Prayer: The Key to Bearing Fruit

EMQ » January–March 2023 » Volume 59 Issue 1

By Moses Olele

Many years ago, my pastor bought a piece of land with a vision to construct a church building. However, before construction began, he passed away. At the same time, the place where our congregation met sent us away. Our late pastor taught us that prayer is the key that can change all things: spiritual, social, and physical situations as well as challenges with individuals, families, communities, and nations. Our stranded congregation put his teachings to the test.

We began gathering on the property to pray. We prayed for people practicing witchcraft nearby to leave, and they did. We prayed for places where people gathered to sin, to close, and they did. We prayed for resources to build a new church, and God provided. Every step of the way, the Lord made possible that which we could not do on our own. Today, our church is thriving, and bearing the fruit that comes only because of persistent prayer.

This background gave me a firm foundation in prayer and started my journey into greater prayer engagement.

Going Deeper in Intercession

The next step God placed on my journey was to pray for the Muslims in our city. God called me to do prayer walks up and down the streets of my city and around it for many months. As I prayed, God called a group of evangelists to reach out to the Muslims in my city.

This opened my heart to pray even more. So, I prayed and fasted for 30 days for Europe and the Middle East – praying especially for people of these places to receive salvation. This inspired other Christians I was connecting with to pray for the nations of the world.

In 2000, I attended Amsterdam 2000 – a Billy Graham conference for global evangelization. For the first time, I learned about Unreached People Groups (UPGs). God also divinely connected me with Liz Adleta, founder of the Fellowship of Prayer Strategists (prayerstrategists.net). After the conference, she continued to provide me with information on praying for UPGs which increased my prayer momentum.

Nine years later, Etrisia Lilly, the prayer coordinator for the Sudan Prayer Network, came to Uganda. She encouraged us to start praying for the nation of Sudan. I joined with my church in doing that. We expanded our prayer effort by going from village to village – from one local church to another – to encourage more people to pray for this great nation. We prayed for the unreached peoples of Sudan including those in the Nuba mountains of the south, and for Muslims in the north.

We continued to mobilize more prayer for Sudan by coordinating prayer conferences, seminars, and prayer teams. We shared the vision for the unreached with university students and recruited participants in the Christian Union and Scripture Union to pray for the lost. In 2012, when the nation of South Sudan was born, we spearheaded prayer alongside other Christians outside of our region with hearts for praying for Sudan.

As a result of our prayers, today, one of our university students is taking a missionary training course in South Sudan to preach of the gospel in that nation. And we believe our prayers have played an important part in increasing missions work across that country. We trust God to continue to produce fruit from our commitment to pray.

Praying for the Oromo Haraghe of Ethiopia

Let’s fast forward to 2015 to see God’s next step in my journey. Liz invited me to participate in an initiative to pray for specific missionaries and the communities they served. Together with my praying community, we adopted Russ and Rachael and Jeremiah and Tez. They worked in eastern Ethiopia among the Oromo Haraghe people. We mobilized Bible college students to pray for them every morning throughout the week. Local churches prayed every Sunday evening. And once a week, we organized prayer and fasting.

This ethnic group practiced a traditional religion which involved worshipping their ancestors and performing rituals under a huge sacred tree. Russ and Rachael gave us detailed information about the rituals of each season in this traditional faith. So, during our times of prayer, we also responded with prayers corresponding to their religious seasons to spiritually wage war against the spiritual darkness that covered the Oromo Haraghe people.

As Russ and Rachael, and Jeremiah and Tez kept us up to date with current prayer information, we continued to pray. We saw God soften the soil of the Oromo Haraghe people’s hearts. Here are a few of the ways God directly responded to our prayers:

• God confirmed his Word to the Oromo Haraghe through signs, wonders, and miracles including raising two people from the dead.
• A movement of house churches was planted amongst them and continues to rapidly grow.
• People received training for discipling new believers.
• More than 150 Oromo Haraghe people were baptized.
• Funds were raised for Bible translation work in their heart language.

Praying for the North Caucasus of Russia

In 2017, I spent extra time praying and fasting to grow in intimacy with God and pray for the UPGs that I focused on at that time. During this time, God moved me another step forward in my prayer journey. Jenny Oliphant, the global coordinator of the Ethne Prayer Network, presented me with a new prayer opportunity. She linked me with a missionary from the United States serving in the Caucasia region where the Caucasus Mountain range is in south Russia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The region has more than 45 unreached people groups, most of which are Muslim.

I am the principal of a Bible college, and so I extended this invitation to pray to the staff and students. They were eager to participate. Our college has a unique practice that we call “prayer chain” designed for around the clock prayer – 24-hours a day, seven-days a week. People sign up to pray individually or with others for specific periods of time all day and night. We implemented this to intensely pray for the Caucasia region.

As we prayed every kind of prayer for this region (Ephesian; 6:18), we saw the number of unreached groups go down from over 45 to 43, then 41, 37, 29 … all the way to 17. Groups were removed from the list of unreached when the gospel was preached, and a few people began to follow Jesus. Beyond this, a few groups had Bible translation projects starting. Again, we saw prayer making a tangible difference!

Increased Momentum in Prayer for the Unreached

We continue to engage deeply in prayer for the unreached participating in many prayer initiatives and networkers including the following:

• Ethne Prayer Network (ethneprayer.org)
• 24:14 Coalition (2414now.net/pray)
• 10 Days (10days.net)
• International Prayer Connect (ipcprayer.org)
• Fellowship of Prayer Strategists (prayerstrategists.net)
• Global Family 24/7 (globalfamily24-7prayer.org)

James 5:16 (NTL) says, “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” As we pray, we participate in preparing the harvest of the unreached for the kingdom of God. Let’s pray together for God to reach the unreached and rejoice together when we see the fruit of our prayers!

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EMQ, Volume 59, Issue 1. Copyright © 2023 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.