for 7 weeks, but we kept praying.

If we don't learn to grow in long persistent and persevering prayer we will not grow in certain areas of our lives. We will be conformed to the pattern of this world and live with only the immediate in mind.

Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, there is a race marked out for you you need to run it with perseverance. There is a race in prayer that is marked out for you, sometimes that race will be a sprint but often it will be a marathon. We need to persevere in prayer, we need to not give up, to keep knocking.

I believe that being part of a community is one of the greatest helps to persevering persistent prayer, we need people to stand with us and encourage us not to give up, to keep running, to keep knocking.

So please don't give up, keep running, keep knocking.

Breathing in and Breathing out

In the book Punk Monk Pete Greig writes a lovely chapter on The ancient art of breathing.

He says this: "Life begins by breathing in, but unless we breathe out, we die! The primary call, as we have seen, is to withdraw in prayer, but we are also commanded to go out from that place of intimacy in order to advance the kingdom of heaven"


How we liken our work out on the streets at night or in general is a rhythm of "breathing in and breathing out" we breathe in whilst in the prayer room and then breathe out on the streets. We spend an hour breathing in and then an hour walking the streets, we come back and spend another hour breathing and then go out for another hour on the street, this is the rhythm of our work here. We split our team in two, so that we have this constant rhythm happening, whilst half the team is out half the team is in!


Pete also says:

“we must not fail to inhale the breath of God (by which we were created and without which we die) through disciplined prayer and meditation upon Scripture. And having inhaled God’s breath, we may

breathe out His life in loving mission, acts of mercy, celebratory worship and generous hospitality.” 

“balance the inward breath of prayer with the outward breath of social engagement”

It can almost seem transactional, but I think it is a little more than that, a guy I know called Adrian Stark Ordish wrote this in his recent essay on prayer and mission:

"Of course, no metaphor will be entirely adequate. The tradition of apophatic, or negative, theology is a reminder that human language and concepts are prone to failure when confronted with the majesty and otherness of God. This must be considered when devising metaphors in the Christian life, or criticising them. It is best to focus on what is right about the metaphor, what can be learned from it, without forgetting that it must, of necessity, be wrong in many ways. As has been discussed, the breathing metaphor has positive, helpful features.

Another strategy to alleviate some of the problems of the inadequacies of all metaphors is to provide more than one, in the hope that they illuminate various facets of the truth. To this end, another metaphor for the connection between prayer and mission is the making of a magnetic compass. A compass can be made by taking a needle, stroking it repeatedly with a magnet, then floating it in water on a piece of cork. The needle will then point towards magnetic north. In this metaphor, the needle is a person. 

God is magnetic north (or possibly magnetism itself). The stroking of the needle with a magnet is the relationship of the person with God – prayer. The more the needle is stroked, the more it is aligned with the magnet. The more a person engages in prayer, the more aligned with God and His purposes they are. Once the needle is aligned, it will point north. Once the person is aligned they will point in God’s direction, become attuned to His will. 

This means they will come to share in His mission. Over time, the needle becomes demagnetised and ceases to point north. 

Similarly, the person who stops praying will lose their alignment with God and therefore eventually lose the missional attitude; the relationship of prayer must be continued."

I agree I think that what we do is so much more than a transitional approach, it is bout alignment, I believe that almost by default a praying person will become missional.

First use

Week 2 of being out on the streets, tonight we saw our first bit of vomit van action. Thankfully the guy vomited before he got in the van, which tends to give you a little window of clarity and you get them home as quickly as possible.

Tonight it was two 18 year old lads who had been at the vodka cocktails.

Will post some more on prayer and mission tomorrow, just a little bit tired right now.

A little something for the weekend

Brian from Tales of the Unexpected on Vimeo.

History and Haunting

A number of years ago we had the privilege of listening to the wisdom of wonderful man called Ken McCreavy, Ken passed away last year which was very sad.

However one of the statements that Ken made really sticks in mind and helps us as we look at prayer and mission. Ken said "For every history that is seen there is always a secret history, a history that is unseen" I really liked that. He said that for every revival that breaks out there is always a church or leader who goes down in history as the centre to travel to or the leader of the moment. Behind all of these there were probably people who prayed for years for break through in their town, or some ladies who prayed faithfully that God would bless and anoint their leader. For every history that is seen there is a secret unseen history.

We have it here, I got to baptise a guy, 24-7 prayer got to befriend him, someone got to pray the prayer of repentance with him, but his mother had prayed for him all his life! For every story that is told there is another story that we don't see.

I love the fact that as we walk the streets and pray with people we get to be involved in their secret history.

A friend of mine in the 80's was in Amsterdam smoking weed with his girlfriend, they stopped to listen to a band play, whilst they listened a guy approached them told  and them the band was a christian band and offered to pray for them. They were very reticent and at first they refused, he persisted and they eventually let him pray for them. He prayed and they left. 6 months later through a whole set of circumstances they gave their lives to Jesus and still follow him to this day. The guy who prayed for them knows nothing of this, yet he is involved in their secret history.

We live in a results driven world, if we don't see results we can feel that we have failed. Yet so often prayer is the long haul, or prayer is the secret place. When we pray with people on the streets we get the opportunity to become involved in their secret history.

We get their name, we take it back to the prayer room we start to pray for them we get involved in their secret history. This is also where haunting comes into it!!!!

In Ephesians 4:27 Paul says "do not give the devil a foothold" 


I believe that every time someone agrees to let you pray for them they give God a foothold. 


