An opportunity to explore and experience different ways to pray was the focus of the Prayer Festival that took place on Saturday 7 June at the St Benedict’s Centre.
Photo: A selection of finger labyrinths
Organised by Susanne Carlsson, Coordinator of the Diocese’s Spirituality Network, 120 people from across the diocese came to enjoy a day of learning and connection with God.
“Everyone has their own unique way of praying; there are no rights and wrongs,” says Susanne.
“However, the way that works best for each person will change and evolve, depending on our stage in life and circumstances. Offering some fresh inspiration is what this day has been all about”
Falling with the 10-day global prayer initiative, Thy Kingdom Come, (which runs from Ascension to Pentecost), the Prayer Festival included workshops on a range of prayer practices.
From Christian meditation, praying with icons, and creative writing as prayer, to sessions on pilgrimage, praying with clay, and Celtic prayer.
Photo: A delegate enjoys practising creative writing as prayer outside
The monastic tradition of silent prayer was also explored with Mother Anne, Abbess of the community of Benedictine nuns at Malling Abbey.
Some of those who attended were students from the Medway University Campus, who were accompanied by the Medway Campus Anglican chaplain, Lynne Martin.
Photo: The group from the Medway University Campus enjoy the surroundings of the Abbey
For student, Mercy, the day was an answer to prayer itself:
"Since the beginning of this year I have been longing for a deeper relationship with God, not the church or anything like that but one-on-one; me and the Holy Spirit kind of real intimacy... An opportunity to attend the prayer festival yesterday came as an answer to this thirst."
She particularly enjoyed the session on Christian Meditation:
“With guidance from the session lead, God used a few hours of the day to move my spirit to a completely new realm. I have a foundation and tools that I can keep building on as I progress onto the deep that is calling to deep.”
Emeka, found the praying with clay session a real inspiration:
“One thing I took away was when the minister explained how pottery is made, [by] heating of the clay in a 1250°C kiln and sometimes the clay might need this process more than once, but the potter knows what he's doing.
Photo: Holding pottery prayer bowls
“It was a call to me personally where I thought, 'It doesn't matter if I go through the fire, the same God that assures me in Isaiah 43:2 that the fire will not consume me, is the same God forging me into His divine image and I should trust in Him.'"
In his keynote speech, Bishop Simon Burton-Jones said that modern life posed challenges to a fruitful and healthy prayer life:
“The culture we live in always plays a big role in how we live for Jesus, for better or for worse. And today’s culture is changing more rapidly than perhaps at any point in human history.
"Changing in ways that is impacting on our desire and ability to pray in ways we haven’t really figured out yet.”
He said these include the endless scrolling on social media, information overload, and the anxiety caused by the urgency of the online world, mean we are constantly distracted, overwhelmed, and exhausted.
For those present, Bishop Simon offered an encouragement to lay aside any feelings of failure because God is always ready to meet us, we just need to open ourselves to the opportunity:
“Being undefended in our relationship with God is the place to start. We…tend to create stories about our lives that we wrap around us like a force field against the criticism of others…But if this force field is in place in our relating to God, we are at risk of developing the kind of polite and artificial relationship we have with people we don’t know well.
He added:
“If you come to this day with a nagging sense of guilt or vague and ill-defined feelings of failure – the belief that your prayer life isn’t what it should be - please let go of that. Lay it before God. He knows us inside out. And here’s the thing: he meets us with boundless grace.”
Click to read Bishop Simon's address in full
**Interested in exploring different ways to pray? The Prayer Pack Book is now available offering 12 ways to pray. Find out more
Bishop Simon's Address for the Prayer Festival
We all come to a day like this with different feelings. That you are here suggests you are serious about prayer and open to new ways of expressing it.
Being undefended in our relationship with God is the place to start. We don’t know ourselves perfectly and tend to create stories about our lives that we wrap around us like a force field against the criticism of others.
Stories where we are in the right. But if this force field is in place in our relating to God, we are at risk of developing the kind of polite and artificial relationship we have with people we don’t know well.
If you come to this day with a nagging sense of guilt or vague and ill-defined feelings of failure – the belief that your prayer life isn’t what it should be - please let go of that. Lay it before God. He knows us inside out. And here’s the thing: he meets us with boundless grace.
Everyone’s prayer life is imperfect, surprise, surprise. What has gone before is forgiven. There’s an old adage that we can only meet with God in the present moment. And this is our moment.
But before we reflect on what it means to pray for the mission of God, I want to start with our environment. The culture we live in always plays a big role in how we live for Jesus, for better or for worse.
And today’s culture is changing more rapidly than perhaps at any point in human history. Changing in ways that is impacting on our desire and ability to pray in ways we haven’t really figured out yet.
You may be familiar with these statistics, but let me remind you of them. We now generate as much information every ten minutes as the first ten thousand generations of humanity combined.
If that doesn’t blow you away because you reckon the first few thousand generations just grunted at each other, then listen to this: between 2010 and 2020, the amount of information we consumed globally went up twentyfold.
By the time the pandemic began, you were looking at twenty times more information each day than you were a decade earlier.
Our brains have not evolved in that time and so this information has overwhelmed us like a tsunami. Have we really stopped to think what this is doing to our relationship with God? On our ability to pray?
Researchers carried out an experiment, where they put several people in a room on their own with nothing else to do but sit there for fifteen minutes. A majority admitted feeling uncomfortable with little but their thoughts to console them.
The experiment was repeated, only this time an instrument was placed in the room that could administer an unpleasant electric shock. In the fifteen minute period, one in four women self-administered the shock to relieve the boredom. Two in three men did.
We live in an attention economy where the goal of social media is to distract us from doing anything other than endlessly scrolling down feeds. Speaking of the smartphone, Ed Smith, director of the Institute of Sports Humanities, says:
'Living inside today’s avalanche of artfully packaged digital information makes it hard to attend to anything. The convergence of work, leisure, utilities, entertainment and personal brand into one device leaves us at the mercy of almost involuntary glances and clicks.'
We should all be familiar now with the way social media makes us angry and polarised, neither of which states are conducive to prayer. But there are two further outcomes less spoken of.
The first, made by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation, is that smartphones create anxiety by undermining the capacity for sustained attention.
The second is the suggestion by Chris Hayes in his book The Sirens’ Call that the reason everyone says they are so jaded all the time now is because this new smartphone culture is using up so much energy.
The average daily time spent on social media alone across the world is 2 hours and 20 minutes. This time is making us more distracted, anxious and fearful – states of mind that could almost have been engineered to stop us leading prayerful lives.
We need to create spaces in the day, the week or the season where we either switch our phones off or put them out of reach in another room. One creative way of resisting the pull of the phone is to create our own digital rule of life. An ethic by which to guide us.
I’ll leave you with those thoughts about the environment. St Paul says we should work out our salvation; we have been given agency in this. A chance to co-operate with the Holy Spirit. However digitally addicted we are becoming, there is always scope to resist, to re-shape our environment in the character of God.
To pray means we must be prepared to wait. This is something I do not find easy. Yes, I have a busy life, but so do most people.
There is a funny thing in the way we approach our daily prayer time. This may take different forms for each of us, but the basic structure is that we set some time aside to meet with God, and then we end that time to move on with the day. In other words, we set the parameters of our meeting with God.
Imagine being invited to meet with King Charles. You know how it would work. You would be given an invitation to attend one of the palaces at a certain time. You would be expected to arrive early; in reality, you wouldn’t dream of arriving late.
If the king were late to that meeting, you would accept that because of his status.
And yet we approach the king of kings on our own terms. Here I am, God, it’s time to talk. I’m off now, God, work to do. Instead of royalty, we treat him more like an elderly relative we drop in on before bustling on with the rest of the day.
