Jon Bellamy found out more from Pamela Stead

Pamela Stead

The International House of Prayer in Kansas City has been running for 11 years. In November last year, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit began amongst the students and is still continuing today. They have already seen healings and around 1,400 people baptised. Pamela Stead, a founding member of IHOP, happened to be in the UK and so came on Breakthrough Nights radio show on Cross Rhythms to inspire and encourage those in England to keep pressing in to God.

Jonathan: I gather you're not American, but you've got an English background?

Pamela: Yes. We are English. We moved to Kansas City nearly 14 years ago before the House of Prayer started there.

Jonathan: What took you over, I mean apart from the Lord? How did he lead you to realise that you needed to locate to over there?

Pamela: Well, it's nothing to do with House of Prayer because it hadn't started. We were part of an Anglican church in Collumpton in Devon where we had experienced, through the Toronto era, an increasing desire and hunger for God. Then we had opportunity to go with another family from Devon to help start a ministry, which was part of the church that Mike Bickel, who now heads up the House of Prayer, was the senior pastor of. That ministry has just really unfolded into the House of Prayer; so we were there when the House of Prayer started.

Jonathan: Wow and this is the 10th year of 24/7 prayer isn't it?

Pamela: Actually it's the 11th year. We said Leviticus 6:12 - that the fire on the altar would never go out; so it is quite astonishing.

Jonathan: How do you see the last ten years then? What do you think has been some of the significant things that God's done through this 24/7 prayer?

Pamela: Well when I look out at just the demographics of our community; we started with Mike Bickel and five interns aged about 18 to 21. We had somebody to clean the toilets and somebody to keep the books. Then about 20 of us or so would come and make up the worship team, playing, singing and praying. Now we have a community of about 4,500 people. The majority of them are under the age of 30, if not under the age of 25. What has astounded me is that in 1983 the Lord said to Mike Bickel that he would raise up a youth generation that would pray for revival. We're seeing it now, a generation later, thousands of young people. To my mind that's normal now. I'm 54, I'm the old lady. You forget when you visit other churches that that's not normal.

Jonathan: For a lot of young people, they might look at prayer and just the thought of prayer might be something that they feel put off by; yet you're talking about thousands of young people 25 and under who are engaged and consumed by prayer. What do you put that down to? Why is that happening with the younger generation over there?

Pamela: It's not just Americans. We have people visiting from all over the world; so it's not a national issue. All young people want to do great exploits. I can't remember who once said that at 17 a child thinks his parents know nothing, then at 22 he realises how much they've learnt in the last four years. There's something in all of our hearts that is still young, but we need to capture it at a young time. We've given our lives to Jesus; that means we've given our whole life. We want to make something of these 70 years that we have on earth. It's difficult to do that when you don't know who it is that you're serving. I think when you look at a place of prayer being a place of intimacy with the Lord; conversations with Jesus and doing so in an atmosphere of worship, which opens your heart and exposes your heart to Him; you then have his heart exposed to you in conversation, that you develop an understanding of boldness, an understanding of who you are. Then you can go out and do the great exploits. If we're going to do bold exploits, we have to come to a realisation of who we are in Christ and that it's only through him that we have the power and we are able to do those radical things we all want to do, however old we are. Does that make sense?

Jonathan: It does indeed. You were just talking about this dimension of worship with prayer. Can you give us a snapshot of what it might look like if someone were to visit an IHOP prayer room?

Pamela: OK. You can watch it on our web stream at www.ihop.org but basically we're 24 hours a day. It's divided into 12 intercessory meetings and 12 worship with the word meetings. In both types of meetings there's a full worship team on the stage of about 15 people: musicians, singers and an intercessor or prayer leader. With the worship with the word, we're actually meditating on the word. It's more of a devotional atmosphere where we'll just sit quietly or join in with the singing, or just hear what the Lord is saying; the thing is to prophetically develop attitudes of scripture that they've studied previously.

Jonathan: So at anytime of the day or night someone can go into your prayer room and there'd be a worship team up on the platform and they'd maybe be singing out scripture or going through a particular issue for the day?