Something Worth Praying For: further to A Call to Prayer…

Some interesting connections in the responses to my email messages and the previous post calling for prayer for revival—for example:

A 24-7 Prayer movement in the UK (thanks Jon Connell). Wonderful. I believe it's important to add our voices to what is already going on all over the world. I'm hoping that not only will a new unified, broadly based Canadian Anglican voice will be added to the mix, but that prayer will spread across denominations, too. A true Awakening would be cross-denominational.

Cross denominational prayer is already happening in the Battlefords. See Peter Norman's comment on my previous post.

Ansley Tucker, Rector of Christ Church, Calgary, in her response to my email writes:

At Christ Church, we’re creating new opportunities for people to reconnect to ancient spiritual practices – as simple as daily prayer and bible reading.  We can pray for revival (and should), but I often feel as if we need to help people recover a sense of what it is we need to have revived. 

I can relate. My reading about past Awakenings suggests that it is exactly this sense of what it is we need to have revived that comes when there is an authentic wide spread Awakening. The Holy Spirit reveals it in the hearts and minds of hundreds and thousands of people. In the meantime, Ansley writes:

Where people are can be a little dis-spiriting at times!

The prayerful waiting, once one applies oneself to it, is hard.

In the meantime, there is good news from Mark MacDonald, National Indigenous Bishop of Canada. In Anglican Renewal Ministries' Anglicans for Renewal Canada he writes:

…many people use the words "spiritual movement" to describe the spiritual renewal that is beginning to spread among the Anglican communities across Indigenous Canada…the intensity and urgency of this movement among Indigenous peoples is unique and vivid…we are seeing other signs of spiritual renewal—elders dreaming dreams, men and women offering prophetic words and actions, and the miraculous healing of the spiritual and physical wounds of an often painful past.

Dreams, prophecy and healing. Often, but not always, a part of the historical Awakenings. Evidence, nonetheless, of something good stirring. And there's more, MacDonald continues:

…we believe that we are seeing the first moments of a great spiritual renewal in Canada; the Gospel coming fully alive in Indigenous life and culture…We are, I believe, witnessing the first moments of a movement that will transform Indigenous life and, certainly, the whole of the Anglican Church of Canada. 

Could that be a prophetic word from one of our Bishops? Could our praying also be a part of "the first moments of a great spiritual awakening in Canada"? Could the Gospel come fully alive in non-Indigenous life and culture and the whole of the Anglican Church of Canada, too?

Something worth praying for, indeed.