On October 29-31st, prayer groups from around New England gathered together in downtown Salem, MA at Eastgate Christian Fellowship, to make a stand for Jesus Christ in the midst of the Halloween festivities. The gathering, called "Flow six-oh (60)" was forged out of a hunger for unity and designed to bring many ministries together from around New England for united prayer and outreach. In a happy stroke of Providence, the 60 hour event included the October "5th Friday". At Eastgate and around New England, we were flowing together in the Spirit. Most participants were younger, and included Jamie Dickson and a group from Maine, a YWAM team from Kona Hawaii, Ryan Weatherhead and a team from Connecticut, as well as many others.
Although the 3 day prayer and outreach gathering began on Thursday night, we began 24 hour prayer with our 5th Friday gathering on October 30th. The sweet presence of the Lord was thick in the room as about 50 participants meditated on His love for us during the 5th Friday. I remember thinking how peaceful everything felt that night-God was stirring love for Him in our hearts-wooing us, bringing us to repentance, that was all. Even as we began to pray about Halloween, asking God for healings, deliverance, and salvation for the lost, there was a real sense of peace and rest. Love, peace, rest, faith, agreement with His word-these are the weapons of our warfare and I knew that we were warring in agreement with Heaven. What amazed me was that I did not really sense very much spiritual opposition. I was wondering, "Where's the spiritual opposition?" In hindsight, I see that God was establishing us in a place of confident trust, where our eyes were only on Him and we were completely confident of our victory with Him. We would need to be confident in love in order to take our stand for light in Salem on Halloween...
Prayer went on through the night and into the next day. After checking out the Halloween crowds and another Halloween outreach sponsored by a church called The Gathering, I headed back to Eastgate. The prayer had been going on since I left last night, but when I arrived everyone seemed to be taking a break, getting ready for the night. Tonight, rather than concentrating our force in the prayer room, half of the participants were in the prayer room, half the team was ministering on the streets.
In the prayer room, the difference in the atmosphere was tangible. First of all, in contrast to the previous night, I found it very difficult to enter into worship. At one point, I found someone sharing Scripture, the same Scripture I had shared the night before but in my mind I was saying, "yeah right, that's not true." How could I be denying the very thing I was preaching the night before? When this happened, I quickly came to my senses, realized I was under spiritual attack, and buckled in for a wild night of prayer.
The opposition was fierce. It seemed I had to keep praying continually in order to keep pushing against the resistance we were facing. It was not scary or laborious, there was just an awareness that if I stopped praying and releasing the Holy Spirit, the enemy would begin to move in and overcome. I could also tell that others in the room were under the influence of the same heavy, lying spirit that had come on me at the beginning of the night. In response to these lies, we prayed out of Colossians 1 and 2, declaring the reality that Jesus is Lord over every principality and power in the universe, and that we were His representatives in this place. As we declared this truth, the air in the room seemed to clear, as if all of a sudden we realized that in Christ we could not lose.
Meanwhile, on the streets packed with 100,000 revelers, we were beginning to reap the fruit of our united prayer and simple confidence in Jesus. Teams were inviting passers-by to receive prayer for healing and also to receive prophetic words. The teams reported close to 100% success in healing prayer. When I first heard what they were saying, I did not believe it. I had never seen that kind of success in praying for healing. All in all, they could only think of 3 or 4 people all night who were not healed after receiving prayer. Many people with back-pain or other "minor" ailments were receiving a touch from the Lord. One woman who could not move her right knee came up for prayer. She was a bit facetious about the whole process, yet sincere. After receiving prayer she not only moved her knee, she was dancing around on the crowded streets saying, "I'm healed, I'm healed, I'm not even joking."
An unknown woman came up to receive a "spiritual reading". The Lord gave Jamie some information about her-she was into the occult and channeling spirits. Then it got really specific. Jamie was able to tell her that she had recently started channeling a spirit that was more than she had bargained for, and that she was losing sleep because of this evil spirit. The woman said, "I've been waking up every morning at 4am...You're good, you're really good."
Another man walked up to one of the Hawaiian missionaries and said, "I'm a bad person, can you help me?" The young man said, "Do you want to receive Jesus as your savior?" The man said, "Yes". In 10 seconds he had prayed to receive Jesus into his heart, after 30 seconds, he had received prayer to be filled with the Spirit. He left saying, "I don't know what you just did, but I feel completely different. Thank you." The outreach team said it seemed as though there was a zone of glory where they were ministering. When people walked in, they were changed. The growing strength of faith among us, the boldness of the witness on the streets, the unity, the 24 hour prayer covering, the united prayer around NE on 5th Fridays-all these factors working together contributed to God releasing Glory on the streets of Salem during Halloween
Meanwhile, we were still going strong back in the prayer room-still pushing back against something. As we prayed, the Lord gave me the word "retainer"; we were like a retaining wall, holding back the evil that was wanting to come into Salem. We cried out for the ignorant and curious to be spared encounters with darkness out of curiosity. We prayed for people to go home early and go to bed. We prayed for mercy.
At the end of the night, there was a strong sense that we had prevailed...we had won the battle in the heavens that night, in the same way that the RAF won the Battle of Britain by continuing to push back a superior force, preventing an invasion. We had been a spiritual retaining wall, standing against an invasion of darkness in that city.
On Monday, I read the Salem newspaper. "Unseasonably Mild", reported The Salem News, in addition to record high temperatures, crime and violent crime were at all-time lows this year, in spite of record crowds. The paper also reported that a noticable amount of people had decided to go home early, just as we prayed. Clearly, our prayers were not the only factor. The other Saints that were doing outreach, the people on the streets, and especially the public service workers and city officials all made this possible. Still, the written record of Halloween seemed like a report on what we had asked for in our time of prayer. What we were sensing in the prayer room, we were then able to read about in the newspaper.
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