Right now, I am sitting in the quiet of my church building at St Mark’s Darling Point. I’ve posted makeshift signs on the door and on an A-frame at the front the church: Open for Prayer.

I don’t have to explain why someone might want to come in and pray this afternoon. The situation that has unfolded in Sydney’s Martin Place today is quite truly the worst nightmare of our community. It seems to be a random fanatical attack. We aren’t being told how many hostages are being held, or by how many attackers. We don’t know what their motives are – if they have any. Are he/they fanatics, or deranged? Does it make a difference? I am just praying for a peaceful resolution to this crisis.

I myself was actually in Martin Place at about the time the initial attack unfolded. But I was completely oblivious to it. It wasn’t until an hour later that my wife texted me and told me to come home that I heard about it. There was a stillness to the city that was bizarre. No one looked too worried. No one was running.

As I walked past Macquarie St I could see the scope of the crisis: the police were out in numbers, and the media were crowded around the statute of a boar outside the hospital, training their lenses down the length of Martin Place, grim-faced.

I know that you can pray anywhere. The Christian God is not confined to the structures built by human hands – nor is he more obviously apparent in them. But it seemed the obvious thing to do to open the church building.

Why?

Because people still want to pray in times like this, even if they haven’t been to church for many years. They still feel the helplessness that human beings feel when we can do nothing to intervene in a situation. And they still vaguely know that the church building is a place that people come to pray. There is prayer in there, at least, even if nowhere else.

And Christians are praying people: we have a language for prayer – and so we can help give words to those who do not know what to pray. We can name the one to whom human beings pray. We pray to someone, in the name of someone, in the power of someone. In Christian prayer, we experience the power of God moving in us to pray to God: God praying to God, so to speak. We are not helpless, even as we cry out in our helplessness. As Paul puts it in Romans 8:26: “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

Perhaps in the moment of turning to God at this hour of crisis, the Spirit will work a turning in the hearts of those who turn.

What a great opportunity to open our doors and offer a space in which a person can turn to their creator, and find in him hope and comfort and sustenance.

For details of churches who have opened their doors, see here.

Image: Charles Clegg on Flickr, used under CC License.