Around 3,000 people danced, sang and waved flags as they gathered in the square outside the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela for a concert of praise on August 14th. PICTURE: Courtesy of Pastor Ben Gray.

7th October, 2004

DAVID ADAMS

In mid-August, around 3000 Christians gathered in a plaza in front of the 1,000-year-old cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, for hundreds of years one of Spain’s most popular destinations for Christian pilgrims.

While millions still converge on the city every year to bow before the tomb of St James, this group of people from Spain and around 30 countries across the globe were there to pray for the city and the nation of Spain and lift up the name of Jesus Christ in worship.

In an event organised by US-based theologian C. Peter Wagner, the “Concert of Praise” in Santiago was the latest in a series of efforts to mobilise people to pray for the 40/70 window - a region extending across the globe from Iceland to Japan and encompassing much of Europe, Russia and northern Asia.

Pastor Ben Gray, founder of the Queensland-based Christian ministry group CityHarvest International, was among those in the square that night.

He says everyone present was caught up in a “festival of praise” to Jesus Christ as people prayed, sang, danced and read scripture.

“There were many moments that were just electric and you felt a fresh lightness come as we focused our thoughts and prayers on the nation and people of Spain and their destiny in the earth,” he recalls.

Pastor Gray had arrived in Spain nine days earlier. He and colleague David Stanfield led a team of 14 Australians on a “prayer journey” which would see them travelling first down to Gibraltar and then along the Silver Route, a traditional pilgrim path, to Santiago in the north west of the country before heading back to Madrid.

“These prayer journeys are not necessarily doing pilgrimages in the same way,” explains Pastor Gray, a former baptist minister and the founder of the Australian Prayer Network who has been on numerous previous prayer journeys including one to Kazakhstan last year.

“We basically declare Christ’s lordship, we pray into things that we are given, we worship. It’s really this whole thing of going off and researching what God has placed in us collectively and also individually in terms of revelation and being able pray God’s Kingdom come...It’s a great learning and a great discipling environment for people to dwell in.”

Those on this trip included four pastors and a number of seasoned prayer intercessors as well as some who have never been on a prayer journey before or who had never been out of Australia until this trip.

The prayer team pray as they travel across Spain. PICTURE: Courtesy of Pastor Ben Gray.

Pastor Gray says the group received a warm reception at the many different churches they shared with along the way. He adds that they also had a positive reception from people they met in the streets.

He describes the trip as a success, noting that the group was able to accomplish all the “prayer assignments” they had planned prior to the trip including praying against spiritual principalities.

“We saw healings and release in both physical and emotional areas in people (we) prayed for,” Pastor Gray says.

There were also opportunities to encourage the local churches, many of whom, according to Pastor Gray, had become “weighed down with hopelessness, persecution and disappointment”.

“We helped a number get a fresh perspective on their calling and their gift to the nation and how God was using them to reach into areas only they could reach,” he says. “Many caught a fresh sense of being connected to God’s large redemptive plan in the nations...”

Pastor Gray says those in the group came away from the trip “with a deep sense of God’s pleasure”.

“The door to the hearts of people were opened as we served them in prayer and God in them did something that we could not have accomplished in the time frame unless God has not done the things He did.”