Mark Ireland's Blog

Prayer requests from the V Festival

Here are just a few of the 210 serious prayer requests left on our prayer tree at the V festival. The team have shared out all the requests and will be continuing to pray for them over the next week.

Please let there be a God

For inspiration and guidance as I enter a new phase of my life

I wish that my Dad can know that I am thinking of him and that I love him.

Please pray for the good health of Justin, Terri and Jacob

Pray for happiness in the world

Middle East

Please forgive me for what I have done, I am deeply sorry

My

Nan

is ill in hospital at the moment, please pray for her as I can’t be with her.

Pray for my family - support them financially and through the changes happening in their lives

V Festival 2006

Just got back from an incredible weekend with the team running the Spirit tent at the V Festival at Weston Park near Stafford. This year, despite the downpours, our free gift of water was received even more than last year, with around 6,000 cups given out - over double last year's figure. People continue to be taken aback that we offer something completely free with no strings attached. This year we had many more conversations and activities outside the tent but the chill zone and prayer stations inside the tent were less busy than last year. 210 people left prayer requests on our prayer tree, most sincere and many of them deeply moving. We gave out some excellent tracts from Lifewords and our own specially designed leaflet with web addresses to visit to find out more about Christian spirituality and about Jesus. We were particularly encouraged by the increase in the number of festival goers joining the team for our Sunday morning communion service. Last year only 3 people joined us for the service, but this year we decided to gather outside the tent and 13 joined us for the whole service and another 9 came for part of it, while others listened in at a distance.

We again had an excellent location on the main thoroughfare, with lots of people around touting for business and selling alcohol in industrial quantities. There were more stalls than last year offering herbal highs and dodgy stimulants. We had a new neighbour behind us with a loud microphone, the Lynx Boost Manwash, promoting a new body wash by persuading men to strip to their underpants on stage and have four bikini-clad girls rub in the bodywash and then hose them down. We realised it would be hard to have a devotional atmosphere for communion with the commentary from this stage blasting out, so I was deputed to go (in my dog collar) and persuade the organisers to schedule a break for 45 minutes whilst we had our service. It turned out that the compere is a Roman Catholic and happily gave several plugs for our communion service over his microphone! When you are about God's work it is amazing he provides 'persons of peace' in the strangest of places. 

The aim of the Spirit tent is to offer festival goers a space to chill and to explore spirituality. Our amazing team of 12 volunteers worked their socks off, serving people with water, talking to them about their hopes and fears, and introducing them to the different prayer stations. They all took turns leading our twice daily times of prayer in the tent, and also praying for people as the opportunity arose. Our inspiration, as last year, was found in the account of Paul's experience in Athens in Acts 17.

Although he was troubled by the idolatry all around him, he took the Christian message out into the market place, and began not by condemning his hearers' ignorance, but commending their efforts to find God and showing that he took their culture seriously by quoting from some of their own writings. Having met his listeners on their own ground he goes on to explain to them the good news about Jesus and the resurrection and ends with a challenge to repent and respond.

Taste and See

Yesterday a brilliant team helped me run the Spirit tent in the centre of Walsall, as part of an event hosted by churches in the town offering people of all ages and backgrounds a taste of fresh expressions of church and of worship. Our tent was modelled on what we did at the V Festival last August, and was 'a place to chill and to explore spirituality'. Giving out free water to passers by, we collected prayer requests on our prayer tree and invited people into the tent to try out a variety of interactive prayer stations. Many passers by stopped to talk and to pray, and a number took follow-up cards from the Christian Enquiry Agency.

When you step out in faith like this you expect some opposition or ridicule. In fact the only opposition we received was from a group of Christians from a very strict local house church who spent a large part of the afternoon coming in and out of the tent and engaging us in argument, telling us that we were leading people astray with 'new age' touchy-feely ideas, when we should be preaching the Word and warning people of God's judgement.

This raises for me an important tension. As evangelists we are called to take risks to get alongside people and present the gospel in the culture and language they will understand - Paul is doing exactly that in Athens in Acts 17, where he quotes from pagan authors to support his argument. However we also need to maintain contact with the rest of the church, so that we don't go out on a limb and leave them behind or start to misrepresent the message - see for example Paul's tense relationship with Peter and the Jerusalem church in Galatians. What rather saddened me on Saturday was reading a prayer left on the prayer tree by one of these particular Christians praying that I would see the light and turn to Christ before it is too late!

Da Vinci Code

Just off to Stafford to take part in an evening on The Da Vinci Code organised by local churches. What are my thoughts as I prepare to sit on the panel?

1. I enjoyed reading the novel - it is a real page-turner. It's great that it's got people talking about Jesus, and I hope that it will really encourage people to go on and read the Bible - it's always good to get back to the earliest sources.

2. I am fascinated by those who want to take it as more than a novel. When I was a teenager many people wouldn't take the Gospels seriously because it was all too much to believe, whereas today some people who have rejected the Bible as a source are willing to accept things infinitely harder to believe with hardly a shred of historical evidence. Was it CS Lewis who said, "When people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe anything"?

3. The novel fits into a mood in our culture. Langdon says to Sophie near the end of the film, "What you believe is what matters". People prefer to make up their own minds, even about subjects where they know little, rather than trust the experts. However a sad fact of history is that those in power cannot always be trusted to tell the truth!

4. The picture of Jesus in the Gospels is much more exciting and deep than the novel suggests - see for example the radical way he treats women in what was then a very patriarchal society.

Inaugural post

Here I am exploring a new technology at last. I always thought blogging was the same as bragging, only on the internet! However if you can't beat them, join them. I am keen to use this space to interact with others who have a passion for evangelism and using every form of communication to celebrate the love of God as we encounter him in Jesus. One of the things that fascinate me at present is the way that people who don't have any contact with church are often asking deeply spiritual questions - what happens after we die, the universe - accident or design, what about suffering? I have recently contributed to a book based on research in this area called 'Evangelism in a Spiritual Age'.

On Saturday I shall be taking a team to Walsall town centre to staff a tent called Spirit between St. Paul's Church and the Post Office. The aim of the tent is to provide 'space to chill and to explore spirituality', offering free drinks of water to passers by and inviting people in to chill. Inside the tent there will be a variety of prayer stations for people to engage with. We did something similar at the V Festival at Weston Park last August, and were amazed by the response.