Of course, we have to schedule time with God, otherwise it won’t happen. But the merciless way we arrange our days and our diaries can spill over into our encounter with God. We become focussed on the tasks at hand, but God then slips from our minds entirely until the day’s end.
It’s not that we should expect to think of God all the time. We are in a covenant relationship with him and it is like another covenant – marriage. We don’t think about our spouses every minute of the day and we only get space to talk to them from time to time during it, but we are still in a covenant relationship with them.
And so it is with God.
But our prayer times are meant to unlock the door on the daily encounter with God, to broaden our horizons so we see him in the margins, not just in the task at hand. We need to treasure silence, too.
This is another commodity in short supply today as people fill every waking moment with noise. Silence can be uncomfortable, which makes it even more valuable because it is in the edgy spaces of life that we mature.
When I had a sabbatical in the summer of 2024, I imagined I was going to use the time to intercede in prayer, but something else happened which was disconcerting at first. I found I just didn’t have the words.
Every time I opened my mouth to pray, my tongue wouldn’t co-operate. I was, literally, speechless. I wondered, what was going on?
My first reaction was that my prayer life must have become so thin that, faced with more time, I didn’t have the resources left to do this. But after a few days, I came to the conclusion God wanted me simply to rest in his presence.
To be aware of him in creation. To celebrate his nature. To simply be. One thing I knew to be true: like many busy people, my prayer life had become an agenda of to do things that I was looking to God for help for.
We all do that, of course, but when it becomes your default setting, you end up expecting to co-opt God into your plans rather than the other way round.
All prayer begins in the heart of God, and when we wait and listen for God, rather than issuing a series of requests, we find that prayer seems to drop into our hearts from nowhere.
It feels much more authentic, like we have rested on God’s chest and found the heartbeat of the Holy Spirit slow our own heart down to his speed.
My speechlessness in prayer felt like a withdrawal from a frontline of ministry; a place of recuperation. At least that’s what I thought, until I shared this with the sisters here at Malling Abbey and Mother Anne observed that rather than being withdrawn from the frontline, she thought I was actually being brought back to the frontline. I really took to that.
The thing about waiting for God patiently and quietly, is that it makes us more alert to his promptings when we are over-stimulated. The model we tend to use is Elijah’s, where God’s voice is not to be found in the overwhelming natural phenomena of earthquake, wind and fire, but in the sheer silence which follows it. But these silences are few and far between today.
Thankfully, this does not trouble God, who always finds a way. One of the deepest ways I heard the voice of God recently was sitting in a multiplex cinema, during a trailer for a new Marvel film which was painfully ear-splitting with its thumps and crashes. God speaks in the earthquake too. And the wind. And the fire.
It’s for good reason that in Isaiah 55, God’s word is said to be like rain and snow. Water gets everywhere; you just can’t keep it out. It always finds a way.
But a word about busyness before we move on. Some people in this world are horribly deprived of time and space. They might have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, be caring round the clock for a dependent relative or consumed by a professional role that demands their soul as a price for their salary.
Pray for such people, when we have the quiet space to do this. And remember in your own busyness when you do not feel you have time to pray. Often what we are doing in life is the answer to someone else’s prayer of intercession.
Work can be a form of prayer, the cutting edge of a spiritual weapon.
But what exactly is intercession? Dictionaries say it is to come between two parties or act as a mediator or advocate. There are moments when life is going so badly for other people that our instinct it to say: ‘come on, Lord, do something, this can’t go on!’.
In this urgent way, we come between God and someone else, acting as their advocate. And there is no better person to be an advocate for than one who is voiceless in this world. Someone must speak up for them. Even if they are not getting a hearing on earth, they will in heaven.
When we pray for others, there is often an emotional connection to be made which is costly. To intercede in prayer for others is not to skate quickly and smoothly over the frozen ice, but to break the ice and dip our legs into the freezing waters below and stay there until we feel the pain too.
For some, there is an even more radical identification to be made. The twentieth century Welsh intercessor, Rees Howells showed this. Intercession was his life’s ministry. If he felt called to pray for people living on one meal a day, he would live on one meal a day.
