oBEdient

Check out this video that focuses on the work in North Africa and the Middle East 

and please commit to pray for and support those serving around the world. And maybe ask the Lord what He is calling you to be obedient in? 

Week of Prayer 2012

It's the most wonderful time of the year! As the focus turns once again to the approaching Christmas holiday, it is time for something else that happens every year: the Week of Prayer for International Missions! This week we take time to stop and pray for the mission work going on around the world as a whole, and for specific ministries that are highlighted each day of the week. Prayer is vital to the success of the work that is ongoing across the globe and we are so thankful to those who are faithful to intercede on our behalf and on behalf of those who we are trying to reach. Thank you for your support. None of us could be here without you! 

Week of Prayer, Dec 2-9, 2012

Focus Scripture: Matthew 16:24-25, HCSB

Pastors brave threats and bombs in the Himalayas. In Central Asia, an IMB doctor’s greatest concern isn’t for safety but that his ministry will make a difference for the kingdom. A worker in war-torn Somalia of the ’90s knew he’d have to be willing to die for Jesus and spend years learning why believers in persecution grow unimaginably strong in the faith. 

Engaging people groups in the hard places comes with risk and sacrifice for all who obediently choose to be His heart, His hands, His voice. Most of us aren’t threatened because of our faith, but we need to be in prayer for those who are — not that persecution will end but that believers in persecution will stay courageous and bold.

Giving is also a call to obedience and sacrifice. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering® enables IMB missionaries to live and work at the forefront of lostness and extend our witness through their full-time ministry.

Each of us and our churches are called continually to take the next step in our obedience so that Christ is glorified and to ask “What am I doing and what is my church doing to be obedient — to BE His heart, hands and voice, no matter the cost?”

Day 2:

Grace* shakes her head. Feathered earrings dance, framing her face with motion and color. She is a member of one of the indigenous tribes of South America and is talking about the future of her people.

There are outsiders who would keep them in something of a museum — as living history, she says — stuck in a time that has not been a reality for several generations. It’s not what she wants. Yet the identity of her people in the global community is not an easy issue. “A lot of our people don’t even know our [culture],” she says. “They say they do, but they hide behind it.”

She wants her people to move ahead — to “win.” She wants them to take advantage of all that is going on about them while retaining the best of their culture. That means having to change.

Grace and her tribe are among 3,400 unengaged, unreached peoples across the world. Nearly 400 are in South America. Isolated by language, culture, history and — in some cases, geography — they live mostly in small clusters of fewer than 3,000 people. Most will never have a missionary assigned to them. Yet the church is called to take the Gospel to all peoples.

Gifts to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering allow IMB personnel to identify and understand these often forgotten people, offering Southern Baptist churches committed to embracing unengaged, unreached peoples a basis for beginning their work among them.

Pray that Grace’s people truly will “win” and have the opportunity to hear about their Savior.

Pray that your church will be one to embrace an unengaged, unreached people group that might not otherwise hear the Gospel. (Learn how at call2embrace.org.)

*Name changed.

Want to learn more?

View photo gallery

Read Embracing the unengaged

See how your dollars help reach the unengaged

Pray for Peru

Join us in praying for Peru.

 Pray that Peruvian believers will be mobilized to take the 

Gospel to their countrymen and around the world. 

Praying for Politicians in Argentina

Praying for politicians

by Maria Elena Baseler on January 30, 2012

Miguel Angel Parisi takes seriously the biblical mandate to pray for authorities                           (1 Timothy 2:1-4).

Parisi, an Argentine Baptist, works in logistics at the Argentine National Congress building in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In that role, he has contact with Argentina’s 72 senators and their staffs as well as the country’s vice president. Parisi also has access to senate offices and the senate chamber, where the senate’s official business is conducted.

When the senate isn’t in session, Parisi sometimes enters the empty senate chamber and sits down to pray at each senator’s desk. He prays specifically for that senator’s needs and his or her future decisions.

“The most important thing a Christian can do is pray,” says Parisi. “By being here in this building, we [who are Christians] can actually put our hands on the walls and pray [for what goes on inside] this building.”

Besides praying for politicians, Parisi participates in a weekly Bible study for senate employees, held in a lounge that opens into the senate chamber. The study is led by Luciano Bongarra, president of “Parlamento y Fe” (“Parliament and Faith”), an evangelical ministry to politicians in Latin America. Manuel Sosa, a soon-to-retire missionary with the International Mission Board, has helped Bongarra teach the study and minister to senators and their staffs.

This ministry “is very important because it makes an impact on the senators and other politicians who come by here all the time,” says Parisi. “We are ‘inside the kitchen’ of the whole political process here.”

For more stories check out http://americanpeoples.imb.org/.

One Shot

This is my favorite photo from Caracas. I don't know that it's visually the best photo of the trip, but I love it because of the moment it captured.

We spent a morning walking around a poor barrio with a couple of women who are doing great work in the neighborhood where they live. Their two young sons ran along with us for much of the time. They were adorable and jabbered at me in rapid Spanish that I did my best to understand. At the end of our time we returned to one woman's home to record prayers for the video we were working on. The women prayed for their community and then we prayed for them and their ministries. As we packed up to leave, one of the boys tugged on his mother's arm. "He wants to pray too," she told us. We paused as he stood in the middle of the room, folded his hands and bowed his head. And then he prayed one of the most eloquent and sincere prayers I've ever heard a 7-year-old pray.  I wish I could quote it for you, but it was in Spanish, so I could only paraphrase. But how precious to hear the heart of a little boy growing up in a difficult place as he interceded for his friends, neighbors and the church. That just does your heart good! I pray this young man continues to grow in his relationship with Christ to become a strong Christian leader.

You, too, can pray for the people of Venezuela and for the work being done there. Pray that Venezuelans will catch a vision for sending missionaries into the rest of the world and will also have a passion for reaching their own countrymen with the Good News of Christ!