The Moravian, 24-7 Prayer and me and 'Miss Daisy'

Something quite profound happened to me when I visited the Moravian Church at Brockweir during the recent Border Prayer Room project.

It wasn’t simply the church with its history tracking back to the early 18^th Century and Zinzendorf’s estate at Hernhutt in Germany, or even the sweetness of the presence of God there, or the prayer stations in various pews which took the pilgrim on a journey to a deeper faith with their questions and challenges.  It was the meeting of two lives lived separately but somehow and strangely connected through two great movements of prayer. This was the meeting of myself and the Moravian pastor Thom.  He has the Moravian church in his blood and as I met him it felt that through 24-7 Prayer I do also.  He was taken first to the Moravian Church in the USA by his grandmother who later moved to California and to a church plant there when he was 15 yrs old.  It wasn’t just the story of his journey but the joining together of two histories, ancient and modern that overwhelmed me.  I was completely undone and continue to be in that state of not totally understanding what I’ve experienced here. 

It felt like this was the end of my pilgrimage from Chester, down the border to this point.  Though my destination was to be Chepstow here I found the end of my personal journey, and yet the end is the beginning! I’ve had to come to the end to reach the beginning point.

Thom put it well when he described what I felt by quoting T.S. Eliot – ‘What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning.  The end is where we start from.’

But what did this mean?  I didn’t yet understand.

The next day I came to Chepstow and saw the point where the River Wye enters the River Severn.  Then together these two rivers, who both have their origin on Plynlimon in Wales, enter the sea.   I heard the Lord speaking to me about the coming together of two great prayer movements.  And in this tumultuous coming together of the two rivers I had something of an explanation to what I felt when I met Thom.  The Moravians, as he told me, didn’t stop praying at the end of a hundred years.  As a church worldwide they carry on the prayer vigil that began in Hernhutt.  

So this river of prayer continues to flow and into it come many tributaries.  24-7 Prayer is but one, but what a great flow of prayer it is and totally in keeping with the Moravian ‘model’ of prayer leading to mission and justice which leads us to prayer and so on.  And so, onwards the two rivers, the Wye and the Severn, break out into the Bristol Channel and into the sea.  Likewise the prayer continues. 

The Moravian church, is still praying.  The 24-7 Prayer movement is still praying.  Both continuous, and both leading those who chance to open their hearts and lives to pray, into a place of no return. 

There’s no turning back for hearts that burst with a desire to change the world or at least the streets in which we live. This is a tide of mission and justice that breaks the banks of our ‘normal’ tidy lives.   The river can’t turn back, even when the tide turns the river continues to flow downstream and into the sea.  The prayer, even when the tide of opposition rises, even when friends forsake us, even when the body is weak, it continues.

 It continues.  

It continues on into the heart of God and accomplishes that which it set out to do. 

And so I thank the Lord for having met Thom.  For it was at this juncture, this meeting, that my life, my river joined with the great and ancient river that flows now on into the sea of prayer that has its origins in the heart of God.