CR spoke with Robert Mountford about the Stoke on Trent prayer movement

Robert: The book is the story of the last ten tears. It starts off by setting the scene of the context of the time ten years ago. The Experian Report, which had just been published at the time, said Stoke on Trent was the worse place to live in England and Wales and caused a lot of soul searching locally. Lloyd Cooke, the Director of Saltbox and I had a conversation in September 2001 about how we were going to respond to this and we decided to call a prayer meeting. This is the story of how we called that prayer meeting, why we did that and what we thought would be two prayer meetings on one day, 31st October 2001, but ended up becoming a monthly prayer occasion for church leaders and for all Christian people, and all the many amazing things that happened in and through those prayer meetings.

Heather: So are both books, your previous one from a couple of decades ago and this one, talking about spirituality and God's response to the social issues in Stoke on Trent?

Mission - 25th September 2005

Robert: Yes, they are very much connecting spiritual and what we would call secular, because I think that's a wrong way to look at life, to divide them. To separate them as though spiritual, God and faith and the Church and the Bible and so on belongs here, and now here's the rest of life like health and education and business and the economy and politics and all the other aspects of life; as though those two areas have got nothing to do with each other.

My journey beginning 25 years ago was to reconnect those, which is what I began to do in Treasure in Jars of Clay. It just kept on being, here's a paragraph about the pottery industry, now here's a paragraph or two about John Wesley who came and brought Methodism to the area at the time that the pottery industry was growing and so on. It was literally connecting spiritual and secular.

That's exactly what this new book's doing. It's about prayer meetings, but the prayer meetings weren't just about, let's have a prayer meeting, it was really asking God for the healing of the land, which means Lord save the politicians and the politics and, Lord help us with the health service and help the education of the city to increase. It was a complete blurring of the secular/sacred lines.

Heather: So in your old book you had a paragraph about Wesley and the potteries; do you have a paragraph about the whole mayoral system for example and all that happened at the same time with prayer in the new book?

Robert: There's a lot more than a paragraph, because this isn't an attempt to sweep over the whole of history in 100 pages. This is focusing in much more detail and depth about what the Lord did with this 10 years ago and the intervening years, including of course Cross Rhythms, which itself was launched on air in February 2002.

Heather: Yes, that was at one of the prayer meetings.

Robert: At one of those very early prayer meetings that we had. So Cross Rhythms certainly plays part in the book alongside the editor of the Sentinel asking us to pray for premier league football, which we did, and saw Stoke City promoted and so this really is prayer plus and you can add a whole host of other things by that plus. It's how God in answer to our prayers was helping to transform the city.

Heather: How do you want the book to be used? Who do you see reading it?

Prayer week at Bethel Christian Centre in 2006

Robert: I hope it's open to anyone and everyone. I mean, I hope it will be of interest to people who are not necessarily church goers or people who attend prayer meetings. Hopefully they'd learn a whole load about it because it connects with their lives as well as it does with what's going on in the church world. Hopefully it would be of great interest to those who were in the prayer meetings and were part of the journey that we've had, but I think anybody who's connected to Cross Rhythms, Beacon House of Prayer, UCB, or the YMCA, or anyone and everyone who's mentioned in the book as part of our ongoing journey, hopefully they'd all think, oh yeah, I was there for part of that, or I heard this story, but it's good now to see it in print.

Heather: Is your old book still in print, because they sort of go together? Can people get the two together?

Robert: No unfortunately it isn't. The old book sold extremely well over the years, but a few years ago it became so outdated, because the middle section of the old book was called the present situation, and of course what was true in 1992/3/4 when it was going out obviously is completely irrelevant to a large degree. I would like one of my next books to be revising Treasure in Jars of Clay and maybe remove or certainly rewrite the middle section, because the history obviously still holds valid and the vision for the future still holds valid.

Heather: When you look back over the last decade of the corporate prayer journey, what have been the highlights and key moments for you?