Old Town Community Church Bringing Jesus to Old Town and Old Town to Jesus

The danger of not blogging regularly is that too much happens and important and exciting things get forgotten and lost! So before the events of the past couple of months disappear these next few blogs are the highlights…

24/7 As you may remember, back in the summer OTCC held it’s first 24/7 prayer week. Just to reiterate – there is nothing “magical” about praying like this. It isn’t a “formula” or method – it could just as easily be a 23/6 and have the same impact! It is more a helpful tool. There is something significant about these focused, united, prolonged times of prayer. There is a sense of rhythm that develops, a momentum that builds and draws people in and onwards. It is not praying for the sake of praying itself – but about relationship, connecting, and rooting in to the river of life.

As OTCC, with Glyn and Emma’s encouragement, we have been getting more into prayer, experimenting with places and different ways of talking to and hearing from God, both individually, as couples and in groups. And getting excited at how God is bringing changes in us, in our relationships, and in the lives of others.

I was reading the story of Jesus in the Temple, with an angry lot of Jews working up a lather and demanding a miraculous sign to demonstrate his authority. His answer did nothing to calm them down, and didn’t make an awful lot of sense to his disciples at that time either!

I don’t know about you but seagulls squawking raucously on rooftops in towns bring out the worst in me. They shouldn’t be there, they’re in the wrong place – after all, they are seagulls, not towngulls! They are often to be seen raiding bins or take-away boxes discarded on the pavements, fighting noisily amongst themselves.

During the last few weeks, whilst I’ve been writing letters to the Iranian Ambassador and praying earnestly about Iranian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani’s sentence of execution, I read the following

A Good Story
Emma asked us the other Sunday about what the gospel is – Mark starts his ‘Gospel’ with
“The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God……”

Was having a little ponder about the healing of the woman with the continuous hemorrhaging for 12 years (puts my monthly moans over earlier years in the shade!), and how in Mark 5 verse 34 Jesus says “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”