Prayer leaps beyond our finite world.

Transcription

1 Focus: Prayer Stream June 2011 Prayer leaps beyond our finite world. Shaped by God s very nature, it deals with the Creator and launches people into the vast arena of God Himself. Dr. Ben Jennings, The Arena of Prayer The Great Commission Global Prayer Movement See each monthly issue at

2 The Scriptures teach us: There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God (Psalm 46:4). In the future the Most High God and His people will happily dwell in a well watered city that He has created. For now, let us rejoice together in this beautiful stream flowing with our praises and petitions and God s answers. Rev. Insoo Jeong Vice President of Operations Campus Crusade for Christ The following daily prayer points are taken from the development of Prayer Stream and represent a variety of Campus Crusade for Christ prayer requests and answers. Wednesday, June 1 Kingdom Perspective Japan: Ask God to strengthen staff and students continuing to serve alongside churches, following the earthquake and tsunami devastation. Thursday, June 2 May-August: May God use a variety of student projects around the world to develop lifetime laborers for His kingdom. Friday, June 3 23 June - 27 July: Pray for at least 100 campers to sign up for each week of Speak Out Camps at Lake Balaton, Hungary. Saturday, June 4 Jamaica: Pray for our June Project Against the Tide coinciding with Montego Bay s Cruise with a Cause reaching out to 130,000+ students. Sunday, June 5 Virtually-Led Movements Singapore: May God give supernatural results and refreshment to the Creative Communications Team on a special June mission together. Monday, June 6 Women s Resources Ask God for wisdom, focus and health for the team planning technology-related and other training for staff women at July U.S. Staff Conference. Tuesday, June 7 Pray for a fellowship at the University of Burundi: 20 of the 85 indicated receiving Christ and 35 asked to be trained! Wednesday, June 8 Area Operations May new Latin America & Caribbean Area Office open early 2012, fully staffed in Accounting, Technology, Communications and Measurements. 2

3 A good place to get a small but flavorful taste of God s work, deserving fully alert prayer Background A number of years ago, the leadership team of the Global Prayer Movement began to realize that the Holy Spirit was speaking to each of them about a specific need. He seemed to be sensitizing them to the need for improving how we communicated prayer points both current requests and God s answers among the staff and volunteer workers of Campus Crusade for Christ. There was a clear need to make more prayer information more readily available to more of the staff worldwide. Last fall, an opportunity arose to take a next step toward meeting that need for information. Following Campus Crusade s recent organizational re-structuring, a member of the new Executive Team secured a large Internet-accessible TV and strategically placed it in a new International Lounge. Even before the equipment was ordered, he challenged Global Communications and Global Prayer to produce a demonstration-of-concept for displaying current prayer requests, initially in public areas throughout our Headquarters facilities. Tasmania and Northern Territory Next steps forward Australia May visionary leaders emerge to launch spiritual movements in those two remaining regions. In November 2010, the Executive Team meeting at Headquarters for the week viewed a 15-minute, 21-slide demo presentation on video, on that newly installed screen. By this time the concept had been given a name, Prayer Stream. Their reception to what they saw was enthusiastic! They encouraged the design team to work toward implementing the concept everywhere and as quickly as possible. Just step in. Fast forward to June 2011: Prayer Stream is still a collaborative effort of Global Communications and Global Prayer. Prayer Stream content is being finalized. As it comes out of testing stage, it will be made available this month to all Campus Crusade staff members. The prototype version will be a 24-slide, 12-minute video. Milton Monell, director of the Great Commission Global Prayer Movement reports that, The content of Prayer Stream will change every week. Our desire is to whenever possible offer a good sampler of prayer requests, representing spiritual movements developing among every people and every nation. For now both the beta version and the final presentation will be housed within the Campus Crusade network. The link to the site will be announced in a matter of days. The goal is eventually to produce also a public version of Prayer Stream. The vision of the staff having easy access to prayer information becomes much more real this month! Awareness of real-time prayer needs and answers to prayer soon will be flowing freely through the Prayer Stream. Local Ownership Pray for Prayer Stream as it nears the end of testing and revision. Thursday, June 9 Prayer Movements Ask the Lord to raise up 1,000 more prayer partners across the South West India region in this movement of pray-ers. Friday, June 10 Local Ownership May visionary leaders emerge to launch spiritual movements in two remaining Australian regions: Tasmania and Northern Territory. 3

