In America a day of prayer and fasting drew a staggering 400,000 young people. Now, thanks to a prophetic vision given to Julie Anderson, THECALL ENGLAND will take place in Reading in July. Tony Cummings reports.

Julie Andserson

On Saturday 13th July 2002 an event will take place with the potential to change the very history of Britain. On that day we pray that thousands upon thousands of young people will congregate at Reading's Madejski football stadium to fast and pray for Britain, calling on God to heal our land. TheCall England promises to be one of the biggest prayer gatherings of Christians seen in Britain for years. Up to 70,000 (40,000 inside the stadium, 30,000 outside) could make the trek to Reading. But it will be God rather than big name bands and evangelical personalities that will draw the throng. The musicians leading worship and the speakers there to minister will be some of the finest. But there will be no personality cults to cloud the issue for this is "a solemn assembly" (Joel 2:15) called to fast and intercede.

If that all sounds hopelessly idealistic in a church age where seemingly only a smattering of Christians take prayer seriously and where "big names draw crowds", doubters had better soberly consider the miracles that have preceded Rod and Julie Anderson, the organisers of TheCall England, or how the first TheCall, held in Washington DC, drew 400,000 young people to fast and pray. But this is not a good idea imported from the USA, but a God idea birthed in Heaven supernaturally given to an East Anglia-born prayer intercessor called Julie Anderson.
Julie has one of those extraordinary life stories that cries out to be told in a book (it will be published soon!). Julie grew up in an Anglican home never doubting the existence of God. In fact, at the age of three she was told by the Lord that he would be with her through her life! In the '60s the wide-eyed teenager went to work in London and ended up as the secretary to Brian Epstein, the legendary manager of the Beatles. The pop and rock fast lane continued to propel Julie along. She fell in love and married John Walker of the hit pop team the Walker Brothers and by the early 70s was staying with the Rolling Stones in the South of France. A supernatural encounter with God in Keith Richards' living room pulled Julie up short.

Starting anew she joined a church and faced the fresh demands of bringing up her baby son (her marriage to John Walker having ended) and learning to journey deeply into the things of God. She succeeded on both counts and by the late 70s was being acknowledged as a profoundly effective prayer warrior. Julie commented, "I discovered the value of fasting when I lived in the States. One weekend a month I would go out to a friend's house in Palm Springs out in the desert and I would fast Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday and then come back to work. I began to see amazing things shift. I knew how to get a breakthrough and I began to put two and two together and that when you fast and pray you get aligned with Heaven and the Lord rewards you publicly for things you do in secret. When I came back to Britain it seemed natural to carry on doing what I'd done."

In the UK Julie found herself nudged by God into ministry. She began to take prayer meetings and teach people how to get hold of God. She became involved in the prayer mobilisation for Reinhardt Bonke's From Minus To Plus booklet drop into every UK home. And, much to her surprise, Julie met and married an American Bible teacher, Rod Anderson, after working alongside him in London. Establishing a highly successful Woman To Woman series of meetings, confronting witchcraft in High Wycombe, praying for the Synod and political leaders, Julie found herself thrust by God into a series of divine strategies until in the '90s she was running the Prayer For The Nations training course at Westminster Emmanuel Evangelical Church. "I remember Gerald Coates being upstairs running the Seeds For Revival Meetings while we were in the basement calling out to God in prayer,"

