Question: Is prayer an extreme sport? If the recent news is anything to go by, then it is fast becoming one! A district nurse who offered to pray for a patient after she had treated her is threatened with dismissal. And a mother who sent round an email to ten friends asking them to pray for her and her 5 year old daughter, who had been reprimanded for talking about God and Jesus to her classmates, is likewise being threatened with losing her part-time job as a school secretary. It seems prayer is a dangerous business and if employers discover you doing it you may lose your job! So much for Britain being a so-called Christian country!

Or maybe this is a jolt for the church to wake up and realise that prayer does change things; it is dynamite in our hands and it does affect the ways of the world. And if Christians have lost touch with the reality of its power, then the world certainly hasn’t and they are very afraid!

Familiarity breeds contempt, goes the old saying, and perhaps we have domesticated the idea of praying so much that we just do it by rote or out of obedience. I remember a ‘gentleman of the road’ who used to visit us regularly at home for a sandwich and a chat. One day when my husband asked him if he could pray for him, our visitor recoiled and pronounced, ‘If you pray, bad things might happen!’

Where did he get that idea from? The trouble is that secretly I find myself believing that ‘nothing might happen’. And which is worse? – a non-believer believing that prayer does things that might not benefit him, or a believer believing that prayer is ineffective? I have a feeling that God looks with more interest on the non-believer!

I’m always amazed at the level of faith that the average unchurched person shows when you offer to pray for their healing, for example. It’s as if they expect God to come up with the goods, and when He does, it is the pray-er who is surprised and all excited! When I asked if I could pray for my Jewish neighbour, who was suffering with a pulled muscle, she went and consulted with her husband and returned saying: ‘I’d really like you to, but my husband says it wouldn’t be a good idea, because I’d get healed and then we’d have to consider the reality of Jesus Christ which would be awkward for us…..’ So that’s maybe why the world doesn’t like prayer…..it puts Jesus Christ back on the radar and people instinctively know that that has further implications for life! And they’re too busy, or too nervous, or too independent to deal with that just now.

But however others respond to the news, we ought to take this wake-up call seriously. Prayer really is dynamite, in fact it’s the weapon of our warfare, that Paul talks about (2 Cor 10:4 NIV) The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We need to get busy subversively and overtly – praying for God’s Kingdom to come on earth so that it's like heaven. The world is waiting.

Ps. It looks as if the nurse is being re-instated and the school secretary might be alright too. The Archbishop of York has spoken up and the so-called Christian heritage is waking up! – and people have been praying of course….!