Prayer Initiative

List member Jerry Wesch sent me this interesting little post which he received. If any of the English list members can add to this, I would appreciate it. I did research in this area years ago and have always felt this was a potentially very useful avenue for social change.

-- Stephan Correspondence:
Bill Sweet spindrif@xnet.com www.xnet.com/~spindrif

Have you caught up with an extremely interesting prayer initiative that is being carried out in England by the Nottinghamshire police in conjunction with local churches? I have been in touch with the police inspector responsible, Inspector Alan Stewart by phone, and he is sending me more detailed information which I will let you have; this is a provisional note.

Briefly, certain housing estates at Arnold, a small town just north of Nottingham, were faced with serious problems of youths breaking into cars, vandalism etc. In conjunction with the police, the local churches, I understand, tried the effects of prayer, but generalised prayer had no noticable effect.

When, however, the prayers were focused on specific estates and specific issues e.g. vandalism, there was a marked decline in the problems. The evidence is hardly conclusive because other coincidental factors might have been responsible, but the results are very encouraging. There has been wide media coverage here and I gather that Inspector Alan Stewart, (I am not sure of the spelling of his name) was interviewed by CBN a few days ago. What is also interesting is the open way in which this has been reported here by the popular press and the very large amount of interest shown throughout the U.K. Another similar initiative is just starting in a community just south of Nottingham.

This information is provisional but I will send you the press release etc. when I receive it.

We have been receiving recent emails from your colleagues and are following them with interest.

Comment by Dan Wilson

I'm one of the contact persons for the Ashdown Forest Fountain Group, which uses meditation (it avoids the word "prayer" but the intention is identical) to improve the civic health of the Forest Row/East Grinstead district by focussing on the church spire nearby.

"Fountain" is a very loose international group founded by Colin Bloy, a dowser living in Brighton, who cooperated with the then vicar, Fr James Holroyd, in holding a prayer service to remove from Brighton the "adverse patterns" that Bloy detected around the town and associated with the gang fights which were then common. These patterns also appear in Hitler's former stadium outside Munich and have since been decoded by dowsers as representing dehumanisation to the unconscious mind - the necessary mental act of reducing an adversary to subhuman level preparatory to attacking them.

That was on 29 September 1981. From that date there have been no more gang fights, although there has been violence at football matches. Fountain became a worldwide movement and its practice coincided with much reduction of domestic violence in American cities, but its gentle promotion has kept it out of the limelight.

In 1996 I suggested that Ashdown Fountain should conduct an experiment to perform some more narrow intentions and we agreed to have a go at the burglary rate which is always well reported by the local papers. We held a meditation which I (unusually, but it was my idea) conducted, and then half forgot about the matter.

Six months later the local paper reported that the police were worried that people were not reporting burglaries, as the rate had gone down to 29% of the previous period. By that time the Fountain members had other priorities on their minds and the experiment was not repeated. However, the best-known example of this kind of effect is the Transcendental Meditation experiment carried out on Maidstone in 1967, which was carried out for longer and (they say) had a large and measurable effect.

Policemen are usually very positive when told of these activities, unlike their usual attitude to psychic location of stolen goods or offenders, which is offhand and often dismissive.

I don't know if Bill Sweet is aware of Fountain so am copying this to him. They have a journal at webmaster@fountain-international.org which I shall copy his message to.