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Closer Walk
He's Longing for Intimacy With His Bride
Many Christians struggle in their relationship with the Lord because they don't realize that He sincerely desires intimate fellowship.
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He's Longing for Intimacy With His BrideMany Christians struggle in their relationship with the Lord because they don't realize that He sincerely desires intimate fellowship.
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Life
The Flesh Is Weak
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The Flesh Is WeakWhen temptation comes, our spirit is willing to do right, but our flesh is not.
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Relationships
Stop Hogging the Baton -- Pass It!
A generation of Christian leaders is passing from the scene today. If the younger generation is to take their place, we must learn the art of mentoring.
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Stop Hogging the Baton -- Pass It!A generation of Christian leaders is passing from the scene today. If the younger generation is to take their place, we must learn the art of mentoring.
read more
This land so famous for its green hills has been shrouded in spiritual darkness in recent years. Yet God has poured out His love and power in a place known for sectarian violence.
Listen. No, not simply with your ears, but with your spirit. Amid the bullets and bombs of sectarian conflict, a fresh sound is being heard from the shores of Ireland. It’s a wave of prayer coming from across the world.
From pop culture to publishing to politics, Ireland is certainly grabbing the world’s attention. People everywhere are showing renewed interest in this small island that’s now making a big impact on the global scene.
Listen. No, not simply with your ears, but with your spirit. Amid the bullets and bombs of sectarian conflict, a fresh sound is being heard from the shores of Ireland. It’s a wave of prayer coming from across the world.
From pop culture to publishing to politics, Ireland is certainly grabbing the world’s attention. People everywhere are showing renewed interest in this small island that’s now making a big impact on the global scene.
Irish-American dancer Michael Flatley has boosted Irish culture onto the center stage of world theaters through the hit shows Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. Rock giants U2 permeate the English-speaking world with their music—and though they do not sing traditional Irish melodies, they play with a Celtic abandonment that has put their hometown of Dublin on the modern musical map.
Thomas Cahill, son of first-generation Irish Americans, took the publishing world by storm in 1995 with his groundbreaking work, How the Irish Saved Civilization (Doubleday). This best-selling book tells the story of Ireland’s central role in maintaining European culture when the Dark Ages descended in the fifth century.
Political eyes also are turned to Ireland. Last year, Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom made headlines by offering an implicit—and controversial—apology for the British government’s failure to help Irish victims of the Potato Famine 150 years ago. And on Good Friday this year, U.S. President Bill Clinton welcomed the historic peace deal for Northern Ireland—which he had helped to rescue. After years of sectarian violence, Ulster now had “the promise of a springtime of peace,” he said.
Yet behind political statements and cultural inroads, God has been working on His own peace process. Growing numbers of people coming to Ireland are neither politicians nor tourists. They are Christians from countries as diverse as England and Brazil or America and Korea. And they are coming to pray.
Brazilian missionary Armaury Braga is one. “The Irish are a strong and faithful people,” Braga told the congregation at Christian Fellowship Church (CFC), a charismatic fellowship in Strandtown, Belfast, “and the Lord wants to give back to you all the things you gave to the world. It’s coming back to you now.”
Braga led a delegation of intercessors from Brazil to pray in key cities in Ireland, Great Britain and Europe—lands that formerly sent out missionaries to the far-flung corners of the globe. The group’s visit was filmed by a British TV crew and broadcast in a documentary called Mission Impossible.
The program showed the Brazilian team praying with revival-like fervor on the road approaching Stormont Castle, former site of the Northern Ireland parliament and the location for the recent peace talks. Thanking God for the opportunity to visit the region, Braga was captured on film crying out, “In Jesus’ name, bring peace to this land!”
The Brazilian team, sent by an organization called Go to the Nations, hopes to recruit 1.5 million intercessors to pray for Ireland. Their visit was part of a chain of strategic events that have been taking place at CFC and other fellowships across Ireland over the last year. While Braga spoke at CFC, another Brazilian missionary preached to a separate group in West Belfast—home territory for Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the nationalist party associated historically with the IRA.
According to reports, people in both locations were impacted deeply by their South American guests. As CFC senior pastor Paul Reid said, “We prayed and cried out to the Lord, and God really touched us.”
In fact, it was in the spring of 1997 that the congregation at CFC first committed themselves to a 40-day period of prayer and fasting. And that summer, according to Reid, they experienced “an incredible outpouring of the Holy Spirit.”
