For us at The Message, our first core value – and the main thing that makes us different – is passion. We’re a passionate people, passionate for Jesus and passionate for souls.

Probably the only thing that marks me out as different from anyone else is passion. I’m very average in a lot of ways: middle age, average intelligence, living in a semi-detached house, one wife, two kids.

But the good news is that it’s the passionate people who change the world. You could have all the gifts on the planet but without passion to drive you forward, you’re going nowhere.

You never outgrow passion

Twenty years is a dangerous time in an organisation’s history. Between 20 and 25 years is around the time when many start to go off the boil.

You see it in ministries, businesses and organisations that start off radical, passionate and fearless but then get boring. Track back through history at revival movements: they make tremendous headway in a short space of time but then something gets lost and they go from ‘great’ to merely ‘good’.

As an organisation grows, yes, you have to have structure, discipline and strategy, but ahead of all of it, you need passion.

Let’s keep our zeal

The charge of Romans 12:11, written in big letters in our prayer room, is ‘Never be lacking in zeal but keep your spiritual fervour.’ In other words, it is possible to be lacking in zeal and to lose our spiritual fervour.

I’m challenged every time I read those words and think back to the early days of The Message. We were nuts! We were driven by utter passion. Maybe it was over the top. Maybe we did work too hard. But I never want to lose that zeal.

One of our early songs has the line, ‘All over Manchester I wanna see revival!’ In that shout is where this thing started and where it will end. We are a revival movement. God’s promised us that we are going to see rivers in the desert… we’ll see wild animals honour him because that’s what they were formed for… we’re going to inherit a land for Jesus. There’s so much more to come.

Nothing is impossible

Because Jesus inspired Paul to write those words, ‘Never be lacking in zeal’, we know it can happen. Every command of scripture can be turned into a promise. It means that all of us can have spiritual fervour, all of the time. We may display it in different ways, but we can all be passionate people. So take responsibility, examine yourself. Stand before Jesus and ask yourself if you’ve lost any passion. And get it back.

I keep coming back to this quote: ‘When work, commitment and pleasure become one, you reach that deep well called passion. Here, nothing is impossible.’

We need to be a community where these things really do come together, where we’re not ‘clocking on and clocking off’ but where passion runs through our veins; passion for young offenders coming to Christ, for schools being turned around, for the most hurting in society. More than anything, a people passionate about the glory of Jesus in this city and our nation.

Andy will continue his series on Core Values on the Message Podcast over the coming weeks.

It was an impossible task – and we know there are many glaring omissions. But here they are…

VAL GRIEVE: Manchester solicitor, passionate follower of Jesus and Andy’s mentor as a new Christian in the late 1970s. He gave us our first major donation.

MIKE SPRATT: Founder of Wigwam Acoustics and the first person Andy and Simon called after having the idea for Message ‘88. Technical genius.

LIZA FAWCETT: Eden pioneer. After hearing Andy speak at New Wine one year, moved from Britain’s poshest postcode to the most deprived – in Harpurhey.

DAVE ASTON: After bringing his youth group to Message ’88, Dave went on to devote multiple thousands of hours volunteering at our gigs and events.

CHRISTINE HAWTHORNE: Without whom there would be no Message Trust. She is also a passionate volunteer who prays every day for what we do.

ALISON HUDSON:  She always believed we were the answer to a promise God gave her in the 1940s that he would move powerfully among young people in the UK.

RICHARD AND SYLVIA JOHNSON: Richard has been our Chair of Trustees since the very start and Sylvia has served alongside him in many valuable ways. They never once looked to quash our faith or limit our plans, no matter how outrageous the ideas have become.

JOHN AND ROSE LANCASTER: Quite literally two of the most generous people on the planet. Because of their incredible passion for young people, they have supported our buses, Eden teams, our prisons work, the TLG school in Harpurhey, and much more for more than 18 years.

GEORGE VERWER:  Mission mobiliser and founder of OM. Andy is blessed to be on George’s prayer list and regularly encouraged and challenged by him to keep going.

SISTER JAN ROSE: Faithful prayer supporter from her tiny home in the remote Welsh countryside. She prays her socks off day in and day out for The Message.

