Strawberry Fields Forever-The extraordinary story of how John Lennon's childhood play area has become a dynamic Salvation Army prayer center and church
by Dan Wooding
July 27, 2007
LIVERPOOL, UK (ANS) -- When John Lennon was a child, he would hear a brass band playing at the nearby Strawberry Field Salvation Army Children's home and this would excite him. John would immediately leave his home where he was being raised by his Aunt Mimi and her husband George, on Menlove Avenue, Liverpool, and would climb over the wall into nearby Strawberry Field in a bid to escape from all his problems and play in the grounds there. He once confided in one of the orphans at the home, "One day, I'll have a band as well!"
Well, John Lennon did -- The Beatles -- and in 1967 he went on to add an "s" to the correct name of the place and write his famous song, "Strawberry Fields Forever" which is still considered to be one of the groups best recordings.
I recently visited Strawberry Field and can report that it is now a lively Salvation Army Prayer Center and Church. It had been closed for a while when the Salvation Army closed down the orphanage there.
But now it has opened again and is humming with activities with Christians coming from around the world to pray and worship the Lord there.
In charge are a delightful couple, both Salvation Army ministers - Gary and Dawn Lacey. Gary is from Liverpool and Dawn from Barnsley, Yorkshire, and they agreed to talk about their work at Strawberry Field for my Front Page Radio program which broadcast recently KWVE 107.9 FM in Southern California.
Gary began with a surprising comment: "The Beatles tend not to be as popular in our own city as they are in the rest of the world. I don't know a lot about the song but I know that it was I know that it was written about this place and I know that John Lennon used to play on the grounds here. Actually, he used to sneak over the fence to play with the children because this was a Salvation Army orphanage and he used to come in the evenings play with the kids who were here."
I told the couple that like a lot of people around the world, I knew of the controversy when Strawberry Field was closed as an orphanage and so I wondered how it had become a prayer center and church.
"Dawn and I were ordained as Salvation Army officers in June of 2004 and this is our first appointment," said Gary. "We were sent to Liverpool, my home city, to plant a brand new Salvation Army church from scratch. God had already given us a vision to build a house of prayer and this is the result.
"The very first year that we were here actually Dawn and I just prayed on the streets of Liverpool. We felt that God wanted us to just prayer and make connections here. After about a year, the Salvation Army had gone through that process of closing the children's home and the building was just lying empty and we asked if we could kind of camp out here for a few years to get us on the map.
All the Broken People; where do they call come from?
"People had started to join us in our house and we began to see people get saved through our ministry," Gary continued. "So we moved into Strawberry Field and it's kind of taken off from there. Now people from all corners of the globe come here to pray and we also have a vibrant thriving church community here which is growing all the time. We have many broken people -- which is what God showed us coming here -- to be prayed with we have a team of prayer ministers who people come for appointments and we pray through issues with them and help them with issues."
I then asked Dawn what sort of problems that women in the area faced?
"A lot of it is just self esteem," she said. "Really, they don't feel good about themselves. So we try to show them how God sees them, and through Scripture, show them that they're made in God's image and that's what it's about; reaching out to them teaching them about God and how much He loves them."
Prayer Center and Church
I then put it to them that not many people could "camp out" at such a famous site and start to see a prayer revolution reach out around world and start a church at such a site. I asked Gary if he sometimes pinched himself.
"We do pinch ourselves," he said, adding something very surprising, "Just before we were about to take possession of the building here at Strawberry Field, and we were praying with a colleague, and God dramatically spoke to us about how His name needed to be worshiped in this place and how we needed to eradicate the Beatle image from this whole site and the idolatry of the Beatles that goes on here.
Thousands of Beatles pilgrims
"We have thousands of people who come here to the site just strange things at our gates. We have people from Japan chipping little bits of paint off you know and putting it in little tins and people taking big slabs of earth and we could make a fortune on EBay you know but we don't choose to do that. We even had the front gates stolen for a while, but we've got them back now.
"God just said that He wanted His name lifted up in Strawberry Field, not The Beatles and we've stuck to that hard and fast since the start."
"Eight Days a Week..."
This couple certainly a busy like which is almost like the Beatles' song, "Eight Days a Week," so I asked Gary to describe a typical week for them.
"Well," he said, "we're open more or less 24/7 for people to come and pray. We also have lots of people come in for meals who have no families and come from really broken home situations. I do a lot of public speaking so I get away quite a lot to do a lot of speaking about prayer particularly because we really believe that prayer fuels all mission so everything we do here is based on prayer. Dawn does a lot of speaking especially to women's groups and travels about doing that kind of thing. We're here all the time we've got our team and church to look after."