An advocate works best when they identify with the one they plead for. I realise this kind of prayer may feel like it is beyond us, but the more effort we make in identifying with other people’s suffering, the more fruitful our prayers may be.
It is at this point that we see how difficult intercession is, and why so few people pursue it in any depth, because intercessory prayer is one of the purest forms of dying to self we can ever make.
Jesus called us to be persistent in prayer, telling the story of the widow who wouldn’t stop bothering the dodgy judge until he gave her justice. We remember the people of Israel circling Jericho time after time and imagine our prayers for the mission of God are a bit like a battering ram that keeps ramming locked doors until they give.
But there is another side to intercessory prayer that is rooted in the gift of knowledge or intuition. We don’t need to flatten the front door when the back door is actually open, if only we would try it.
The odd, incidental, opportunistic prayer can work wonders in demolishing problems – a bit like pulling out just one can in a carefully stacked tower of cans can bring the whole lot crashing to the ground.
We should be imaginative. We often talk about problems in life in terms of there being presenting issues which mask what is really going on. Too often in our prayers, we address the presenting issue as if it is the one that needs prayer, when what is concealed actually needs our attention.
This is where the gifts of knowledge and wisdom come into their own.
One of the outcomes of the digital revolution has been an unwelcome tide of guilt and helplessness among Christians. They hear about suffering from every corner of the world within minutes of it happening and – wanting to intercede because they care about other people – end up with a ‘to do’ list as long as the U.N. Secretary-General’s.
This cannot be sustained and inevitable failure is followed by a guilty conscience. I cannot believe this is what God intends.
As consumers of news we are in unconscious thrall to the priorities of TV news editors. We rarely assess the medium through which the message is passed and take its authority for granted. Only so much news can go into thirty minutes every evening and there is a tendency for the news rooms to move on to the next disaster before the implications of the last one are fully felt by the victims.
And this process is horribly accelerated on social media, where more people now get their news. This form of global attention deficit may have its own rationale for news channels, but the outcome is, as the Canadian philosopher Michael Ignatieff has noted, that we experience pain for other people intensely, but only transiently.
A hundred years ago people did not find out about suffering in other parts of the world until months or years after the event – and sometimes not at all. This alone should make us think about what God is really calling us to pray about. God calls us to love him with all our hearts and with all our minds and perhaps this gives us the clues we need.
When faced with news from outside our personal experience, one way in which we can love God with our heart is to immerse ourselves in prayer for the people for whom we feel especially deeply.
Perhaps this is for the mother of a teenage knife victim because we are parents or grandparents of teenagers ourselves; perhaps it is because we once visited a country now in crisis or know people living there or originating from there. We each have our particular concerns in life and God has usually given us them for a reason.
At the same time he has called us to love him with our mind. Sometimes we need to think intelligently about what we should be praying about. This means taking a more analytical approach to news gathering and not just following where the TV cameras go.
There are 130 countries in which neither Reuters nor Associated Press have a TV bureau. Most TV channels are dependent on these two outlets for news, so you can see the limitations we face.
One example of this might be choosing to pray for Christians living in countries where they routinely suffer violence and discrimination. We do not hear much about this on the news but agencies like the Barnabas Fund have excellent resources to help us pray for persecuted Christians. Another example is in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
War crimes are perpetrated daily in the east of the country, but we do not think much about them because we do not see any TV footage (the risk, expense and geography working against journalists). ‘Out of sight, in my mind’ is a good heading for such prayers. Where never gets our attention?~
We surely have to set some kind of informal cap on what we intercede for so that we can be fruitful in what we will. It is similar to the kind of response we make to charity.
Week after week we receive invitations through the post to give to particular charities. If we gave to them all we would be spreading our commitments so thinly as to be meaningless. Choosing a limited number of charities we have a heart and a mind for is usually what we do – and the same principle might apply to intercession.
