Hi!
Every Friday night from 10pm to midnight we're traveling from church to church to pray for revival and unity, and to pray for wild blessing over the pastors, staffs and their vision.
We'd love to connect with you (or your pastor)!
Check out the site at www.revivallab.com and you can request a date for the team to pray in your church.
Here's the plan:
There’s an increasing hunger in the body in Detroit for a move of God, and our heart is simply to gather these people together and to pray. I had the privilege to give leadership to a similar prayer movement in Colorado Springs and the impact was truly amazing. Every Friday night we’d be in a different church in the city, and at times we’d pack 150 people or more into a tiny church building—people whose only motivation was to bless God and bless the church.
The protocol is intentionally simple:
1. After I give a short briefing for those who have never been to theLab, we spread out and pray fervently in tongues for around an hour and a half.
2. I will give direction at times throughout the night as we focus on different issues. For example, I may call everybody together to pray over the church’s leadership, or we may move outside and pray for homes and businesses in the area.
3. We will close with 20-30 minutes of reading scripture together.
Here are some points that will help in understanding the vision of this ministry and the flow of the evening:
1. We chose the 10pm-midnight Friday time so as to ensure everybody in the Detroit region is free to participate. We’ve found that’s almost always a wide open spot on people’s calendars.
2. A primary call is for pastors and ministry leaders in Detroit to travel with us every Friday night as we move from church to church. What a powerful statement of unity it is when pastors from other church devote two hours a week to pray for blessing together over another church!
3. We are believing for 1000 intercessors to develop through this ministry. People from churches all over the city are being positioned to simply pray together for revival in Detroit. Can you imagine seeing 1000 people show up to pray together in Detroit every Friday night?
4. During the time when we’re praying in the Holy Spirit, we don’t allow time for prophetic words to be shared. We simply pray. However, we do encourage post-event reports to be sent in through a contact form on the website. Also, when we are reading scripture, we don’t include commentary along with the passage. We simply read the scripture. No teaching, no preaching, just the Word of God.
5. We ask that you have the doors to your property open by 9:45pm the night of the event.
6. Please have every interior room (classrooms, sanctuary, etc.) open so we can pray in them. We pray over the children’s ministry, over the worship department, etc.
7. If possible, please have a microphone available for me so I can be clearly heard as I give direction.
8. Invite your entire church to participate, and ensure your leadership team is there so we can pray for them.
9. Plan on joining us the following Friday at the next church, and then the next and the next!
Here's an article published by Pray! Magazine regarding the prayer movement in Colorado Springs:
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO—Faced with dwindling attendance at prayer meetings, many church leaders address the problem by publicizing more, trying to find more “convenient” times to meet, and just plain coaxing. But a Colorado group has done the opposite. They picked what many people would consider an inconvenient meeting time—10 p.m. until midnight every Friday—and they don’t publicize at all. The results have been remarkable.
“It has the feel of an underground movement,” said Pastor John Burton, who coordinates the meetings. “We all show up in the middle of the night at a church we’ve never been to—there’s a certain mystique about it,” he said.
“Secret Prayer,” as it’s called, began almost a year ago when several pastors who believe God is sending revival to their community decided to pray with and for one another. “What we want to see more than anything is unity,” Burton said. “We need to love each other a lot. That’s what God is going to use to bring revival more than anything else, and prayer does that. It’s hard to hate anyone when you’re praying for, loving, and blessing each other.”
The format is simple. Each week a different church is targeted to receive prayer. Intercessors show up at that church, read Scripture and pray however the Holy Spirit leads. Usually they pray through the church, blessing and interceding for the various ministries that take place in each area.
Attendance varies, but is usually anywhere from 50 to 200, Burton said. It’s a very diverse group of pastors and lay people, with representatives from different denominations, ethnicities and church sizes. The largest participating church has more than 10,000 members; the smallest only a couple of dozen.
The biggest result is that people are always encouraged, Burton said. One story that particularly sticks out to him is of a little Baptist church the group prayed for late one Friday night. It had only about 30 regular attenders. But within two or three weeks of the Secret Prayer meeting, attendance had doubled.
Although many churches request repeat visits, and sometimes the group will do that, Secret Prayer more typically aims to pray in a different church each week in order to reach as many churches as possible, Burton said. Churches and intercessors find out about the meetings mostly by word of mouth, although there is a website and they have made up business cards to hand out to people who inquire.
We can’t wait to pray with you!
John Burton
theLab
