Pete Greig founded 24-7 Prayer, an international, interdenominational movement of prayer and mission. He’s the author of Red Moon Rising and God on Mute and leads Emmaus Road church in Guildford, with his wife Sammy. Deputy editor Ruth Jackson spoke to Pete about prayer and his vision for young people
RJ: Why do you think prayer is so important for young people?
PG: Prayer is important for everyone. It’s like breathing, it just helps me with life. All the surveys tell us that everyone , whether or not they’re Christians, prays. Prayer is much bigger than the Church. 1.4 billion Muslims pray five times a day. There are about two billion Christians. Every roadside shrine and at the scene of every high school shooting, you see prayer. So, the question is not ‘should we pray’, but ‘how do we pray’? That’s where I think, as Christians, we’ve got the most amazing news: God hears our prayers, he loves us, he’s with us, he suffers with us and there is a miracle-working power to prayer, not just as a therapeutic technique for experiencing peace, but for actually changing reality.
Prayer is at the heart of not just what it means to be a Christian, but what it means to be human. Prayer, at its simplest, is asking God for help. At its best , prayer is conversation with God – listening as well as speaking. At its deepest, prayer is communion with God. It’s an awareness of God’s presence in which we walk and talk with him, sometimes even in silence. To know the presence of God is the most important thing.
We won’t always have to pray for the sick. We won’t always have to plant churches. Evangelism will come and go. About 95 per cent of what we do with our time is temporary. Jesus is coming back, but before the Fall we were called to walk and talk with God. One day in the new Earth, we will walk and talk with God. Prayer is eternal in a way that most of our Christian activity isn’t. So let’s prepare for the future. Let’s teach a generation how to change history through the bended knee. Let’s teach them how to practice the miracle-working power of God through prayer. Let’s teach them how to listen to God in prayer. Let’s teach them how to wrestle with God in prayer. We’re preparing them, not just for adulthood, but for eternity.
RJ: What would you say to a young person struggling with unanswered prayer?
PG: As youth pastors, let’s be honest about our disappointments and unanswered prayers. If we’re to be biblical, we must create a culture where people can share their pain and struggles, not just their glory stories. Let’s create a culture where we can live with questions and struggles, where we can come alongside people and grieve with them.
Being a youth worker is one of the hardest, most important and most undervalued jobs in the country
What I’d say to young people with regard to prayer is: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up. Don’t get too complicated. Just tell God what you’re feeling. Sometimes that’s going to be a lament, sometimes it will be rejoicing, sometimes it will be desperation. Sometimes we just have to persevere. It’s like stacking dominoes: you pray the same prayer you’ve prayed a thousand times before and then you pray it once and the whole lot comes down. It’s not because you’ve suddenly found the right technique, it’s just that you didn’t give up one prayer too soon.
RJ: Have you got any practical tips for youth workers who want to cultivate a culture of prayer within their youth groups?
PG: The most important thing with prayer is desire. When people are desperate, they pray. When people get a terminal diagnosis they don’t say, ‘I ought to pray about this but I can’t because I find prayer difficult’, they cry out to God. None of us have a prayer problem; we have a bit of a comfort problem.
Firstly, if there’s a crisis, use that as fuel for prayer and people will pray. Secondly, use good news as fuel for prayer. The apostle Paul says that faith comes through hearing. If you want to get people hungry for God in prayer, tell stories of answered prayer.
I guarantee that everyone reading this has experienced at least one miraculous answer to prayer. Tell that story. Find other people who can tell a story of healing or provision or God speaking in a remarkable way. In telling those stories, young people will want to have a go themselves as they’ll see that it works. Bill Johnson says that if you’ve only got one answered prayer story, tell it until you’ve got two. Don’t think, ‘we can’t tell it again because we already shared it five years ago’. The Bible doesn’t work like that – if there’s a good news story in the Bible, it doesn’t disappear once you’ve read it once, you can keep generating new perspective and new revelation from it. Tell stories of answered prayer and use crisis, pain and trouble as fuel for prayer.
RJ: The vision poem of 24-7 Prayer talks about a young army rising up who are radically set apart for Jesus. What does this mean for young people?
PG: We’re just starting to see the army now, so it’s the right time. We’ve just had the 15th birthday of 24-7 prayer. It was an absolute brain-mash moment to pack out one of the most iconic buildings in Europe: St Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna, with thousands of people dancing. There were Catholic bishops with their hands in the air, nuns weeping, Syrian Orthodox priests, young Salvation Army officers and all in the middle of the refugee crisis. It feels like we’re just beginning. This is the time that it’s all just starting.
It’s so important that we learn to pray. The world is moving too fast - we can’t prepare the future generation for what the world is going to look like. But what we can do is teach them to walk with God into it.
15 years ago, we gathered a bunch of young people to pray in a warehouse in a back street and now we’re in St Stephan’s Cathedral with the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury sending personal greetings, we’re working in over 100 nations with monastic communities on four continents. There is no human way we could have gone from one prayer room to this place, but God has done it. So the question is, what might he do next? All we ever did was stop trying to save the world and just tended to our relationship with God in prayer. He sneezed, the virus spread. So this is a key time for calling young people to pray because none of us really know what will happen next when they do so.
RJ: 24-7 Prayer have started prayer spaces in schools. Can you tell us a bit about that?
PG: It’s amazing. We’re seeing a lot of classrooms turned into prayer rooms and mostly in ‘normal’ schools. We actually find it harder to get into church schools. Ofsted love it and call it ‘cross-curricular experiential learning’! Atheist teachers think it’s a great model and then freak out when they find people encountering God and praying and weeping in classrooms. It’s growing exponentially. We’re in hundreds of schools in quite a lot of countries now. We just create interactive, experiential space in which people can talk to God in prayer.
We don’t have a prayer problem; we have a comfort problem
RJ: If you had one piece of advice for youth workers, what would it be?
PG: Remember this is all about relationships, rather than programmes, products and personalities. It’s too easy to resort to those things, but you’ll feel most alive and be most effective as youth workers when you’re engaging personally with people’s actual needs. Courses are useful but they must follow on from relationship.
Tend to your own relationship with God, because that’s what will make your youth ministry sustainable and enjoyable in the long run.
One of the best things most youth workers could do is spend more time watching the great YouTube stars of our age. They do sermons, they are discipling the emerging generation and there are almost no Christian voices among them. Their 15 minute sermons two to three times a week are on whatever they’re thinking about or whatever they’re feeling. I sometimes think that our youth activities are less serious and thoughtful than what’s out there in the wider culture.
RJ: How can we ensure we’re catering to every personality within our youth groups?
PG: We often set up events that are completely designed for extroverts. As well as us needing to help the rising generation intellectually with cultural challenges and the new landscape, we also have to recognise that, if Myers Briggs is right, we have as many sensors as feelers out there. So much of the Charismatic renewal has ministered to those who want to ‘feel’ but has not necessarily helped people whose engagement and response might be intellectual processing. We don’t legitimise that. It’s even become denominational, where conservative evangelicals ‘think’ in their response and charismatics ‘feel’.
None of us are living our lives in a demographical, psychological box, so we’re all thinkers and we’re all feelers, but we must ensure that our ministries are accessible to introverts as well as extroverts. We have to make sure that our models of response and ministry validate the intellectual and emotional. Otherwise, I think we’re going to fail to reach half the population.
RJ: What would you say to youth leaders in small churches with a handful of young people?
PG: You’re in good company because that was Jesus’ strategy for changing the entire world. He had 12 people and failed with at least one of them! The average protestant youth group in the UK is nine people. If you’ve got less than that, you’re probably not far behind. If you’ve got more than that, you’re probably in revival anyway. Don’t be too impressed by the big stories. Realise that what you’re doing is probably fairly normal. Some of the most effective youth ministry in the country is done in smaller contexts where it’s deeply personal. You probably have more opportunity to profoundly change the destiny of a handful of young people, than if you suddenly found yourself leading a massive youth ministry where you have to resort to programmes and products just to scale-up the operation.
RJ: What would you say to a struggling youth worker?
PG: St Augustine said, ‘Thou has put salt on our lips that we might thirst for thee’. Sometimes it is our own tears that put the salt there. The word ‘Israel’ means ‘the struggle’. This is a faith of disappointment, hardship, discouragement and yet within it there is hope.
Remember your calling, know the favour and gratitude of God. I think that being a youth worker is one of the hardest, most important and most undervalued jobs in the country. If it’s sometimes difficult and sometimes a spiritual battle, you shouldn’t be surprised. But, I want to say, as a church leader, thank you for the hours you put in, quietly, often invisibly serving God. You’re making an eternal difference.