In 1999 in the Prayer School something extraordinary happened. Julie endeavoured to explain: "I had learnt to pray strategically, by that I mean, where you wait on the Lord and you listen. I found that I kept praying for 'stadium anointings'. I thought it was a funny term, 'stadium anointings', 'stadium anointings'. It kept coming up. I'd be thinking about something else, I'd be leading in prayer, I'd be teaching on prayer in the school when all of a sudden I'd hear myself saying, 'And there are going to be stadiums filled.' One day in the Prayer School I took about three steps forward, it was like I collided with the power of God. When I went home and sought God in my own private time I thought, this is serious, actually God's got something here that is beyond what I've considered. In my mind I went back to my days with the Rolling Stones, and to my days in America seeking God as a single parent, and I knew the deepest thing in my heart and my reason to be alive was that I LONGED to see a cultural change. What I'd seen in the '60s wasn't right, it had all got so messy, so AWOL, so absent without leave from what God had intended. I said to the Lord, 'You know, if you're saying Rod and I should rent a football stadium you would have to pay for it and you would have to bring everybody in unity.' I think it was a week later we had a prayer summit here in Westminster with Jim Goll and Ken Gott. It was the day designated to pray for the youth. They began to prophesy about stadiums being filled with young people. I thought this is it, we've got to do something about it. At the end of the meeting I stood up and said, 'I want to receive a sacrificial offering and what we're going to do is give this to youth ministry.' As the meeting came to an end a person came up to me and said, 'God's been dealing with me all morning... I thought I should give this much, then God doubled it, then he trebled it, then quadrupled it. Basically, God's told me we're to give you the money to hire the Reading football stadium.'"

God has shown Rod and Julie favour with the church leaders in Reading. In fact, one of the pastors is the chaplain for the Reading football club. Her vision to call England's youth together for fasting and prayer dominated Julie's thinking. But she had no idea that across the Atlantic God was consuming other people with the same vision. In Pasadena, California, a pastor at the Harvest Rock Church, Lou Engle, had been fasting and praying for revival.

Shortly after the renowned Promise Keepers' 'Stand In The Gap' event held in Washington DC in October 1997, Lou received a prophetic vision of a youth counterpart gathering at the Washington DC mall. Soon he was preaching the vision in youth conferences across America. In the spring of 1999 a lady gave him $100,000 as seed money to get the vision started. Lou, or rather God, was able to persuade the senior pastor of Harvest Rock Church, Che Ahn, to join him in the venture which they dubbed The Call.

Remembered Julie, "I had met Lou Engle a couple of years earlier at a prayer meeting. I had a letter, January/February time, from Lou and Che Ahn about The Call. But I didn't connect with it except there was this Spirit witness when the Holy Spirit touches you. The impregnation in my heart and God's provision didn't come until June. By July we had met up with Reading church leaders. By August we were back in the States. I began to dwell on the enormity of filling Reading football stadium and thought, I don't have faith for this. Then my husband said, 'I'm going to send you and Jamie to The Call. You need to go, you need to be a part of it.' So Jamie (Julie's son) ended up working with Paul Cole, who was the director of the whole thing, working with him as associate producer and helping him on the day."

That momentous day in Washington on September 2nd, 2000 will stay forever in Julie's memory. "I stood backstage absolutely gobsmacked. 400,000 young people fasting and praying. And the Lord said, 'So you have a problem with the Reading football stadium?' And I went, 'No,' in a little voice. Later in the afternoon the Holy Spirit again downloaded on me and said, 'Who will teach the next generation to pray for those in authority? Will you?' It was such a devastating commandment and mandate from the Lord."

It was crystal clear to Julie that the vision she had for the Reading stadium carried the same spirit in fact as The Call. "Rod and I jumped in a car and drove to Pasadena to see Che Ahn and Lou and they said, 'Go for it.. .absolutely go for it' So TheCall England was born. The choice of Reading for TheCall England has, Julie believes, been ordained by God. "What they have in July and August is the Womad Festival and the Reading Rock Festival. So this year (2001), instead of going to the States to see Rod's family, which is what we'd normally do in our summer school break, we went to the Reading Rock Festival. And my heart was broken in a thousand pieces. 55,000-60,000 young people -the real state of our nation faced us. We saw those tens of thousands desperately needing to be shown the way to go. Then everything dropped into place. Just as God had audibly spoken to me in Keith Richards' living room in France in 1972 that 'you are walking where angels fear to tread,' now I was walking in His divine strategy. So it all began to make sense why God would use me, why he taught me a life of prayer and why he had chosen Reading."