Red Moon Rising

Rediscover the Power of Prayer

Pete Greig, Dave Roberts

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780781412872
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

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.

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 opened fire. There would be rumours later of deals done in high places. Whatever the reason, within a week the prayer rally for peace had grown to 120,000, and the East German leader had been forced to resign. Within a fortnight the prayer rally attracted three hundred thousand protestors, and within a month—four weeks later to the day—the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Some journalists and historians have identified the Leipzig prayer rallies as the tipping point in the fall of East German communism—a remarkable acknowledgement for a movement that had begun so quietly seven years earlier, with a handful of people at a prayer meeting. One communist official from Leipzig made an extraordinary, unguarded admission to a journalist: ‘We were prepared for every eventuality,’ he said. ‘But not for candles and not for prayers.’

The greatest theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, said that ‘to clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world’. And in Eugene Peterson’s classic book The Contemplative Pastor (which, let’s face it, sounds about as harmless as a book can be) prayer is described as ‘a subversive activity [that] involves a more or less open act of defiance against any claim by the current regime’.

The Leipzig prayer rallies embodied the defiance of praying for the kingdom of God to come on earth and the power of crying out to the Lord of lords for regime change. It’s tragic that the most revolutionary cry in world history, ‘Let your kingdom come’, is so often reduced to a religious catchphrase, mere shorthand for a few less people leaving our churches and a few more homeless people receiving a tuna sandwich on Friday nights. By contrast, early twentieth-century Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper understood the revolutionary implications of Christian allegiance (and I can almost imagine his hand trembling with a mixture of terror and excitement as he wrote these words): ‘There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!”’

Christians are called to welcome Christ into every ‘square inch of the whole domain of our human existence’. This means that whenever we see the tyranny of enemy occupation at work in our own lives we try to pray for Christ’s kingdom to come instead. Wherever we see oppression, amongst the poor, in our educational systems, in government or even in the church, we use our free wills to say defiantly, ‘Not my will but your will be done.’

When we pray in this way, it’s like those urgent messages tapped out in code by resistance fighters far behind enemy lines in the Second World War. Our prayers light up landing strips for the invading forces of heaven. And when we come together to do this in sufficient numbers, we can move from small-scale guerrilla warfare to publicly defying tanks and guns and governments with our prayers for liberation.

Having spent his formative teenage years caught up in those peace prayer rallies in Le...