Debra and Frank Green have been leading a remarkable prayer movement in Manchester, England that has since spread further afield through Redeeming our Communities. City Changing Prayer: Insights from Manchester’s impacting city-wide prayer movement is the story of their journey from gathering half a dozen people in their front room to pray to gathering thousands of Christians from across the denominations to pray together for their city.

The Green’s come from an evangelical charismatic background and in the UK those aren’t always the most obvious places to look for fruitful ecumenical initiatives but this prayer movement turned out to be something quite special.

There are numerous practical lessons to learn here: from how to organise and run large prayer meetings with people from different church backgrounds so that prayer happens and not actually sink to the lowest common denominator to building trust between church leaders (which often proved to be the biggest obstacle) and how to involve city leaders from politics, education and police.

In fact it is the way they gathered the church to constructively engage with the civic leadership of the city that I found the most helpful and inspiring. In a secular post-Christian society civic leadership can often be suspicious and ignorant of the church, fearing us to be God-botherers with a narrow moral agenda and whose intolerance runs contrary to the leading values of the day. This constructive approach builds positive partnership, dispels fears and again puts the church as a constructive contributor to city life. As someone soon to move into a major city, this was an excellent insight to gain.

However, the book can’t really live up to its title (not that that’s necessarily the authors fault) but while the church may have changed and indeed many wonderful things have happened in Manchester supported by and contributed to by this prayer movement, it would be hard to argue that Manchester itself has significantly and measurably changed. So has it changed the city? The honest answer must be ‘no, not yet.’ Of course, we wouldn’t buy a book titled ‘Great prayer meetings in a city’ or ‘how to build ecumenical prayer movements’ so I understand the issues.

The book is also pretty well loaded up with Christian jargon and if you’re sceptical of any charismatic phenomena (such as evidenced during the Toronto Blessing) then there are any number of opportunities to exercise due caution. Yet on the whole they steer away from the silliest theological ideas that evangelical charismatics have had and mostly embrace a solidly evangelical understanding of prayer, that when we pray with faith God hears and changes both the church and the situations being prayed for.

The book is readable enough while never being exactly gripping, describing as it does the slow process of relationship building and running prayer meetings but for those who are committed to building prayer across churches for a city then this is a good book to read.