3 minute read
Author Interview: Pete Greig
Pete is a bestselling author, pastor and bewildered instigator of the 24-7 Prayer movement which has reached more than half the nations on earth. He is also the Senior Pastor of Emmaus Rd, Guildford, England, an Ambassador for the NGO Tearfund, and teaches at St Mellitus Theological College in London. For 7 years Pete served with the senior leadership team at HTB and Alpha International.
We're presenting here your new book, How to Hear God. When you wrote your previous book, How to Pray, did you have a follow up in mind? No, I was kind of blown away by the way that the last book took off. I went to the Lord in prayer and He made it clear to me that I was to write on this particular theme which happened to work really well as a follow up to How To Pray! When I told the rest of the 24-7 team that this was what I was thinking of doing they all said 'Thank goodness! What took you so long?'. Really listening to God is the other side of the conversation when it comes to prayer.
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You're one of the instigators of the 24/7 Prayer Movement. How did that come about and what moved you to help start this? We started the first 24-7 Prayer Room way back in 1999. We weren't trying to start a movement at all. We just finally acknowledged that we were really bad at praying. And so we started praying round the clock to see what would happen. And then the prayer room began to multiply all around the world. And now today, all these years later, we're in well over half the nations on earth and we've been praying non-stop for more than 20 years.
In what way has your new book spoken to and challenged you? This was the hardest book I've written so far. Nothing matters more than learning to hear God for ourselves and yet we've all been hurt by those claiming to have heard God's voice falsely, or confused when we try to hear God and got it wrong. The backbone of this book is the wonderful Emmaus Road story. This story is loaded with revelation for all of us. It's such an important topic. Want to know more? What's next in the pipeline? Read our full interview on our blog! In May we've got the Wildfires Festival at the Wiston Estate and I'm really excited about that. And also very busy with Lectio 365, our daily devotional, which is used by tens of thousands of people every day. It's an extraordinary privilege to be able to create this material that impacts so many lives. So there's plenty going on to keep me busy!
New for 2022! How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People Nothing could possibly matter more than learning to discern the authentic voice of God, but few things in life are more susceptible to delusion, deception and downright abuse. Having addressed God's silence in God on Mute, and then How to Pray in his previous bestseller, Pete Greig is back to bring wisdom and guidance to one of the most pressing and perplexing aspects of universal Christian experience - How to Hear God. Exploring the story of Christ's playful, poignant conversation on the road to Emmaus, Pete draws deeply from the insights of a wide range of Christian traditions. He weaves together the evangelical emphasis upon hearing God in the Bible, and the charismatic commitment to hearing God in the prophetic, with the contemplative understanding of God's 'still, small voice' within.
Also available: How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People
God on Mute: Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer
