School of Prayer

This past March a group of 15 people gathered to pray together for seven days on the outskirts of London, England. Nothing remarkable about such small beginnings, and still too early to know if it will ever become more than that. But this disparate group assembled as a faith-filled response to a conviction and dream given by God, and most of us have stories of such small beginnings growing into something much more.

From South Korea, Brunei, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Canada, the USA, and England we gathered. Missionaries, worship leaders, researchers, educators, medical professionals, students, taxi drivers. Anglicans, Pentecostals, Baptists, Presbyterians, post-evangelicals, charismatics. Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. So much diversity in such a small group! But this was a core part of the vision – a vision best described by first sharing a few points about the spiritual challenges and opportunities of our times. Initially, they might seem unrelated, but their profound connections should become clear soon enough.

Christianity is a Global South religion. The Global South has eclipsed the Global North in both church growth and in sending missionaries. The worldwide reality is that our faith is increasingly an African, Asian, and Latin American majority faith. This is not news. In fact, Christianity has been a majority Global South population since around 1980. Think of it this way: the global median age is around 30 years old. This means that most people alive in the world today were born since the tipping point when Christianity ceased to be a Western majority religion.

The Global South Church is a praying church. Churches – and Christians – in Africa, Asia, and Latin America tend to be more engaged in and comfortable with prayer. This is in part due to the acceptance of the reality of the spiritual world and the supernatural, in contrast to the highly materialist and secular nature of Western societies. It is no accident that the most dynamic prayer movements of our day are happening in places where it is normal to expect God to actually answer prayer, and where the reality of spiritual evil is acknowledged and addressed.

The missionary task remaining faces increasing and intensifying opposition. There are many sensible sociological and cultural aspects that inform and explain this dynamic, but as Christians, we must acknowledge the spiritual warfare that is inevitable when the Gospel presses into the heartlands of other religious systems. The more progress we make in global mission, the greater the spiritual opposition is going to be. “The devil has come down to you in great wrath, for he knows his time is short!” (Rev 12:12, ESV). The persecution of Christians around the world is intensifying, with the horrific Easter attacks in Sri Lanka as just one recent example.

Prayer is being once again being understood as an effective tool for mission.It may be impossible to get missionary visas to many countries. It may be equally impossible for most believers to be able to travel to the most spiritually needy places on earth, even for short-term trips. Prayer, however, needs no passport or visa! We can throw vast amounts of money and human resources at an unreached part of the world, and apply all our cultural anthropology and linguisticsand missiology and see no fruit. But in recent years, the increase of targeted and sustained intercession is seeing an increase in breakthrough. It is no coincidence that global prayer initiatives such as 30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World (www.30daysprayer.com) have coincided with the greatest response to Jesus among Muslims in history.

A globalized Christianitycan maximizethe beauty of unity in diversity. God places redemptive gifts into every culture, and we have much to learn from one another. What God has instilled in Nigerians, Indonesians, Brazilians, Samoans, and Finns are aspects that my own culture cannot present to Him. No one denomination, culture, or tradition can ever display on its own the glory of God the same way that we can when we demonstrate that we are one in Christ.But the threat of division among God’s people remains, and nothing delights the enemy more. We may not be murdering each other as happened centuries past in “Christian” Europe, but bitter acrimony between different denominations, doctrines, and networks seems everpresent.

Ancient wisdom is revitalizing the Church in these shallow times.The contemplative intimacy of the Christian mystics, the missional spirituality of the Celtic peregrini, the holistic outworking of faith in Benedictine communities, the singing of the Psalms in many Reformed traditions, are providing deep wells of living water for the increasing number of believers disillusioned with the shallowness of what they experience in contemporary worship.

The relationship between generations is under threat. The intensity of resentment, bitterness, and misunderstanding between boomers, Gen X, and millennials is a playground of the enemy and grieves the heart of God. It is God who promises to send one who will “turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers” (Mal 4:6, ESV). Those of us in global prayer ministry have seen the brokenness that comes from the rift between generations, and the beauty and power of reconciliation and unity.If there is anywhere such breakthrough can occur, would it not be the body of Christ?

Traditional missionary recruiting methods are in rapid decline in the West, and have never been widely successful in the Global South. Telling a younger generation that they must go and proselytize the world brings diminishing returns, no matter how many shiny pamphlets are distributed or how many water bottles are given out at mission conferences. What is working,it seems, is drawing them together to passionately worship and pray. When this worship turns into intercession, especially intercession for the nations, then we see the Holy Spirit calling forth people to serve Him in the fields of the world.

We are seeing a restoration of the power of community. Rationalism, enlightenment philosophy, modernity, and the global dominance of the West all put the individual atop the pedestal of human identity. Thankfully, the pendulum has swung the other way toward a healthier balance between community and individual. Intercession for the nations is not a solo performance! The mushrooming of houses of prayer around the world in the last 20 years bears this out. Intercession is best done in community. As the African proverb states, “If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.”

God is bringing a convergence of the streams. Prayer movements are connecting (hence the existence of International Prayer Connect!). Mission organisations and evangelistic ministries are collaborating. Research initiatives are working together and sharing information. All of these are happening at unprecedented levels. And now, these streams are overlapping, intermingling, and deliberately helping each other in the greater vision of the Great Commission – seeing vibrant communities of people from every tongue, tribe, and nation worshipping and following Jesus!

Serving with Operation World, it is part of our remit to study, report on, and mobilize intercession for all of the above. But for a few years now, God has been stirring us to pray and think about taking it to another level. And so the question on our hearts has been as follows:

What would it look like if a community was formed to be set apart specifically to intercede for the fulfillment of the Great Commission? A community where the prayer, mission, and research movements converged. A community that was deliberately diverse – intentionally multicultural, intergenerational, trans-denominational and trans-organisational. A community that drew from the richest traditions of 20 centuries of church history and the countless ways in which God is at work today. A community of people that gather from the nations, in order to pray for the nations. A community that could learn from one another as they walked out a lifestyle of intercession together – Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Europeans, Middles Easterners, and all the rest, bringing the redemptive gifts God has placed in each of our cultures, coming from many different denominations and church traditions and all the richness therein. A community whose greatest desire is to see the Lamb upon the throne being worshipped by every tribe and tongue and nation!

What would such a community look like? What would it be like to be part of such a vision?

For seven days in March, 15 of us got to explore these questions. And it was glorious. On a leafy campus of All Nations (www.allnations.ac.uk), a college which exists to train missionaries, in partnership with Operation World (www.operationworld.org), a research ministry which exists to mobilize prayer, on the outskirts of one of the world’s most multicultural cities with its own great spiritual legacy and its own great spiritual needs, we got a glimpse of what God could do with such as vision.

The vision is so compelling, and our experience so positive, that we are not just repeating this gathering, but building it out to fill four weeks rather than just seven days. It will run from 9 June to 6 July this year. Despite this being a big step of faith, and on short notice, we are full of expectation to see what God will do! He is in the business of exceeding our expectations. He is in the business of answering prayer. He is in the business of fulfilling His purposes. And He is in the business of bringing glory to Himself!

If you are interested in being a part of this “School of Prayer for the Nations”, please write to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visitwww.allnations.ac.uk/courses/short-courses/school-prayer-nations

Jason Mandryk – IPC Leadership Team
Operation World

Published in International Prayer Connections

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Wednesday, 01 May 2019 04:14