ZARC PORTER AND MARK PENNELLS: The musical geniuses behind The Message’s output in the early days with The World Wide Message Tribe. Without their visionary commitment to excellence and passion for Christ it’s unlikely there would be a Message Trust today.

LAURA NEILSON: who came to Manchester for Message 2000 and never left. Her heart for community transformation started with Eden and has grown into pioneering new healthcare provision.

DAVE AND COLETTE NUTTAL: The very first Eden workers who moved into Benchill in 1997. Since then they have brought up their family in the same home, committed to the local church and sending their kids to local school. They have played their part in seeing real change come to Britain’s toughest estate.

PAUL AND GILLIAN NADIN: Passionate Jesus followers and another extremely generous couple. When the credit crunch hit and several of our major donors had to significantly reduce their support, the sale of Paul’s business helped us through without cutting back on projects or laying off staff.

TIM MYCOCK: Perhaps the perfect example of The Message in action. He became a Christian when the Tribe visited his school; joined our Xcelerate evangelists’ training school and now works full-time on our prisons team, helping young offenders discover Jesus.

I know how hard our Eden teams work to be a positive influence on the young people in their neighbourhoods. Yet they often describe to me how hard their task is as these young people are often caught in webs of toxic relationships. Every hour they spend with a young person is competing with many more hours spent with other people whose influence is likely to be a lot less healthy.

The fact is, Jesus is not the only one saying ‘Follow me…’ to teenagers growing up in our cities. With too much time and too little to do it’s a real problem when someone turns up saying ‘Try this’ or ‘Have a go’. And that someone usually has some kind of power or leverage – there’s often an ‘Or else’ attached. We see this over and over again, messed-up, bad-news people who maliciously drag others down to their level.

This is why I’m so thrilled with the calibre of people who have chosen to join Eden teams throughout 2011. We had a target of recruiting 100 new people to our teams this year and, praise God, we’re well on our way to achieving that. These are people who realise that the only way to turn the tide in our estates and inner cities is to go to where these kids are, to become part of their world, and to begin to exert a positive influence.

People often ask me to summarise what it means to belong to an Eden team. The answer is simple really: it is to move in, live deep, and say ‘Follow me as I follow Christ.’ I’m more convinced than ever that the Jesus way is the only way. Whether we’re in the terraced streets of Sheffield, the tower blocks of London or the council estates of the North East, making disciples is the only strategy that the Master gave us. We’re called to be those who draw others away from destructive influences into a creative
community of love called the church.

Do you think you could be a positive influence on a teenager growing up in poverty? If so, perhaps you should look into joining one of our Eden teams. We’d love to hear from you.

When I got there, one of the teachers told me shocking fact: that 94% of the students in the school had no dad at home. Now I have three children at home and I was looking out on 250 young people, and realising that only 10 of them had a dad at home.

I could barely hold it together for the rest of the assembly. At the end I walked out, and heard God clearly say to me, ‘If we do not raise a generation of people who know how to father, we will lose a generation of people because they won’t know how to connect to me.’

Knowing our Dad

God’s primary revelation of himself through scripture is as Father God. The basic building block he uses in people’s lives is family. So when we don’t grasp the ideas of father and family, we miss what God is all about. Unless the church is displaying it, fleshing out what it means to be fathered and part of a family, people today will never see God.

So my wife and I started trying to do that with our church. We just decided we’re going to give our lives to young people so they realise what this is about. Because it doesn’t matter what age you are, the issue of being fathered is the crucial issue in our relationship with God. Every Fathers’ Day I get seven Fathers’ Day cards – and my own three kids tend to share one! The other ones are from kids that my wife and I have fathered.

The Father’s voice

If we’re going to be people who speak the Father’s voice, we have to hear it with clarity. We need to hear the Father’s voice – not just for ourselves, but for those we’re responsible for. Luke 3:21-22 says: ‘When all the people were being baptised, Jesus was baptised too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”’

Watch how the Father does three things: he acknowledges his Son (‘you are my Son’); he displays his affection for his Son (‘whom I love’); and he affirms his Son (‘with you I am well pleased).’

I love the fact that Jesus had done nothing at this point. No miracles, no teaching, nothing. He’s just getting baptised – just like everybody else – and God speaks his pleasure over his Son’s life. I love that about God – he doesn’t need me to perform, to succeed or fail. He just needs me to be me.

First of all, we are sons or daughters. The simplicity of that is what matters most as we father and raise this generation.

Stuart Keir is Associate Pastor at !Audacious Church in Manchester and a lecturer at the !Audacious Academy.

You dedicate your book ‘Revolution…’ to George Verwer who is also a great friend of The Message. How did he impact your life?

I know of no other man of such radical commitment and consistency. I was 17 and attending a missions conference in Bangalore. I was shocked and gripped to hear this skinny white man’s challenge: ‘How many of you will make a commitment tonight to go and serve God, looking for nothing but to see the lost come to Christ?’ That night, I surrendered my life.

What did that decision entail?

I was raised in a comfortable place in southern India. But that night I knew God was calling me to the north, where there were few Christians and missionaries were despised and abused. I went with a team of brothers from Operation Mobilisation to places where no one had ever even heard the name Jesus. We went from village to village ‘like sheep among wolves’, often being attacked and chased away.

How did the experience change you?

I came to realise that the Bible is not a book to understand doctrine and philosophy — actually it’s a book that’s given to help us follow Christ. It is a book to live by. It taught me the absolute uniqueness of Jesus as the only way. And my heart began to break for those who don’t know Him.

You often say that we are in a ‘new day of world missions’. What’s changed exactly?

When George came to India it was clear he saw the answer for India was in young people from India, not missionaries from overseas. If we’re going to see the two billion hear the gospel, the only way to do that is to give top priority to training and sending out brothers and sisters from their own countries. Besides, many priority countries are no longer places where outsiders can go easily.

How is Gospel for Asia working that out in practice?

We only have one thing on our mind: a call to send workers to fulfil the Great Commission. We help train and support a missionary for three to four years until he becomes self-supporting. We have thousands of missionaries supported by our programmes and on average, we are seeing 12 churches planted every day in the 10/40 window.

Who do you look up to as spiritual fathers and role models?

My own mother was an inspirational figure in my life. She spent many hours each day in prayer and that impacted me greatly. I also look up to people like Watchman Nee who were so delighted in God. They wanted to know God, not just know about him, and walked away from money, fame, everything for the sake of knowing him.

What’s your message to young people trying to follow Christ today?

For this generation which is so confused by the media, I encourage them to read the gospels and see the Christianity that is there. Read an hour a day. Seek to know the Lord and make his passion yours. I also strongly recommend reading the little book True Discipleship by William MacDonald.

FIND OUT MORE AT www.gfauk.org

The first thing I’ve become convinced of: the Bible works in terms of raising aspirations among our young people. The best of our government, judiciary and society is built on this precious book. At our Queen’s coronation sixty years ago, she was handed a Bible and these words were said: ‘Our gracious Queen… we present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is Wisdom; This is the royal Law; These are the lively Oracles of God.’ I believe that with my whole heart: the closer we stick to this book, the more our society will thrive.

I appreciate so much the MPs who work so hard on our behalf. But I was gutted to hear that the book most of our MPs took away on their holidays last year was Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. How much better equipped would those guys be to lead our nation if they’d taken a Bible away on their holidays?

The second thing I’ve become convinced of is that Jesus works. I saw some fascinating research from the think tank Theos recently. Interestingly, God has been mentioned in our political speeches more times over the last ten years than at any time in our nation’s history. But nobody mentions Jesus. The truth is, we do ‘do God’, we just don’t ‘do Jesus’.

How bizarre is that? When Jesus is so precious, so lovely, when Jesus really can transform any life. He’s changed my life and he’s changed the life of thousands of young people we’ve worked with in Manchester and beyond.

With Paul, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ because it is power of God for the salvation of anyone who believes. And Jesus doesn’t just save you for the by-and-by; he saves you now, from living a small, self-centred life. He gives you a heart for the poor and the hurting and the broken. His energy, his Spirit within, gives you power to change society on his behalf.

