A Cult? Or A Week Of Radical Faith? (Burn Week Part One)

As someone who has seen way too many documentaries and has listened to far too many podcasts about cults. Even as someone who grew up in a watered-down version of what it means to follow the Lord, I would have never thought I would be a part of something like this. It would have seemed like too much, a little too cultish for me. 

It would have been too much for my faith that consisted of only going to church Sundays and being a part of a Bible study to look the part of being a Christian. Now if you happen to not believe in God and stumbled across this blog maybe because of the title, welcome! I wanted to start with this disclaimer that this to the nonbeliever probably sounds crazy. Maybe even to someone who grew up in church but this week was a huge blessing to my faith. 

I mean how do you pack 7 days of non-stop prayer into a blog? My squad along with our squad mentor went to a yurt camp 4 hours outside of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The goal: pray all day, like 24 hours, for a week. We were going to feast, fellowship, and worship corporately.  

Travel Day: September 12th 

This is where I slept, with the exception of one night in my tent under the stars! 

One thing I adore about my squad is we all love coming together and hanging out. Even after a week of debrief we choose each other, we are a squad of worship, being LOUD, and just loving each other well. 

Day 1: September 13th 

We started with a day of silence. No talking, no music, nothing. Unfortunately, I had a pretty bad cold and ended up sleeping all day. The night we got in we had a huge dinner and I went straight to bed and didn’t get out of bed really until the following night. Midnight also started the first prayer shift. Each of us was scheduled an hour slot to pray alone in the prayer yurt throughout the week. In this time you could worship, pray, dance, do whatever you wanted with the Lord. I had the opportunity to pray at 3 am, another time at 7, and then 2 am-4 am. 

I also was able to take some sweet pictures of my team. The last one captures a lot of true joy, I think it captures the joy from the week we had and the joy we carry as a team. 

Days 2-6: 

Our days throughout this time looked fairly similar. We started with breakfast, then we went to the prayer yurt and worshiped together. After worship, we had a teaching, and sometimes it would be followed by activation. Activations are just practicing what we learned, applying it to our lives. Then we would have free time, sometimes before lunch. After lunch, we would rotate through different teams to lead a Bible study. Teams would also rotate through the prayer yurt and would pray and worship for four hours together. If your team wasn’t leading or praying you had an adventure day! This was time to explore, swim in the lake, or if you were lucky, ride horses. After individual/team time it would be dinner time and we would feast together. Dinner would always be followed by worship in the prayer yurt. If we were not in the yurt as teams or the squad, one of us individually would be praying in the yurt. So 24 hours total of praying and worshiping even throughout the night. 

Night 6: 

Well I am going to end part one here, subscribe and get ready for part two… the end of burn!