Praying Without Ceasing - Six Months of 24-7 in Bratislava

Published: March 17th, 2008

What happens when a town unites to pray 24-7-365?  The Slovakian town of Bratislava is six months into just such a crazy prayer experiment.  Peter Cernak reports on the effect it’s having and the challenge still to come…

Imagine a town much like any other.  A town where the church is fighting the same problems; where life is a mosaic of happy and sad people, of good and bad angels and lots of busyness!  Now imagine that town when all the different denominations join together to pray non-stop.  Imagine the young people leading it and finding what the Father’s heart beats for, what His plans and desires are for the town, the nation and the sleeping church.  

Now stop imagining.  This town exists… its name is Bratislava.

God gave me a vision for a year of prayer where Christians from all churches and communities would be invited to participate.  At the time, we were concentrating on the growth of the 24-7 Prayer movement all around Slovakia, so I wasn’t expecting God to send me off on any other crazy missions.  I mean a whole year of prayer!  At first I was intimidated by the idea.

We began to spread the vision throughout the Churches and the response was positive.  Every denomination got onboard!  We were soon praying for the right place, the right people and right resources to make it happen.  After we invited everyone we knew, we finally took the plunge and launched 24-7-365 in September 2007.

The Prayer Room has been alive!  

So far we’ve prayed together for more than 4000 hours and God has been speaking to us. Symbolic interactive installations are guiding our prayers.  We have a huge wave that fills a large part of the room: people are invited to stand on a surfboard and ride the wave of the Holy Spirit.  God has spoken to many through this fun representation of a spiritual reality.  

Other creative areas include a rack of slippers people can wear whilst praying: you can choose between ‘forgiveness’, ‘freedom’ or a number of other things.   There’s also a 3.5m tower in the centre of the room that represents a prophetic picture God gave us about Bratislava.  In the picture, the tower was called "unclean"; it represented sins like adultery and pornography.  Christians came and put thin ropes around it, like lassos and looked quite foolish: so huge a tower, such thin ropes.   It looked like nothing was happening… then the tower fell.  We use this picture and the tower we’ve built in the Prayer Room to guide us in prayer for our town.  

We’ve just reached the middle of our year of prayer. Our challenge now is to renew our passion and continue to stand for our town and nation.  I dream about true transformation for Bratislava.  I think God is calling us to three things:

Passion – not to pray continuously just for the sake of it, but to love God and the world around us enough to pray, to fight and to pay the price.

Expectation – to ask the Lord what His plans are for our town and nation and for faith to believe in them.

To decide again to unite in prayer - there’s a scene in the film ‘Braveheart’ where William Wallace and his comrades face a large, intimidating and organised army.  Wallace makes a great speech and miraculously they regain courage.  The point was that each individual had to make their own decision to fight as free men.  When they all chose to stand together, they were united in one cause, as one army.  This is true for us as we pray: we individually choose to respond to Jesus’ call and when we recommit to the fight/to pray then we stand unified, one army.

We have six more months of continuous prayer to go.  I can’t wait to see what our Father will do in that time.
 

Carla Harding champions prayer in the International 24-7 movement.  Hailing from Chichester, England her life was hijacked by God in 1999 during a two hour stint in the first ever 24-7 Prayer Room.   Carla is very happily married to Stephen and loves worshipping, blogging, films, books, friends, food, live music and international adventures.  

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