24 Stories of Prayer: #2 - Four Years of Non-stop Prayer in Vancouver

Published: May 16th, 2008

For more than four years, Aaron White and the Vancouver Boiler Room (who call themselves 614 Vancouver) have lived and prayed 24-7-365; saturating their forgotten and despised neighbourhood in Downtown Vancouver with the love of Jesus.  Aaron writes about the lessons they've learnt praying alongside drug dealers, addicts and those without homes...

 

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“They will rebuild the ancient ruins, repairing the cities destroyed long ago. They will revive them, though they have been deserted for many generations.”

This quotation is taken from Isaiah 61:4, and it is the foundational Scripture passage of our Salvation Army community, 614 Vancouver. It speaks of going back to the places - the cities in particular - that have been abandoned for generations, forgotten or ignored by the powers of this world. But it also speaks of great hope, and of the possibility that those who have been oppressed, mourning, despairing, and captive can now be those who rebuild, restore and renew. God made this promise originally to Israel, and we believe the same God can do the same thing in our forgotten places here and now.

We are officially a six-year old Corps (Church) plant of The Salvation Army, but even people within our denomination have a difficult time characterizing us. We don’t have meetings on Sunday, we don’t play brass instruments (except maybe at Christmas) and we don’t run a charity shop. All of these things are fine, but we have chosen to focus our community life around prayer, incarnation, joy and justice.

So we have all moved into the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood in Vancouver which is considered by many to be a serious blight on an otherwise world-class city. We don’t see it that way. This is our home, these are our neighbours, and we have learned that there is great beauty, love and possibility on these mean streets. We run cell groups here, small Church fellowships in apartments, slum hotels, homeless shelters, and local parks, and invite our friends and neighbours to come learn and worship with us. We play and work and garden and raise our families here as a regular pattern of life, and we fight for our neighbourhood as well. There are very large forces and powers that wish to see this place demolished, our friends locked up or moved elsewhere, the people we love controlled or kept until they die off from AIDS, drug overdoses, violence, or just plain old poverty. So we fight.

But most importantly, we pray. This is not distinct from our living or playing or working or teaching or fighting. It filters through everything we do, is the reason for everything we do, and is the strength behind everything we do. For the last four years we have been maintaining a type of 24-7 prayer vigil. For the first three and a half years we prayed non-stop in a slum hotel room overlooking Main and Hastings, the centre of the open drug trade. Now our primary prayer room sits above a homeless shelter and women’s refuge, but in reality the prayer room has moved beyond the bounds of those four walls, and takes shape in and through the daily warp and woof of community life.

We do have a prayer rhythm which involves twice daily community prayers, prayer walking combined with visiting and street evangelism, artistic and musical worship, multiple communal meals, teaching, times of quiet listening, gardening, praying the Scriptures, and personal prayer shifts in what we call The War Room. During the summers we often send people out on missions and visits, so we will be maintaining a prayer rhythm based around three daily Psalms, as well as creating some artistic and poetic prayer resources to go along with the Psalms. We will also be hosting a variety of prayer teams and pilgrims.

What we have discovered in and through our four plus years of 24-7 prayer is that the purpose of prayer is not intercession or petition (these are certainly parts of prayer, but we don’t even really know how they “work”!), but rather intimacy and obedience.  Praying takes our attention off of ourselves, and teaches us to fix our gaze on the only One worth looking at (see Col 3). The LORD receives our prayerful attention, and then teaches us to actually see the people who are around us, often for the first time. As we grow in this discipline of intimate attention, we begin to see with Kingdom eyes, seeing evidence of life and beauty where others might only see death and ruin. We start to become aware of the seeds of the Kingdom that the LORD has already sown around us, in unlikely places and amongst unlikely people, and we get to witness its growth. The Kingdom, as we are told by Jesus, starts small, invisible, buried even, but then it starts to grow and will eventually infiltrate the whole garden. We have seen the Kingdom growing in people, bringing release from captivity, freedom from oppression, hope for change.  And we have seen some of these people inspired tobecome re-builders, restorers, and re-newers. Whenprayerful community is formed along these lines, with people from all kinds of differing backgrounds andexperiences, that Kingdom seed seems to stretch out its branches in surprising ways.

The message we like to bring to anyone who will listen – 24-7 Prayer included! – is that prayer is the main thing. Giving honour to the Father was the primary passion in Jesus’ life, and it must be ours as well. We have been given the enormous privilege of being adopted as sons and daughters of the Kingdom, of being included in the Trinitarian love that exists at the Centre of Creation. So prayer must never be an add-on, must never be something that we “use” to make our programs more effective. Coming before God in thanksgiving, humility and praise, desperate for the intimacy he offers, is the very best that we can do. When we are in busy places of ministry, in places of terrible despair and obvious needs, it can be easy to push prayer off to the side.  We have to trust that God knows and cares for these things much more deeply than we do. As we experience intimacy with the LORD and learn to be obedient to His commands, we get to see how it is also in His plan to bring renewal and revival to the forgotten places, and how He is so much better at it than we are. 

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