A Day of Heroes By Lyndall Bywater

Published: October 26th, 2009

This week I have been mostly making history. For starters, I am one of the first non-officer guests to stay at The Salvation Army’s International College of Officers in London. What’s more, I am currently attending the first ever International Prayer Leaders Conference in The Salvation Army. Eight years ago I pitched up at the SA Mission Team office in Morden as the first ever Salvation Army Prayer Co-ordinator in the world, and now I am here with my counterparts from 22 other territories. That’s progress!

All quite amazing and quite momentous!

The week has been everything I could have wished. It’s been inspirational hearing how TSA is developing its prayer and spirituality in cultures as diverse as Canada and Ghana. It’s been heartening to find that I’m not alone in the struggles I have and the breakthroughs I rejoice in. It’s been almost spooky to note the synchronicity of what God is doing across this vast global movement. And it’s been a lot of fun too.

Our days have, up to now, been full of lectures, story-telling and prayer, but today we broke the pattern a bit and took in some real history.

After a hasty breakfast, we piled into vans and headed for Wesley’s Chapel, near London’s financial district. Despite all my time working in London and my appreciation of Wesley’s remarkable life, I’ve never been there before, so it was fascinating.

We started in the chapel itself, and marvelled at the idea of a pulpit which put Wesley at eye-level with the people in the balcony. You really would have to get all your vertigo fears dispatched before venturing into that kind of preaching.

Then we went to look around Wesley’s house. My first observation was how remarkably like our community house it is (minus the gigantic extension), but then I remembered that it was built only 17 years before ours, so maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised!  My second observation was that it was dusty and a bit musty-smelling, but then such is the effect of preserving history I guess. He had the most enormous tea-pot too …

Just off John’s bedroom is his prayer room, and like the self-respecting prayer leaders we are, we of course huddled in there to pray. It’s a tiny room, but the experience of being there was quite remarkable. To think he got up at 4am each morning and headed straight in there for time with his Heavenly Father, before settling down to write another of his umpteen thousand sermons, or setting off on his horse to preach to the masses … And to think that I was standing there, more than 200 years on, a direct beneficiary of all that he did, now doing my bit to keep the faith … All pretty sobering and yet inspiring.

Then, after an afternoon of lectures and story-telling, we settled down this evening to watch a film about the lives of William and Catherine Booth… and again I am confronted with heroes. Of course, I’ve spent most of my life hearing stories about early Salvation Army exploits, but to see the story laid out in front of me, with all its joys and struggles, was humbling to say the least.

I come away from the film being sure that both of them were extreme fanatics, but also being sure that it would have been difficult to significantly impact that climate of appalling deprivation and exploitation without being something of a lunatic. They needed the kind of blind passion that would drive them through every kind of opposition, from being physically abused in the streets to being charged in the courts with pimping. They needed the kind of determination that would take one look at the hundreds of thousands in abject misery and still not give up and go home.

I come away also being sure that they weren’t pastored or mentored in the way all of us need to be. There seem to have been few fathers and mothers of the faith cheering them on or slowing them down, and perhaps that’s why Catherine died comparatively young, and why their family life was less than straight forward. I come away being sure we have lessons to learn from that. As we pray for the kind of passion that drove the Booths to such great achievements, let’s also pray for the kind of church that works together, as the body should, to support, advise and release its fanatics as wisely as it can.

John Wesley and William Booth both lived into their 80s. They both impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. They both travelled the globe and they were both at the heart of significant social transformation. Yet perhaps most importantly for me, the humble prayer co-ordinator, they both had a deep heart-connection with the Jesus they preached, and they never let the size of the task or the fame of succeeding draw them away from that central cord of love.   

Lyndall Bywater lives in a community in the historical city of Canterbury, England.  The Bywater family is made up of her husband Phil, Hugo (the black lab guide dog) and Oscar (a black cat with attitude!). Phil is an accountant and spends his time auditing other people's accounts, while Lyndall works for the Salvation Army and spends her time persuading people to pray. (We leave it up to you to decide which is the easier job!) Lyndall has been a great friend and champion of 24-7 Prayer and now serves on an International Team resourcing and championing prayer within the movement.

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