How it all Began

I’ve always wanted to have a garden. I’m not much of a gardener, but the idea of all those fresh, juicy carrots at my disposal has high appeal. Not enough for me to make it happen though. When we moved to Banbury we hit gold – a guy from our church lives around the corner and was missing his old allotment and used our back garden to grow his veg. For a couple of years we did well out of it. John mowed our lawn and trimmed our hedges in return for the use of the land. Score. 

Now he has a job with more hours, and our garden has lain fallow this year.

In January 2014, God started talking to us about the need to do things differently than we have before. ‘No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out, and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.’ (Matt 9:16-17)

As a corps we’d just come through quite a rough patch, with people leaving, some difficult conflict, and we entered into a corps council (leadership) meeting and just started to vision and scheme and plan about what could be. For the first time since we’d been here, it felt like a fog had lifted and there was real energy in the room, hope and expectation. There was palpable excitement.

The next day, Xander was reading Exodus 23, where the Lord was giving the Israelites instructions on spiritual rhythms – pilgrim festivals, weekly Sabbaths, yearly Sabbaths, etc. It was one of those moments where God makes something shimmer. It stuck out and we didn’t really know why. What do the farming patterns of an agrarian society thousands of years ago have to do with church life in 2014? A lot apparently.

We came back to it, and felt that God was drawing our attention to the idea of the Sabbath year, that happens every 7 years. We realised that we were entering into our seventh year as a Prayer Beacon, with our particular focus on prayer pulsing through everything we do, and forming our values. As we were researching, we discovered that the next Jewish Sabbath year (they still have them!) would begin on the closest Wednesday to our Prayer Beacon birthday, the start of our seventh year. We couldn’t resist that confirmation from God – we couldn’t possibly have made up that connection.

We started to dream about what it would look like to have a Sabbath year. Obviously we couldn’t, shouldn’t stop praying for a year, but what if we stopped doing everything but praying for a year? Once we’d thought of it, the idea wouldn’t let us go. We chatted through with our local leaders, and with DHQ (who were very supportive in encouraging us to push the boat out), and started to think about what it could look like to spend a year in prayer.

God had called us into a Sabbath year, with the challenge, ‘Give up your programmes and your busyness and come and sit at my feet and rest for a year.’