24-7 Prayer has been described in many ways; a non-stop global prayer meeting, new monasticism for the 21st century, even as a virus that has spread around the world as a result of “God’s holy sneeze”. But we’ve come to describe it, quite simply, as a movement of people who are centred on Jesus Christ, trying to live their lives wrapped around ‘prayer, mission and justice’. At the heart of this mo
vement are hundreds of prayer rooms, in which people take one hour (or more) each, one after another, to form unbroken chains of prayer where they are. Twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, ordinary people pass the prayer-baton onto friends and strangers… and on it travels, from group to group, from church to church, from city to city and from nation to nation. All over the world, night and day, this is non-stop, 24-7 prayer. What began as prayer very quickly became mission as God’s Spirit stirred and inspired people to become the answer to their own petitions. Over the last few years, prayer/mission teams have been sent all over Europe (and beyond) and some have put down roots, to serve communities for the long term (for example, in Ibiza and Morocco, Skopje in Macedonia, Boystown in Mexico, and more). The UK has a special place in this story. It was here, in Chichester, on England’s South coast, that the very first prayer room began, among a group of mostly students and young people. And it was here, in Reading, that the first Boiler Room community emerged after local Christians had hosted a series of creative prayer rooms, and began to feel that God might be calling them to explore a kind of ‘new monastic’ life together. Since then there have been hundreds of prayer rooms all over the UK, and many groups and church communities have also been inspired to explore the Boiler Room journey.