You may have seen Peter Brierley’s research on the link between Sunday school over the last 200 years of our nation’s history. Two hundred years ago, Britain was going to the dogs. The inner cities were scary places, Britain was getting drunk on gin, the prisons were full. And guess what? Very few children and youth were engaged with church — three or four percent.

But on the back of great men who worked in our Houses of Parliament like Shaftesbury, Wilberforce and the Sunday School movement, through the 19th Century, more and more children started engaging with biblical values.

Guess what happened? Crime came down, communities became safer. By the start of the 20th century we were at an all time high. Over 70 per cent of our children and youth were engaged with church. The prisons were emptying, the inner cites were safer, addiction and crime were at an all-time low.

After the First World War, we took our foot off the gas. We stopped investing in children and youth. Throughout the last 100 years, fewer and fewer have heard Christian morals. What’s happened? Crime, addiction, divorce, mental illness — all up. Two hundred years on, we’ve got lots more things, but we’re back where we’re started.

I honestly believe as goes the church, so goes the nation. So if we believe this stuff — that the Bible works, that Jesus works — then let’s get to work. Let’s do something new, or support someone who’s doing something new. The gospel has lost none of its power.

WATCH Andy giving this address at the National Prayer Breakfast on YouTube

FREE DVD: We’d love to send you a copy of the video of Andy’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast for free. Just contact our Supporter Care Team on 0161 946 2328.

Here’s what’s on the July Podcast…

Andy Hawthorne OBE joins host Ian Henderson to talk about what’s been going on over the last month – including his honour from the Queen, the Urban Hero Awards and a preview of the Open Day on July 2.

He also shares about speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Houses of Parliament and getting the chance to share unashamedly about how the Bible works and Jesus works — and how, a few days later, he was seeing young men give their lives to Christ in Thorn Cross prison: ‘What a joy to be able to speak to the good and the great about the gospel but also to take that same message into prison and see it do its wonderful work.’

Eden head honcho Matt Wilson also joins us with Dan Haigh, Eden’s London Director, to bring us up to date on new teams around the nation and especially in the nation’s capital. They also talk about why people all around the nation are moving to join Eden teams.

Finally Nick Shahlavi from our Reflex team drops in to talk about his amazing personal testimony, sharing the gospel in prisons and some of the stunning miracles he’s seeing God doing through him. Plus how excited he is about the Message Enterprise Centre.

Don’t miss this brilliant hour of good news and encouraging testimonies – get the July 2011 Flow podcast for free.

Listen (and subscribe) to the Flow Podcast in iTunes

Listen to latest teaching and media from The Message on the main Message Podcast

Andy was the keynote speaker at the event which had the theme ‘Raising the aspirations of young people’.

He told breakfast delegates: ‘The Bible works – and Jesus is the answer. The message of the Bible raises the aspirations of young people – we ditch it at our peril. The best of our society is built on this precious book.’

He went on to say, ‘The more we invest in today’s young people the values that God gave us in this book the better our society will become.’

One delegate, Jon Kuhrt, was at the breakfast and wrote afterwards, ‘He spoke with a rock-solid conviction about his faith in a Jesus who shakes things up, who brings hope to the marginalised and subverts the way things are.  A Jesus who transforms lives.  It was the kind of speech that I bet someone like William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, would have made 150 years ago.’

Thanks to Inspire Magazine for the reporting and the Bible Society for use of the pictures.

WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING?
Tell stories, throw parties, and try and live the good news of Jesus as much as possible! The ‘official’ answer is that I lead 24-7; a movement of prayer, mission and justice. My part is to set the vision and get everyone working together.

WHAT’S THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CONTINUAL PRAYER AND THE PRAYER ROOMS?
Although we kind of stumbled upon it, we later discovered that it was a model that God’s been using throughout history. The church itself was born out of a 24-7 ‘prayer room’ in Jerusalem; the desert fathers and ancient celtic church believed in laus perennis, continual worship; the 18th century Moravian non-stop prayer meeting resulted in John Wesley’s heart being ‘strangely warmed’; and in the 20th century both the Pentecostal and charismatic renewals were born out of long spells of constant prayer.
The prayer room is not the point. The Bible tells us we are the place of continual prayer. Our lives should be full of joy, gratitude and prayer 24/7.