4 God s Wonderful Plan For Prayer Adapted from The Arena of Prayer, Dr. Ben Jennings, 1999, New Life Publishers Prayer leaps beyond our finite world. Shaped by God s very nature, it deals with the Creator and launches people into the vast arena of God Himself. Romans 8:26,27 describes the action: Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray (for) as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which are not spoken. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to (the will of) God. (NKJV, adjusted to reflect original Greek) Prayer can be pictured as a cosmic circle engaging four major participants. At the zenith is God the Father, to whom prayer is rightly directed. Three intercessors engage in the action. The first intercessor, at a lowly six o clock position, is the praying Christian who needs to improve in prayer. The second one, at three o clock, is the Holy Spirit who does not articulate His passionate longings, but uses human intercessors to do it. (See verse 27.) The third intercessor, at nine o clock, is Christ Jesus, identified in Revelation 2:18 & 23 as the Person in the Godhead who searches human minds and hearts. He prays for prayers He receives from His people. A dramatic scenario unfolds here: God the Holy Spirit continually receives the Father s purposes and craves their fulfillment. He expresses these groanings in praying Christians - as cares, burdens, and even anxieties. God, the heart-searching Son, receives those yearnings through His praying disciples. He perfects and empowers them; presents them back to the Father; gets them answered (John 14:13); and thus completes the circuit of God s action in the world! Four conclusions stand out in this panorama: When you pray, you step into the arena of God s plan for mankind. Your praying connects the passion of the Spirit with the power of Jesus. Praying does not change God s will; it effects His will. (Matthew 6:10) Praying is God at work through you! Ben and Mary Jean Jennings For many years and in many places, the rich baritone voice of Ben A. Jennings, Th.B., D.D., has been encouraging followers of Christ to revel in God s Wonderful Plan for Prayer. Saturday, June 11 Leader-Led Movements Ask God to work in and through each person at the LLM Global Team Conference in England today through Thursday. Sunday, June 12 John 10:10 New believers in Central Indonesia: May New Life Groups continue to multiply in all strategic cities, despite pressure and persecution. 4

5 God is exalting His name in Manila! In 2006, the Campus Ministry in the Philippines realized that even though they had several effective, staffproducing ministries in Manila, they were not making progress toward the 600,000+ students at 250 universities beyond their reach in Metro Manila. The Global Campus team offered training in two Southeast Asia countries, and in 2007, Jason and Ben Balsueza began to lay new foundations and launch broader ministries. In one year they opened eight universities as students responded and stepped up to lead. In addition to prayer, their strategy was simple. By discovering believing students, they shared vision, trained in basic ministry, and encouraged them to form student leader teams. These small teams pray and study God s word together, then take clear steps in evangelism, followup and discipleship. Movements have grown on more than 30 campuses, with 800+ students involved, and 132 leading small groups. Pristine was a believer at Ateneo University, one of the top schools in the country. Her heart longed to see a ministry at her school. After attending a student congress with other student leaders from Southeast Asia, Pristine was even more burdened. So, she began praying not just for a few converts but for God to raise up laborers, specifically a team to see their university reached for Christ. God answered Pristine s prayers. Eventually seven students joined her, some of them new believers. Together they have seen their team grow to more than 40 leaders! Pristine graduated last spring and joined the staff, but her legacy has multiplied at Ateneo. Meanwhile Jason and his team, including five interns, continue to trust God for students like Pristine to reach all 250 universities in Metro Manila. In addition, they serve other teams in the Philippines, where there are more than 100 student-led movements. Their experiences and models will serve other nations as well. With just a handful of staff members, God is exalting His name in Manila! Monday, June 13 Area Operations East Asia Orient Area: Pray for a Finance Manager, CLM and LDHR associate staff, Prayer Movement Coordinator, and secretary for the Area Team Leader. Tuesday, June 14 Women s Resources The Significant Woman: Pray for U.S. delivery of reformatted edition by 10 July, translation of other languages, and a new evangelistic version. Wednesday, June 15 Leading from Core Values June: Pray for fruitfulness and growth as we interact and distribute Josh McDowell books during the Dearborn Arab International Festival. Thursday, June 16 May our missions partnerships result in one faithful, multiplying church for every 1,000 inhabitants in the Latin America & Caribbean Area. 5

6 Friday, June July 8 August: May many European students of the arts register for International Crescendo Summer Institute and become passionate disciples. Saturday, June 18 Pray for our church planters and our partnering planters as they work in the unreached villages of North East India. Sunday, June 19 LDHR Monday, June 20 South Korea: Ask the Lord to watch over our 48 new staff members currently in training. Poland: Pray for the marriage and parenting conferences that the FamilyLife team is conducting across the country. Tuesday, June 21 Mali: Pray for numbers of fervent disciples and church plants to continue multiplying after our recent Boat Caravan project on the River Niger. Wednesday, June 22 Learning Environment Ask God to enable StoryRunners to respond to requests for Bible storying training for women in more than 20 countries. Thursday, June 23 Kingdom Perspective Colombia: Pray for the project Transforming Colombia Together and our training of 1,200 people in how to effectively use the project. Friday, June 24 United Kingdom: Ask God for open doors to register Agapé Student Life Societies and offer all universities greater access to the gospel. Saturday, June 25 Virtually-Led Movements Western Europe: Praise God for the fast growing ministry of jesus.net, a partnership led by Agape Europe and TopMission. Sunday, June 26 Romania: May God bless the growing partnerships He is giving our movement with U.S. churches. 6

