Showing posts with label Muslim. Show all posts

Colchester Boiler Room has recently sent a team of people off to Turkey. Two of the people from our community have plans to move there in the early part of 2014!

With excitement, anticipation and hope we sent them off as they continue on the first start of this journey.

Those of us left here in good old Colchester held a time of prayer for our Turkey Team. We wanted to pray inspired by the culture and people of Turkey...  in the way they naturally live and are... and then pray they would see Jesus where they are currently at.

Hahaha I wil say that I don't know that much about Turkish culture and I aso didn't have an extensive time to look into it, but the hour of prayer that we had set up went so quickly and was really amazing I thought that I would mention some of it here to help inspire those looking for creative ways to pray.

To begin we started outside the prayer room. We asked people to take their shoes off and as they did to really leave behind all the drama, stresses or worries that might be playing on their mind.

We then went into the prayer room. In Turkey a huge percentage of the population practices the Muslim faith. One aspect of this is to pray 5 times a day. Since we only had an hour we decided to still pray 5 different times through out the hour, which basically meat we set a timer for 10 min intervals and prayed every 10 min! We really loved this because when the timer went off through out the hour we would all stand up and we had chosen a short prayer to read out all together. At first everyone was a bit shy, but by the last few times the timer went off we were all jumping up and shouting out the prayer.

One of the things we really wanted to pray for was Hope. We put a water jug in the middle of the room and went and found little shot glasses (wink wink). We talked about how living lives of hope is about working together, being intentional and sometimes going out of your way to make it happen. So even though there was no water in the room we all needed to grab a little glass and go find water in the house and then bring it back and pour it in the jug until the jug was over flowing.... WITH HOPE WATER!!!

As we started we prayed that as we went out of our way to work together to fill this jug with water that it would be our prayer for the Turkey team that they would be intention, work together and create hope that was over flowing.

This was really great and everyone really got into it and started saying their prayers of hope as they poured their little shot glasses of water into the jug. We also let ourselves be inspired by the activity and prayed for people not to be discouraged by the messiness of gathering hope to over flowing (we did have a few spills of water... my bad!!) ... and also we thanked God for the joy of all working together to  create hope as we started cheers-ing the cups before we poured the water glasses as well!

Then we wanted to create a Turkish Rug!!! we didn't have any classic abilities to weave rugs, but we grabbed some big pieces of paper and cut them in to strips and let each color of paper represent a different person on the Team. we wrote our prayers down for each person and then worked together to weave them altogether.

Before we knew it the hour was over and we were really amazed at how God worked together and we pray that the Turkey Team is blessed and much hope and unity is found and overflowing.

For those of you who didn't know, Ramadan is a time that Muslim people set aside a whole month to fast and pray. This is really important to Muslim people because the Muslim Faith has 5 'must do' or 'pillars' that help confirm a persons faith and acceptance by God.... and practicing a month of praying and fasting or Ramadan is one of those 5 pillars.

And Also if you didn't know Ramadan is happening right now! From 20th July to 19th of August.

As a Christians, Muslim people should be very very close to our hearts. If you look (and you don't have to look that hard) you will see that our story is one and the same....

Once upon a Bible Story there was a guy named Abraham. He was just your average guy, but God chose him to do something special. God chose Abraham to be a part of His plan to save all the people in the world... (remember when God originally made the world it was suppose to be a place where no bad things happened, but because humans made the mistake of letting evil things (or sin) into the world by choosing bad over God's good i.e. naked man and woman in garden munching down fruit from the tree God asked them not to eat from... #EpicOops... God now had to come up with a way of getting his creation out of the dirty mess we made.)

So back to the Abraham... He agrees that he will be a part of God's rescue plan and then God tells him that the way he is going to do it is through Abraham's family... that Abraham will have a son and that son will have sons and they will have more sons and then... duh duh duh... God will send his own special son through this family into our world to rescue us from the mess we got in.

Abraham was more than happy to hear the plan, but also a little confused. See, he and his wife Sarah were childless and on top of it all God decided to tell Abraham his plan when he and Sarah were much to old to have babies (think of your grandparents and then add a few years!)...

But God told both Sarah and Abraham to just trust him that he would work it out. But ... you guessed it, true to our human nature Sarah and Abraham just had a hard time trusting that God could work this miracle child into their story... So they decided to take matters into their own hands... Sarah told Abraham to sleep with her servant girl and to get her preggo. Abraham did it and the servant girl, Hagar, became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy named Ishmael.

But this wasn't what God had promised. He had promised that Abraham and Sarah would have a baby... not Abraham and Hagar. And to top it off once Hagar had her baby Sarah couldn't stand the sight of her or the baby and started to treat them horribly (even though this was all her idea to begin with!).

God reminds Sarah and Abraham what he promised and soon Sarah becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby boy they name Isaac. Isaac goes on to have twins name Esau and Jacob... Jacob goes on to have twelve sons who become the 12 tribes of Israel... the 2nd born of this twelve is Judah who descendants have the famous King David (yep the boy that killed the giant Goliath) who's descendants have Mary and Joseph who become the parents of Jesus, God's promised child to rescue our world...

The End....


If only it was all that simple.... but see the one thing that humans keep forgetting is that their actions and re-actions to God's plans have consequences. God is in control of his plan and what is going on, but he isn't a puppet master. He lets us choose what we will do and also the fall out from that. If we choose to get involved in God's plan the fall out is God's amazing blessing. If we choose the opposite it often brings with it issues that make things complicated, but still not impossible for God to work out his plan... but way more complicated.

Remember Ishmael... well Ishmael goes on to have loads of kids too and his descendants believe that Ishmael was the child God promised. This has caused loads of tension between these two families... and that tension has continued as the two families have tried to tell the story of God's plan... one family divided by a moment in time when humans decided again that we knew better than God.

Ishmael's descendants have continued in their faith and are known as Muslims. Isaac's descendants have continued in their faith and are known as Christians. One family broken by humans trying to work out the promises of God through their own power instead of trusting God in his. 


Both believe in the same God, but struggle to clearly understand and see who and what are God's promises. Muslims have missed that Jesus is the promised child because they are two caught up in trying to earn their place in God's story. Christians often miss the full importance of Jesus by failing to make the connection between the Muslim and Christian story of God, as well as failing to honor Jesus through a lack of love and care for Muslims.


So, Why do we pray for Muslim people?

we pray for them because if we look back at the story we realize that they are our closet brothers and sisters.

we pray for them because we realize that, through no fault of their own, they are often mistreated and hated.

we pray for them because often the way Christians treat Muslims completely dis-honors the Jesus we claim is their savior and loves them unconditionally.

we pray for them because they are so near to the story of God that its hard for them to see how Jesus is more than just a prophet but is actually the promised child of their and our great ancestor Abraham.

we pray for them because just like us before Jesus came and took our place, we to felt like it was through deeds and good works that we had to earn our relationship with God and it was hard... even impossible... and we want them to experience the freedom of knowing that Jesus has completed every law on our behalf and we are free now to just be in relationship with the one true God we all love and pray too.

we pray for them because we love them!

Join Colchester Boiler Room on 17th August 2012, 8p to midnight to pray during this season of Ramadan for our Muslim brothers and sisters. We all have much to learn and praying for broken families to be re-united is exactly the love Jesus died for us to show!

message me at rockstartina83@gmail.com to get involved.