So, we should not feel guilty about not praying for everything. Our prayers will be most effective where our heart and mind lead us.
God will prompt others to pray for the things we do not, just as he prompts us to pray for the things they do not. We cannot be messianic about prayer because only one man has that role: ‘it is Christ Jesus…who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us’ (Romans 8: 34).
But what is happening when prayer is not answered?
We avoid the use of words like success and failure in the life of faith because we find other words are employed by scripture, like faithfulness or fruitfulness. There are good reasons for resisting the idea of success and failure because the adoption of a secular view on this is just a step away.
But when prayer goes unanswered, it can feel very personal, as if it is a failure in some way. I say ‘unanswered prayer’ but this is also questionable. I don’t think God turns a deaf ear to the prayers of the faithful. That is the mark of a false idol.
Frequently in the Psalms we see false idols mocked for their inability to see or hear and God is always distinguished from them. So what is happening when we feel like our prayers came to nothing?
Well, here are four possibilities:
Firstly, God answers some prayers in unexpected ways – we just don’t notice it. Our minds are only able to hold one or two ideas in place at any one time and when we pray we only imagine one or two ways God might deal with the question.
But God is infinite; the I AM of eternity is capable of a flexibility and inventiveness in his response which defies our imagination. He is drawing all things towards the hope of a new heaven and a new earth. If we find it hard to imagine how he will ultimately achieve this, we shouldn’t be surprised if we struggle sometimes with the next step in our own lives and the lives of those we pray for.
In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter was imprisoned by Herod shortly after the execution of James. The church ‘prayed fervently to God for him’ and yet when Peter miraculously escapes and turns up to the prayer meeting in his honour, they ridicule Rhoda for saying Peter is at the door.
If the early Church, at the zenith of its powers, couldn’t see that Peter escaping from prison might be one outcome of their prayers, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when we miss the answer God has given.
Many of us don’t see much of some of our younger relatives from one year to the next and we are always surprised by how much they have grown in the meantime. In our mind, they are still the same size they were a year ago. In the same way, we can be locked in prayer on a situation that spiritually God is changing out of all recognition, but we don’t notice it until much later.
The second risk we face in prayer is that God answers these prayers in ways we were hoping for, but we forgot we asked for it in the first place. We all forget to do something we have been asked to do or something we have been told from time to time; it’s human nature. And yet somehow we imagine we’ll never forget the things we say to God.
Our attention span is short and it is getting much shorter in today’s digital culture. To God, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day, as the first epistle of Peter tells us. By comparison, our powers of recall are like a goldfish swimming round a fish tank.
A little self-awareness in this respect should tell us that a lot more prayer is probably being answered than we give credit for.
A greater challenge to us is when God delays answering our intercessions for a reason that will become clear or for a reason which doesn’t. Many people who have worked in some professional capacity or other has faced a situation where they know something but are not able to share the news with other people for some time.
When other people get to know about it, they can be cross and questioning that this information was not shared earlier, but there are often good reasons why it was not: perhaps because not everything was in place or because someone would have been harmed.
If we face these dilemmas in our limited way, should we be surprised that God is not always able to give us the answer we want immediately? And such is God’s almighty nature, there must be times when he delays giving us what we are looking for, for reasons he cannot describe to human beings
The final dilemma around the apparent failure of prayer is when we absolutely do not obtain what we sought.
A desire for healing which did not emerge is a good example. We may plead with God, standing side by side with the people we are interceding for, and yet their continuing suffering sits uneasily with all we know about God’s care for us and the promises which attend the prayers of the faithful.
Why has God not given us what we asked for, because we felt to our bones that we were asking it in his name? There are reasons we will never know and it’s the not knowing that is always hardest to bear. We somehow have to trust in God’s goodness and love. ‘Even though he slays me, yet will I trust in him’ said Job.
Every believer has to make provision in their faith for this, to be ready to endure the worst and still make the sacrifice of praise. Three exiled Israelites made this allowance as they readied themselves to be thrown into the blazing furnace prepared by King Nebuchadnezzar.