Then news came of a prayer movement affecting 30 towns in Scotland, inspired by visiting Korean intercessor Joshua Paul. “He had a message to the British church,” explains Reid. “It was, ‘If you want to see revival, you need to pray early in the mornings.’”
A CFC-affiliated fellowship in another Ulster town became involved and started holding their own early morning prayer meetings. The results were remarkable, according to Reid. Within three months 30 people had been converted.
“I saw such an impact on that church—which is five or six miles from Belfast—that I asked the [CFC] leader to come and speak to us. His appeal was, ‘Will you commit yourself to praying at six o’clock each morning?’”
Since February, CFC has taken up the challenge. During the course of a week, up to 200 church members pray in the early morning meetings. Children come dressed for school. Some adults are dressed for a day’s work.
“It’s the most exciting thing to see people pour in at six o’clock and get on their faces,” Reid says. And the impact has been significant. The vision of revival has gripped people’s hearts.
“We’ve been praying for the prodigals,” he notes. “People we haven’t seen for years are starting to come back again.”
He describes what’s happened as “impartation.”
“Something happened to us,” he says. “Who wants to get up at 6 to pray every morning? Now there’s not a week goes by that we don’t see people saved.”
Praying for Peace
A beautiful land, with breathtaking scenery, warm and friendly people, and a vibrant culture, the island is split into two parts—the northeastern region, known as Northern Ireland, which is part of Great Britain, and the south, which forms the independent Republic of Ireland.
It’s had a turbulent and often bloody history—from tribal conflicts of ancient times to the present day “Troubles,” which date from the late 1960s. The new peace deal is a multiparty effort to try to end years of terrorism and bridge the gap between the opposing communities—the unionists, who want the mainly Protestant Northern Ireland to remain part of the U.K., and the nationalists, who want the north to become part of the mainly Catholic south.
The settlement came on Good Friday. Many TV viewers were watching the crucifixion scene in the movie Ben Hur when the news flash hit their screens. Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell led the intense negotiations between the British and Irish governments, and the unionist and nationalist parties. The agreement—which entails a Northern Ireland assembly, cross-border authorities, release of prisoners, policing reforms and a promise of decommissioning terrorists’ arms—is now being put to voters north and south of the border.
With those events in mind, special prayer meetings were being planned in Belfast. Among other intercessors, a group of Ugandan Christians were planning to come to Ireland to pray.
CFC’s Paul Reid believes the issues at stake are greater than political accord and the cessation of violence in the region. “We’re praying, ‘Lord, send us peace,’ and obviously we want that,” Reid says.
“But the reality is that if there weren’t ‘the Troubles’ here, the world wouldn’t be focused on this wee bit of land. People are praying all over the world for Ireland.
“And it’s beyond peace in one sense. It’s not just about not killing each other—but about God actually doing something.”
Geraldine Hogg agrees. Hogg assists her husband Terry in spearheading Coracle—what they describe as “an indigenous Irish church”—in a fiercely nationalist area of Ulster. Like Reid and CFC, they promote a transcultural Christianity in a region where the labels “Catholic” and “Protestant” often have life-and-death connotations.
The Hoggs too have noticed a growing number of non-Irish believers who have been inspired by God to identify with Ireland and intercede for the people.
“People are being raised up in Brazil, America and England,” Geraldine Hogg notes. “There’s an expectancy and anticipation that something is going to happen in Ireland.”
Hogg is convinced a sweeping change is on the horizon. “I know it’s going to take place. And it’s bigger than what we’ve imagined because God is going to bring something new out of it. It’s as if the very stones are crying out.”
Hogg became a Christian as a teen-ager through a team from David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge ministry. More recently, in 1994, she experienced God in a fresh way as the Toronto Blessing swept CFC in Belfast. “What came up from my spirit was like a deep wailing,” she remembers.
The Hoggs have been inspired by the rediscovery of their Celtic Christian roots. “Celtic Christianity is a whole lifestyle,” Geraldine Hogg explains, “not just something you do in a meeting. It’s a journey with each other in discovering God and getting to know Him.”
The early Celtic Christians operated under an “open heaven,” she says. Compelled by a deep inner yearning for God, the Irish monks set up bases on tiny islands and engaged in spiritual warfare for the land.
“Our Toronto experience brought back to us the realization that our relationship with God is supernatural and anything can happen,” she says. And since that time, amid the end of the Troubles, they have seen lives transformed through prayer.
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