Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God and you will begin to sense his grace. Matthew 6, The Message

For more than twelve years, 24-7 Prayer rooms have been multiplying and spreading all over the world. Thousands of people have been encountering God in these ‘sacred spaces’, and the stories coming out from them have been remarkable. If you check the 24-7 International website, you’ll probably see that more than 100 churches and groups of believers across numerous nations are praying 24-7 right now, and many of these are in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

And if you read some of the stories on the 24-7 UK, Ireland or International websites, you’ll quickly notice that these prayer rooms haven’t just taken place in churches. There have been prayer rooms on university campuses and in schools, in prisons and even in the Houses of Parliament, at a German punk festival and in a Missouri brewery, in tents and in caravans, in people’s homes and basements and garages… wherever people are, wherever people want to pray, prayer rooms and prayer spaces can spring up.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen a rapid growth in the number of prayer rooms across the United Kingdom and Ireland, partly triggered by the Alpha & 24-7 Prayer years of prayer in Scotland (‘The Big If?’, 2010) and Ireland (‘What If?’, 2011). In 2012, however, this is going to multiply dramatically.

As part of the ‘Kingdom Come, 2012’ year of prayer, which is being hosted by 24-7 Prayer and Alpha in the UK and Ireland, we’re expecting an unprecedented number of churches and groups to sign-up and register their prayer activities. Many of these will host a prayer room – some for just 24 hours or for a weekend, some for whole weeks or even longer. We want to fill the whole of 2012 with layers and layers of non-stop prayer across our nations. Imagine this… what if every major city and every network of local towns and villages, or every denomination and church network, each organised amongst themselves to fill every single week of 2012 with non-stop prayer? Imagine that volume of prayer.

“Again I tell you that if two of you on earth agree on earth about anything you ask for it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two of three come together in my name, there I am with them.” Matthew 18v19 (NIV)

So, what happens when more than a hundred-thousand people across a thousand prayer rooms agree in prayer together during 2012? What happens in heaven and on earth then? What will the Father do in response? How about we do this together and find out?

Hosting a 24-7 Prayer room isn’t hard, but it does take some planning and preparation. In our newly-redesigned, free-to-download, ‘How to host a 24-7 Prayer Room’ pack (see above), you’ll find loads of practical ideas and resources that cover the following areas:

1. Why pray?
2. What is 24-7 Prayer?
3. What’s your vision?
4. Preparing well
5. Motivating people to pray
6. Designing your prayer room
7. Creative prayer ideas
8. Starting and ending well
9. After you pray
10. Sign-up sheets and reminder cards

When you download the pack, give it to a leader or a youth worker or someone who can ‘make it happen’ in your church or area. And if you have any further questions contact our support teams at: uk@24-7prayer.com (UK), info@24-7prayerireland.com (Ireland).

Two of the things in the pack that we particularly want to highlight in the build up to ‘Kingdom Come, 2012’ are these:

• Prayer rooms and Alpha courses. Many churches have found that it works well to host a prayer room just before starting an Alpha course. Consider how your prayer room could fit with an Alpha course during 2012. For more information on Alpha, please contact kingdomcome@alpha.org
• Town/city-wide prayer rooms. Rather than just hosting your own prayer room, consider how you could host one by working together with other churches and groups of Christians in your town or your part of your city. Pray together, united as one Church, for your area. It will probably take a bit longer to organise something like this, and there will be some additional issues to consider (the location of the prayer room, managing the rota, security, etc.), but it could be very exciting.