When Pete Greig founded the 24/7 Prayer movement he thought he had prayer sown up. “If only people would pray like us,” he remembers, “then revival would happen.”

But then his wife Sammy became seriously ill - and was not healed in the way he prayed for. Indeed, dangerous seizures remain an unwelcome part of her life. It led to Pete – the founder of a prayer movement now more than 20 years old – writing a whole book and more about unanswered prayer¹.  

Prayer is of course an integral part of the Christian life: Jesus regularly took himself off to pray, encouraged persistence in prayer, and gave us the words of the most prayed prayer of all. Major events of the early Church were preceded by prayer. Paul encourages the Church in Thessalonica to ‘pray continually’. The Bible is full of stories of prayer, and of prayers.

So we know God calls us to be prayerful, and so many of us are. But would anyone admit to having prayer ‘sown up’? (In the gracious interview he gives overleaf, Pete readily confesses to being ‘a bit insufferable’ in the early days of 24/7 Prayer.) There’s always more to learn, even for those who have walked with Christ over many years.

It’s why, when Lynn Green and the Core Leadership Team encouraged a season of prayerful waiting and stillness in December, it helped set the course for this edition of Baptists Together magazine. While prayer has featured regularly in the editions over the years it has never been the direct focus in the way it is here.

The pages before you attempt to showcase prayer from different angles across our Baptist movement. The edition is therefore not an introduction to prayer, but a snapshot in the ways it features in the lives and ministries of our people and churches.

Our hope as an editorial group – our prayer even – is that your own prayer life and connection with God will be enriched and renewed by what you encounter in these pages.


1 God on Mute - Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer by Pete Greig (2007, updated 2020)

The main articles in the magazine are featured below: