Planting, growing and maintaining fruitful and joyfully praying churches – a vision of what The Concert of Prayer is called to do in Scotland.
Planting, growing and maintaining fruitful and joyfully praying churches.
A vision of what The Concert of Prayer is called to do in Scotland in the twenty first century, through training leaders and churches to pray together, host prayer meetings, enjoy prayer and demonstrating how to create a culture of joyful and vibrant prayer in any local church for the purpose of revitalising churches and getting Scotland revival ready.
Background
After five years of the ministry ‘Concert of Prayer for Scotland’, which was birthed in January 2020, it has come time to refresh the vision and clarify the calling God has placed on the ministry and what lane He has this ministry (which is His idea, and therefore His ministry ultimately) running in across Scotland. Scotland has historically experienced more revivals than most nations have, almost always birthed when the church started to pray earnestly and in a sustained manner to ‘The Lord of the Harvest’ for more labourers, which He sent in vast numbers and which the church in Scotland sent across the world over previous centuries. The church in Scotland today is a very different place, with many churches prayerless and lifeless. But God is never done with his people. This vision is described using imagery of planting an avocado plant in Scotland – something that is very difficult, but something we believe as a ministry God will do in our time. The imagery of avocados has been used because they are a tropical plant and don’t normally grow in Scotland, so require a special effort to be a successful fruiting plant in a normally cold and Northern European environment – not suited to avocados at all.
Why specifically the avocados? Well, the imagery of avocados came to the founder one night after many months of praying about ‘what was next’ for the Concert of Prayer. God placed a picture of avocados in his heart and spoke of how in the same way as planting and growing avocados in Scotland is unlikely – but possible, stirring the church in Scotland to joyful prayer will happen in our generation with a great effort and the Spirit of God at work in churches across this great nation.
Below is a summary of what part we believe God wants the Concert of Prayer for Scotland to play in Scotland over the coming years. How we can encourage and strengthen churches in corporate and individual prayer and inspire churches to make prayer a priority, a passion and a delight rather than drudgery or duty.
The vision looks at the summary statement above and does a deep dive on each word or phase and helps to unpack what that means in terms of the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘who’.
So, this is why the vision is explained as “Planting, growing and maintaining fruitful avocados in Scotland”, whilst referring to Planting, growing and maintaining fruitful and joyfully praying churches.