Once we have prayed with someone we get really on it, we pray that God would haunt them, that they would meet people who are christians, that friends would find faith, that people at work would talk to them about the Lord, that they would have dreams about Jesus, that they would start to ask questions about their eternal security, that they would find a strange interest in the bible, that they would start to see God in nature, that they would want to visit as church, basically that God would haunt them. They have given him a foothold, their was a chink in their armour of resistance the minute they agreed for you to pray with them. We pray that chink would widen and they would invite Him in. 


We get involved in their secret history and ask God to haunt them. 

Connect and Communicate

This is starting to take shape as a little prayer and mission series, which is good.

As we walk the streets at night our prayer before we leave is that we connect and communicate. Here's a thought: all the suddenly stuff, the supernatural stuff dare I even say the treasure hunting has a place in our lives but, and I use this "but" carefully, could it bypass the need to develop connections with people and build relationships with them?

Do we hide behind the supernatural as a pose to putting in the ground work of building relationship? I give you a prophetic word or word of knowledge therefore I get to speak intimately into your life without really knowing you! Can prophecy be a bypass to intimacy?

I believe that supernatural revelation is a God given gift that does make evangelism more effective, I don't doubt that for one moment.

I want to connect and communicate with people and sometimes that is a long haul relational deal, in fact I believe that most times it is long haul relational over instant supernatural. We go out we meet people we try to build relationships with them. We connect and communicate.

My prayer is often that we make a connection, that we communicate the love of God to whomever we meet. If they are only around for the short term probably the supernatural works as an instant hit. If it's long term, sure the supernatural can unlock a door, but the reality is that we need to build relationships with people. Relationships don't happen quickly.

One of the guys who got saved out here, was loved into the kingdom over 5 years by a variety of people who built relationships with him. He was also prayed into the kingdom by his mother and family, the end result was supernatural transformation of his life but it came through the effective connection and communication of the love of God over a long period of time.

Connect and communicate.

Blessing not Selling

Yesterday I wrote about quantity leading to quality. Another part of our philosophy is "blessing not selling" I would love to claim this pithy little phrase as my own but unfortunately it belongs to someone else.

Before we left for Ibiza we spent a little bit of time with a chap called Floyd McClung he said a number of inspiring things to us and gave us some really good tips and advice. This phrase stood out the most; he said "concentrate on blessing not selling" we really took it to heart and we have successfully adopted it and used it with all our teams ever since.

I don't need to sell Jesus, I need to bless my community, I need to be kind. Gods great kindness leads us to repentance. We want to be incredibly kind, we want to bless, assist, love, help, care for, show compassion, pray with, listen to, hug and generally bless people. We then trust that they see God in this.

Of course we do enter into discourses, and realise that most people do come to faith when someone actually verbally shares the gospel, but that moment is normally the tip of the ice berg that people have arrived at through a whole load of other experiences.

We once had a team member get so involved in an argument with a worker in the west end, that the worker said "will you just f**king shut up and listen to me" he got angry with our guy, and our guy had forgot the motto of blessing not selling.


In his eagerness to convince someone of the truth he had forgotten to be the truth. He needed to relax trust the Holy Spirit and allow the truth to shine through him. He had boiled his evangelism down to an argument, a head discussion (which I know works in some situations) when really he should have blessed and shown love.

So if you are trying to impact your community with the Love of Christ concentrate on blessing not selling. As we have done this over the years I have had hundreds of beautiful conversations and wonderful holy spirit led chats, the kind that many street evangelists would love to have. These moments didn't come from me shouting "turn or burn" or giving out tracts that said "you won't be dancing like this in hell" they came and continue to come as we have concentrated on blessing not selling.

Thank you Mr McClung

Quantity and Quality

First night out on the street last night. One of the things we tell all our teams is the importance of quantity time which inevitably will lead to quality moments.

It goes like this: If I want to have quality time with my sons I can try and schedule it in but often that doesn't work, moods are wrong, people are distracted, they have other stuff on their agenda, etc.. But if I spend quantity time with my sons in the midst of that I have quality moments.

When we read the book of Acts or the gospels we read about the quality moments. There is a lot of quantity time spent in between these quality moments that we just don't read about. Primarily because they would be boring! The book of Acts is basically a book of highlights, a collection of quality moments.

I am pretty sure this is the same for most of us whose job it is to communicate stories, we don't tell the boring ones. We talk about our quality moments, we don't always emphasise the quantity time time that led to those quality moments, we need to! We don't talk about the nights when nothing happens, Luke didn't write many chapters about the apostle Paul getting up and making a tent, having some lunch doing a bit of reading then going to bed. He gave us the best bits.

Like wise our work here is about investing quantity time walking the streets and hanging out with people then in the midst of that we have quality moments.

If you give the quantity the quality will come.

Break Over

That was a nice unplanned break, just spent a bit of time getting my focus sorted for the season ahead so took a little break.

We have just had a prayer team out for 6 days they were excellent and it was a real blessing to have them help us in getting ourselves prepared and geared up for the summer.

Tonight will be our first night out on the street and our centre opens in about 2 hours for the first time this year. Having done this a few times now, we are pretty sure it is going to be a quiet week as all our first weeks normally are. I like the way the seasons builds and you don't just plunge into the madness.

Our team here is taking shape, we already have 5 people who are here for the summer long and will be expecting 2 more in 2 weeks. Our summer long team is wonderfully large. The only slight frustration is that  Poppy who is moving out here for 3 years, has yet to receive her visa!! Hopefully it will arrive soon, if you're the praying kind please pray that this happens quickly.

Another thing that has been happening here for about 6 weeks is our little growing community here on the island made up of Spanish and British guys. We are really trying to develop a long term resident native community here on the island and it's going great. There's about 12 of us so far, but I have the feeling it will grow.

We meet every Sunday night and run a bi-lingual service, it's challenging but seems to be working, anyway church is so much more than a service so we are hoping that as a community we really grow.

Life is good