WHAT’S THE ROLE OF PRAYER IN BRINGING ABOUT CHANGE IN THE WORLD?
Two things, I think. Prayer changes us so that we can change the world. If we’re not good news, we have no good news. The way we get grace for the sinner and love for unlovely people is by catching God’s heart.
But it’s more than that too. There are certain situations in ministry when you realise you’re dealing with more than a few bad decisions – that people are being physically, mentally or even economically controlled by cancerous spiritual forces. You need a miracle to break in.

WHO ARE YOUR SPIRITUAL FATHERS & ROLE MODELS?
Hudson Taylor, William Booth, Desmond Tutu, the prophet and occasional rock star Bono. And it might sound cheesy but I get to work with some of my heroes – people like Nicky Gumbel, Tim Hughes and Carla Harding.

WHAT IMPRESSES YOU MOST ABOUT THEM?
Definitely faithfulness and joy. Without doubt those are the two marks of authentic spirituality.

WHEN YOU THINK OF THE MESSAGE WHAT DO YOU THINK OF?
I’ve been an admirer for a long time. I love the journey that Andy has been on, moving from innovative gospel proclamation towards incarnation and moving from just making converts to making disciples.
I am an enormous fan of the whole Eden vision – I absolutely love it. People hanging out on the estates one minute and then gathering thousands in big venues the next. I love that discipleship is being outworked in real redemptive communities.

WHAT’S UP AHEAD FOR YOU?
One of the things I’m most excited about is a project called Prayer Spaces in Schools which is putting 24-7 prayer rooms in classrooms. Teachers love it because it fits with the national curriculum. School kids are stepping into these prayer spaces and praying for the first time or coming out in tears because they’ve had an amazing experience with God in there. We’ll be rolling it out next academic year.

www.24-7prayer.com

As I turned each page, I would look forward to the next miracle story, whether it was a drug addict being set free or a terrible illness being healed. For the first few stories I would think, ‘Imagine if that could happen in my life? Please God!’

But after a few more stories about guys raising people from the dead or leading half the passengers on an plane to the Lord, I began to doubt whether this could ever be for me. Basically I began to wonder if this was just stuff for the spiritual superheroes.

My own experiences weren’t very positive either. One evening my wife Esther had a bit of earache and I thought this might be a good chance for a miracle (and a not too difficult one at that). So I prayed for her. In the morning Esther woke up with a severe ear infection in both ears! I am now banned from praying for her when she’s ill.

So imagine how nervous I was when a few mates and me thought God was telling us to go out on Salford Precinct to pray for people who were sick. With my track record, I imagined these poor sick people coming to me and getting worse. In my darker moments I even imagined people dying. And no one wants that to happen outside Greggs the Bakers.

But we did it anyway. One Saturday afternoon, eight of us put a few chairs out and invited people to sit down and be prayed for. One lady came and she was suffering from migraines, a bad back and she had a lump in her throat she was worried about. As we prayed for her, she said she felt tingly all over her body. A month later we were out again, and the same lady came back to find us. She was bubbling with excitement as she explained how the lump had disappeared, and that she had not suffered any back pain or migraines since we had prayed for her. No one was more surprised than me!

Over the next few months, we saw God heal a number of others as we prayed, and each time I was stunned that God would let us be a part of it. What we learned was that this stuff doesn’t only happen in books – it happens in real life!

And it doesn’t only happen in Africa or America – it happens in Salford Precinct, near Boots. And God doesn’t only use famous Christians – he uses people like you and me, in fact anyone who is crazy enough to believe that God loves people and wants to bless them.

The beauty of it all is that God comes to us in the mess of our lives, and we see the miraculous in the mundane; we see ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and we see our lives becoming naturally supernatural.

A few of us are putting on a day in association with Soul Survivor where we’ll learn how to be more ‘naturally supernatural’ to bless our communities and workplaces.

We’ve got Mike Pilavachi and Jeannie Morgan speaking, plus worship led by James Gregory. It’s happening on October 27-29 at the Lighthouse Centre in Salford. Find out more here.

Chris Lane is a Salford lad and leads Langworthy Community Church, where Eden Salford & LifeCentre Salford are based.