The Way Of BlessingSample

The Story of Ffald-y-Brenin

For those reading The Way of Blessing without having encountered The Grace Outpouring story, let me give you the gist of what God did. During an anguished time of prayer, God told me to stop worrying about how I could do evangelism in a remote corner of Pembrokeshire where almost everyone who visited was already a Christian. He was going to send people to us.

Within hours, two people turned up at the door asking about the Centre and were full of curiosity. After a cup of tea I showed them around, and when we reached our small chapel I asked if I could speak a blessing. They agreed and a work of the Holy Spirit began in their lives in the tiny white chapel.

The encounter with God that they experienced was the experience of many. Buddhist seekers, atheist doubters, and blasphemous jokers would find themselves swept into new life by the presence of God. Sometimes our job was to explain and affirm what God was doing in their lives. Other times we helped Christians discover the riches of their own faith and the empowerment that God had for them.

We were on a journey that was part discovery, part trust—when what God was prompting didn’t seem to make sense to our human reason. We fretted when there were lulls in the wave of miracles until God spoke to us through an overseas visitor with a message about ebbs and flows. We started to ask what houses of prayer might look like dotted across the nations, around the UK, and around the Mediterranean. We explored what wisdom we could find from the ancient Celtic believers whose insights had shaped our locality and whose prayer warriors were thought to have interceded on the hill above the Retreat Centre.

We started to pray in the chapel four times a day, mixing the beauty of liturgy with spontaneous prayer. One night over 30 people dreamed different dreams and saw different visions that brought the comfort of God to their personal circumstance.

We trusted God when He told me to build a cross on a high point of the land. It seemed impossible to find a stable base given the nature of the rocky ground. But there was a place, a nook where the base could go. It became a place of encounter for many and a thing of great curiosity for the local pagans, one of whom told me that their occult power was diminished after it became part of our witness to the work of God through Jesus.