The Liverpool Boiler Room
I wondered if the church was called Strawberry Field Fellowship and Gary replied, "No, our church has a pretty cool name. It is I-56 which is based on Isaiah 56, the scripture where it talks about God's House becoming a House of Prayer for all nations and the whole of the building here is called the Liverpool Boiler Room."
During the interview, both were casually dressed and so I wondered why they weren't wearing Salvation Army uniforms?
Dawn explained, "When we first started here in Liverpool, we were sent to a very rough area and while walking around in there we actually met with some police officer at some point and one of them actually said to us, 'I wouldn't advise you to wear uniforms around here because it's very authoritative and could cause a problem for you.' So that was one of the reasons. But we also found that wearing a uniform is not really relevant for today in our situation and we don't want people to be afraid of approaching us. We want people to be able to see us as normal human beings -- not that Salvation Army people aren't normal human beings. I don't mean that! What we want them to see is that they're real we are who we are made in Jesus' image and that we're normal people who want to reach out to them and that we want people to see Jesus in us that who we are as natural people."
So did their church have a brass band?
"No, definitely not," he said. "We have one or two worship teams here at The Boiler Room but it's very contemporary and everything's very forward thinking. We've taken many risks actually and praise God that the Salvation Army has really been understanding of that and allowed us to break out, be different and it's working as that kind of risk taking has attracted many people to us. We try to get the real DNA of Jesus into here; the love compassion and acceptance. They are the main things because people just want to feel that love, that acceptance and they want to be part of a family, a fellowship that just has total love embroiled in it."
He admitted they do have Mercy Seat in the building where people can go and confess their sings. "That's an integral part of the Salvation Army and it's a place that has been there since William Booth created and founded the Salvation Army," said Gary. "He basically had it for altar calls; where people would come forward and there's amazing stories in the early days of people total drunks coming towards the Mercy Seat drunk and getting up from that place totally sober and free.
"It's funny that while there's great debate in the Salvation Army about whether we should have a Mercy Seat, it's ironic that we, as a forward thinking Salvation Army corps, it was one of the first things we did because we felt it was really important."
I asked Gary of there was a possibility that could soon be running out of space at Strawberry Field and he replied, "There is a possibility that we'll do that. We are really outgrowing this building. It is a purpose-built children's home that we're in and we've kind of adapted it but now we are not coping with the numbers coming to church. It's amazing. So in the future we can't rule out that we would move to something bigger and better.
"We have a big vision for not just this Boiler Room here, but we want to see Boiler Rooms all over the world. We're part of the 24/7 prayer network that is actually sweeping the world. I think there is a Boiler Room in the States at the moment I can't quite remember where that one is but I think our vision is, from the Salvation Army point of view, to see other Boiler Rooms in the Salvation Army right throughout the world and we want to be an integral part of that."
I then asked Gary what he thought John Lennon would make of the present-day Strawberry Field.
"I think he'd enjoy the kind of modern touch on it and the different way we do things," said Gary. "There are many people we work with who, like John Lennon, have a lot of spiritual confusion and the thing we would do here is to simply stick to the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
I then asked if John Lennon was alive, if he'd let him sing during a service.
"I'm not sure if our worship leaders might get upset," he laughed. "But a rendition of Strawberry Fields Forever wouldn't go amiss."
I then asked Gary what he thought that Salvation Army founder William Booth would make of Strawberry Field.
"Without a doubt, he would approve of what we are doing here," he said. "Many people say, 'You're not really Salvation Army,' but actually we would argue with that we are more Salvation Army than most Salvation Army churches these days, particularly in the UK, because we believe we've rediscovered the roots; the Spirit of God; that was working in the Salvation Army in the old days. We've caught a bit of that early Spirit we believe and we firmly believe that the early vision of the Salvation Army was an amazing vision from God and it still is going n today and we're an integral part of that."
I said that the work they were doing was like creating a spiritual hospital for hurting people to be made whole.
"Yeah, that's an amazing thing you should say because two people gave us prophesies early on when we were seeking the vision from God in which they said they saw us as a kind of medical center where the needs of the people were written on the walls and I myself, because I'm an evangelist, was bringing people in over my shoulder and Dawn was in a nurses uniform mopping up blood so we are a place for the broken and the hurting and many lives have been transformed, restored and healed in this place through the amazing power of Jesus working through us in here."
I concluded by asking Dawn Lacey what was her great prayer need.
"It is that we could see this duplicated in other cities because it's not just about Liverpool; we believe that God wants prayer to be based throughout all of Britain and to me that would be the greatest thing to see people grasp a hold of prayer the way it's happened in this place," she said.
Strawberry Field welcomes visitors and also church groups for short retreats.
They don't charge, but appreciate a donation being made to the Salvation Army.
You can contact Gary Lacey at e-mail at: gazlacey@aol.com.
© 2007 ASSIST News Service, used with permission.
