Nomad, Christian community, mission and the future of the church.

Hello and welcome to Nomad podcast. On this month's show, I'll be having a chat about prayer and mission with Pete Gregg.

And then we will be thinking on what he has said and discussing it together afterwards.

Our very special guest on this month's Nomad podcast is Pete Gregg, a man synonymous with the 24-7 prayer movement.

And we usually start these interviews by listing the credentials and qualifications of our guests.

But let me just say this, Pete Gregg is a man who when you hear him speak,

if you're a Christian, you kind of wish you weren't a Christian,

so you could become a Christian again.

And I have to admit to go into a few ropy Christian conferences over the years that have been transformed into life-changing experiences

because later in the week, Pete Gregg has popped up as one of the

speakers. So Pete, it's a real privilege to have you on the show this month. You're very kind, Nick.

I'll try not to be ropey. We wanted to chat to you a little bit about prayer in the context of mission

and community and church and things like that. A lot of people will know you as the man who was partly behind the 24-7 prayer movement. So maybe you could just tell us a little bit about

how that whole thing came about. Sure, yeah, I'd planted two churches. There were

submissional communities, relatively experimental. We were focusing on youth and students and meeting in bars and so on.

And kind of people were interested in what we were doing. This is before people kind of were talking a lot about

missional community or even church planting. And you know I was being invited to go and speak at conferences and things

like that because we had DJs leading worship and whatever. But something became deeply

dissatisfied in my soul. I think it was simply that my own spiritual experience was shallow.

And I just realized that the key issue was prayer. I needed to learn to stop

outsourcing prayer and get to know God for myself and learn to hear his voice for myself and

stop surfing off everybody else's stories. And this is someone who'd planted two churches

...