I think I’ve just lived through the longest 9 days of my life. Nothing bad – just the sense that an immense amount is being packed into some fairly short parcels of time.

Last year someone wise (in fact several wise people) prophesied that we in Kent were entering a time of acceleration. For those of you who find yourselves baffled by such pronouncements, I think it was basically a warning that things are speeding up around here. As someone put it last night:

“What used to take months is now taking minutes.”

They say you’ll know a prophet’s integrity by the fulfilment of his words, and on this occasion they werent wrong. I’ve been here for nearly 16 years now, and for most of those years I would expect to attend a particularly ’significant’ prayer meeting about once every 3-4 months, and about twice a year I’d expect to find myself in a church service where the working of the Holy Spirit was powerful to the point of overpowering, so much so that it was breaking out into the supernatural.

In the past nine days I have attended three ground-breaking prayer meetings, and two ‘outpourings’ in church meetings. By my reckoning, that’s at least a year’s journey in just over one week!

It all started last Friday (9th May). I went looking for a little Pentecostal church which meets in one of our oldest city centre churches. I got lost, which is a rare occurrence, so just gave Hugo his head, as it were, and prayed wherever I found myself walking. Turns out I had managed to walk somewhere where I should never have been able to walk to given the direction I started out… but that’s another story. I am assuming it was useful to God in some way!

Having found myself again, and faced the problem that I really didn’t know exactly where to find the place (and ‘exactly’ is quite important for me and Hugo), I nearly gave up and went home, only to receive a call from someone who had seen me wandering around earlier, and wondered if I was heading for said meeting. I took that as a sign that I probably should go!

I did… along with 45 others who don’t normally go. God’s power was tangible, evident and almost overwhelming. Not quite what I’d expected of 11pm on a Friday night.

Then came Sunday – the Global Day of Prayer. With a name like that, you can expect something good, I always think. We in Canterbury gathered on the university campus a-top the hill, hosted by one of our other Pentecostal churches. The event was entitled ‘Fresh Fire’… and there was… in abundance. The kind of passionate, unflinching, outward-looking prayer we rarely see in this city.

Then came Wednesday, and a Hope 08 Prayer Celebration. People from umpteen different churches, gathered not in a church but in one of our secondary schools, to pray for young people and those who work with them in our city. Unprecedented on so many counts!

Then Saturday, and the second of our ‘Momentum’ events, held in Herne Bay. I walked in to find far more people than I’d expected (I should be used to that by now!), yet also a slight sense of uncomfortableness given that the group was splendidly ecclectic and most of us didn’t really know most other people! But waddaya do when God has asked you to tick on in prayer? Well you pray. By the end of the evening we were like old praying buddies! I think I’ve rarely seen a prayer meeting go from cold to scold so quickly ! That’ll be that acceleration again then.

Nine days later, with Friday 9th feeling like a world or two away, I ended this remarkable run at a meeting of another Canterbury church. We heard Rob Rufus preach, but to tell you what he said would be to defeat the object of why he said it. What it is worth telling you is that, yet again, I have rarely known power so tangible and so active here. There was a wonderful freedom to do and be whatever God’s Spirit was stirring up in you; there was the familiar range of unusual physical reactions to that incredible Spirit – all signs of the inner work he was doing; there was healing and release and anointing … and definitely the hint of a glimpse of some glory.

So what is it all about? Well, I get the feeling we are making up for lost time. Having been stuck for years, we are running to catch up … diving into the pools of refreshing and renewal that have been waiting for us for years, so we can get on with the tasks which have very nearly been given to another place to fulfill. The ‘water-table’ of prayer is higher than I have known it for years – perhaps than I have ever known it – and we are being challenged over and over again to hunger and thirst for God.

I would also say that our newly-shaped Body of Christ in Canterbury is coming to life. In the week of Pentecost, it was tremendously significant to find our Pentecostal churches leading the way in calling for fire to fall. Yet, for once, instead of leaving each limb to do its own thing for its own people, we began to journey together… to humbly lay aside our own ’stuff’ in order to share in what God was doing in other congregations. For us down here, that is immense!

One thing heartens me above all, however. In none of those meetings have I found one single person saying ‘this is what I’ve been looking for!’. The heartcry as we leave those Spirit-soaked places behind is two-fold: ‘I know there’s even more!’ and ‘I know it’s not for me alone … it’s gotta go out through me to my community’.

For us, the ‘Lakeland Blessing’ comes with pangs of ever deeper hunger, and the tang of love and longing for the lost.