7 PRAYING CREATIVELY Leader-led movements (LLM) has been making good use of popular social media to mobilize extra prayer for their next global conference. From June the LLM Global Team Conference will be meeting in England. The LLM Leadership Team viewed this conference as an especially crucial gathering. In light of discussions that would take place there and decisions that could be made, a special prayer initiative was launched: That God would bless LLM efforts and produce leaders amongst the cities and communities of the world. That a number of LLM model cities would be identified as this strategy is fleshed out during the conference. That God would use the conference as a time of renewed vision and focus, with the content touching specific needs in the staff members lives and ministries. In the days leading up to this event, a creative prayer initiative was launched: 50 Days/50 Each of the 50 days was designated as a period of prayer focus on one of 50 global cities. The encouragement to pray at 10:02 (local time) was chosen as a reminder of Jesus words found in Luke 10:2. And he said to them, The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. In order to help the LLM staff everywhere pray in unity, and to encourage the flow of communication, a decision was made to make greater use of Facebook and Twitter. Take a look at a sampling of what LLM staff members and their prayer partners have been receiving. Along with the daily city prayer focus, a running commentary on the Luke passage was included: Facebook link: com/home.php#!/pages/leader-led- Movements/ Twitter link: LLMovements Monday Pray with LLM for a different city in the world for which you can pray (Luke 10:2b). Tuesday Pray workplace leaders will catch the vision that God wants them to ignite and accelerate movements in His cities. Wednesday Johannesburg The term white unto harvest is a farming term that literally means the harvest will have a white head on it. Thursday Berlin A white head on the harvest indicates that if it is not harvested that very day it will spoil and be of no good the following day. Friday Mumbai When Jesus says, look at the fields white unto harvest, he is painting a picture that shows the urgency of harvesting lost souls. Saturday New York City Just as one person is reached with the gospel, they too will have a sphere of influence they will reach with the gospel. Sunday Tokyo The answer to meet the need for more workers is not harvesting by addition, but harvesting through multiplication! The LLM Leadership Team currently is surveying those who participated in 50 Days/50 Cities and evaluating just how effective it was to harness Facebook and Twitter for broader prayer support. Monday, June 27 Virtually-Led Movements Taiwan: May the Women Ministry s online small groups representing 23 cities and 10 countries continue to grow and multiply. Tuesday, June 28 Czech Republic: Pray about translation of the film Magdalena: Through Her Eyes and many opportunities to use this tool in our churches. Wednesday, June 29 Leader-Led Movements Francophone Africa: May ripples from a November 2010 Transformational Leadership Seminar in Cameroon continue to touch leaders. Thursday, June 30 Ask our Lord to encourage and bountifully provide for staff members from every nation seeking full prayer and financial support. LDHR 7

8 My Prayer Life Notes... My prayer requests... People I m praying for... Answers to prayer... PRAYING FOR YOU Our network interceding from the Prayer Center and around the world. PRAYING WITH YOUR TEAM Mobilizing a new 24/7 Prayer Movement. Helping provide on-site prayer for conferences and ministry events. TRAINING YOUR MINISTRY TEAM Prayer Leadership Seminars (downloadable) recently upgraded with revised manuals and visuals. Let s talk about ways you can see Global Prayer cultivating prayer in your movement! On the Web at: Global.Prayer@ccci.org (407) Woerner Great Commission Prayer Center Campus Crusade for Christ 100 Lake Hart Drive 2100, Orlando, FL 32832, USA EQUIPPING YOUR TEAM FOR PRAYER Monthly Movements Prayer Journal highlights one geographic area or Campus Crusade global strategy. Now downloadable in English and Korean! us to subscribe to e-reminder service. Providing a selection of ministry requests online for use movement-wide. Send us yours! 31-Day Global Prayer Initiative: Daily prayer topics focusing on some of the most challenging situations in today s world. Download in English or Spanish! Were these prayer requests helpful to you? Each monthly issue of Movements Prayer Journal offers current prayer needs from another part of the Campus Crusade for Christ worldwide movement. Get an reminder when the next issue is ready. Sound good? Just send your name and preferred e-address to: global.prayer@ccci.org, subject line: Subscribe. View some of the latest prayer requests and praise items from Campus Crusade for Christ ministries around the world Campus Crusade for Christ