We will not bow down to the statue you have made, they told the king, because we will only worship God. Perhaps God will save us from the furnace, but even if he doesn’t, you should know we will continue to trust in him rather than the statue you have made.
It is a resounding testimony.
I expect they bore witness to truth from the same mouth which was going horribly dry and out of a heart which was turning to jelly with the anticipation of what lay ahead. Sometimes the faith we cling to, which looks so courageous to others, is like holding on by numb fingertips from the drop below us.
Often we do not acknowledge the impact which seemingly unanswered prayer makes on the way we pray today. Yet this self-knowledge is vital to a robust and honest life of intercession.To intercede is sometimes to fail; to believe is to continue interceding regardless.
Let me finish my address today with a word about overstories. I will explain.
Sequels are two a penny with novels, but less so in non-fiction. Malcolm Gladwell has broken that trend with ‘Revenge of the Tipping Point (Abacus, 2024), a follow up to the riotously successful The Tipping Point published in 2000.
His first book was full of millennial hope and how small interventions can make big differences in culture and society. In keeping with the spirit of the age, his sequel attends to the darker side of tipping points, especially when they are engineered to preserve elite power in varied social settings.
He also talks about how big changes, when they happen, take people by surprise.
In our generation, the collapse of East European communism is a stand out event. The world was full of politicians, advisers, intelligence gatherers, academics and assorted punters who failed to predict even weeks beforehand that the Berlin Wall would be breached; that east and central European countries would become democracies and the Soviet Union cease to exist.
For Malcolm Gladwell, part of the answer lies in the overstory. This is the ‘upper layer of foliage in a forest and the size and density and height of the overstory affect the behaviour and development of every species far below on the forest floor’. We may not like grand narratives in our post-modern world, but we are governed by stories we barely register.
And one of these, for the person of faith, is the coming of the kingdom of God.
The Israelite exiles were languishing in Babylon with the hope of a return to their land just about extinguished, but Daniel, reading the prophecy of Jeremiah, saw the length allotted to this exile was seventy years. He took this promise as the overstory of exile and held God to his word. The people were in despair, but their deliverance was drawing near.
The land was suffering from severe drought when the prophet Elijah knelt down on Mount Carmel to pray for rain. The people had lost all energy and hope, but Elijah still trusted in God.
He asked his servant to look out over the Mediterranean for signs of a change in the weather and was not dissuaded when at first there was no change and that, even at the seventh viewing, there was only a ‘little cloud no bigger than a person’s hand’. Elijah saw rain in a cloudless sky because faith gave him a different overstory.
Elisha, successor to Elijah, was surrounded in his house by a large army of Aramean soldiers tasked with his capture. His servant, understandably, thought there was no escape. But Elisha saw ‘the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around’ and asked God to open the eyes of his servant to this astonishing overstory. The pair was rescued.
We may feel that Daniel, Elijah and Elisha inhabited a different level of trust, but the words of Jesus on the cross shows even he could lose sight of the greatest overstory of all: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? he said. In pain, humiliation and loneliness, Jesus felt abandoned, but he was the faithful servant of the overstory.
Gladwell’s point is that change does not seem to be coming when it is, and that when it arrives it often comes quickly, meaning we are taken completely by surprise. We may be edging ever closer to victory but it feels like we are losing.
Writing in his seminal essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless’ Czech dissident Vaclav Havel said of the Soviet yoke:
‘What if (the brighter future) has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us and kept us from developing it?’
He could have been speaking of the coming kingdom of God.
Jesus told us to be persistent in prayer. We assume this is because we have to keep chipping away at an immovable iceberg, and sometimes we grow discouraged because there appears to be no change. But faith is ‘the conviction of things not seen’. An overstory has already shaped the world around us.
God’s salvation is so very near. And none more so than when we feel all is lost.
Simon Burton-Jones
Bishop of Tonbridge
June 7, 2025