A different kind of party
Recently God changed my plans for election night and inspired me to spend my night praying for each constituency and every MP. So we opened up Boon Café and Zoom for a watch party focused on prayer over punditry.
After the polls closed and before the results started to come in we prayed and worshipped. I had planned to bring Post Its and give space to lament over policies and poor governance. But I forgot them. And that was a blessing. There was still space to mentally and emotionally clear our prayer decks without spending too long on the shortcomings of the past. Fixing our eyes on Jesus was a much better way to spend our time before the first result popped up.
When it did I was grateful to Philip Brown and Alasdair Rae at Automatic Knowledge for sharing the hex map in a number of formats. Every time we prayed for an MP we could add a heart to our A0 poster, as well as automatically to the web app I’d built with the help of ChatGPT and data from Democracy Club1.
In the lull after the first results we went to our homes, and a few stayed on Zoom for varying lengths of time. I knew I would be on all night because I had fallen in love with praying for every single newly elected MP.
Time flies when you’re having fun praying
I hadn’t actually thought about how long it would take to pray for 650 MPs. Simple maths would have told me 11 hours would have been a ballpark, assuming a minute each and non-stop prayer). It actually took me until 1600 on Friday to pray for 648 people (with a couple of outstanding results to come).
Rinse Repeat?
If you spend 16 hours praying for people starting the same job then inevitably your prayers become a bit samey. That’s especially true if you also know very little about 90% of the places or the people. There were moments of praying for the health and welfare of Parliament as a working environment. For hoping that a big majority and a united party might allow space for greater multi-party collaboration. That Parliament’s Christians would look to pray for and disciple one another as Christians first, representatives of their parties second.
If I did know something about the person or the place it was because of some sort of public profile. And to be honest, it wasn’t usually a good one.
This was one of the best surprises about being obedient to the vision God gave me. He’d said pray prophetically, as encouragement, for each of these MPs, all of whom God is head over heels in love with. No policies, no politics. No wider hopes for governing well. Just a simple ask. Well, simple in theory but much harder in practice, especially when a couple of infamous faces cropped up early on.
As my praying continued there was an absolute transformation in my whole attitude. I can’t tell you how genuinely wonderful it was to pray with joy over some of those who came on screen. In fact, there was a beautiful freedom in the repentance of my having reduced them to caricatures, and less than the beloved children of God that they are, and always will be.
My prayer for each MP
And those moments led me to a pattern in my prayers:
- Start by thanking God for them and expressing my love for them, and celebrating all the ways their lives have reflected being made in God’s image in the past, and all the ways they will do so in the future
- Celebrating God’s love for them, his knowledge of them, and his desire for relationship with them
- Asking God that someone would tell them about God’s great love for them
- Praying that as they learn about God and come to know Him that they would love him and in return desire deeper relationship and fellowship
- In that process expecting the Kingdom of God come into their life. As God establishes the Kingdom in their lives, would they be so excited to be transformed into His likeness
- As God builds his Kingdom in them that it would transform everything in their lives: their families, their friends, their communities, their Parliamentary colleagues, and the way they serve their constituencies.
- Finally I would pray for the church in their constituencies to be a strong foil for their work. To welcome and invite and love their MP while advocating, championing and challenging on behalf of that place.
- And that as MPs and churches seek God’s heart for these places that the Kingdom would come and lives would be transformed, renewed, revived, restored, and all the other things found where God is at work.
Don’t stop me now, I’m having such a good time
I think it impossible to spend such a long period of time spent in prophetic encouragement and not feel full of optimism and hope about God’s Kingdom and the partnering role of good governance as a mechanism for justice, mercy and grace.
If you’re sceptical, there are ample opportunities to give it a go. You could start with the 577 members of the Assemblée nationale in the week ahead.2 What other response can I have to the success of Le Pen and the National Rally except to pray for her and her colleagues to encounter the love of God and fall in love with His Kingdom?
I am convicted about how casual and perfunctory our prayers can be for those who govern us. We begrudgingly do it. Rarely do we consider authorities to be “ministers of God“. And even setting aside their roles, rarely do we start from where God does – the same absolute delight and adoration for these individuals as he does you and I.
This last week of tramping the pavement and praying for Croydon and then praying over our new Parliament has been incredibly encouraging on a personal level and I trust also impactful spiritually too.
This is definitely something I’m going to repeat in the future. And I’m going to be praying these things accompany every election, everywhere.
