We’ve had 570 visits to the Prayer Room. We’re shattered, elated, grateful, and waking up to the urgency of responding to this thirst for God which we hardly believed was there in this rather sleepy small town of 8,500 people.

'We’, by the way, are four small churches, all pretty traditional, none with significant numbers of youth or young adults, all deeply concerned about that and not sure what to do… until now. Here’s what we did. We chose the venue closest to our local Comprehensive School. It’s a church hall complex where, surprisingly, the main entrance is into a very large kitchen. We turned this into Coffee Shop, open 7am to 9pm every day of our week.

As you enter the door, you might expect to enter straight into a rather serious, pious kind of place – you may be a bit daunted. In fact, that couldn’t have been further from the truth! Instead, as you came through the door, you discovered you had not entered a place at all, but ,in character, a homely farmhouse kitchen.

The main hall we turned into Workshop, with loads of creativity options and a library of Christian literature in and around a gazebo we erected as the reading room. Off this main hall and down a short corridor to a big living room sized space with a huge bay window looking over a quiet back garden … the perfect Prayer Room. When you come in you discover a large sitting room, a light, welcoming space, a little messy, but with a number of alternatives to choose from- on the wall, on tables, and in separate spaces screened off in parts of the room.”

We four churches do a twice yearly mail drop to every house in town so our 24-7 got a mention in the May edition and the end-of-August edition focused on it. We have good links with our local schools and this resulted in me being invited into a primary school to take all the school assemblies the week before, to let students know what we were up to and give them a gentle invitation to drop by if they wished.

The three Primary schools of the town all opted to do an afternoon workshop on Christian Prayer for their Year Six classes at our venue, where one of the round of activities would of course be spending some time in smaller groups in the Prayer Room. But in the end it was children and young people who were doing the invitations … some of the year six children came back after school with their parents and siblings; some of the Christian students at the comp brought their friends during lunch breaks and then those friends brought other friends.

By Friday the Headteacher’s PA was with us because, as she said, “Students are telling staff that they mustn’t miss the Prayer Room so I thought I’d better come”. It so happens that on that Friday, it is was Rachel, aged 14, who was signed in to carry the hour of prayer 12noon to 1 (the school lunch break) and we adults in the Coffee Shop at the time counted 20 more students go in and join her. By then we knew that all would be fine and more than fine. There was no need at all for a ‘grown up’ to go and check them out … by this time in the week the older boys (16-year-olds) were taking their shoes off before entering the Prayer Room. None of these boys were members of churches as far as I know.