EMQ » January–March 2023 » Volume 59 Issue 1
By Jenny Oliphant
After nearly 2,000 years of Christian mission, 25% of humanity still are part of Frontier People Groups (FPGs). The nearly 5,000 FPGs have a total population 2,004,065,000. That’s about one fourth of the world that have almost no chance of hearing about Jesus from someone in their own people group. About half the population of all FPGs live in just 38 groups, each ten million and over in population.[i]
Yet less than 1% of international laborers are working to reach them. What do we need to do to see this spiritual injustice addressed and overcome the high population growth rates that outstrip the rate of making disciples of Christ amongst all peoples and in all places?
Prayer.
Since 2020, we’ve seen more and more people involved in global, united, Great Commission prayer than ever before. And as more people have gained access to the good news of Jesus, flourishing participation in grassroots prayer movements, both online and in community gatherings, has played an increasingly important part in global Great Commission prayer.
Church Planting Movements Give Birth to Grassroots Prayer
The world’s population and the number of people self-identifying as Christians has increased by 2%. However, disciples in Church Planting Movements (CPMs) have grown around 50% – from approximately 40 million in 2020 to 115 million, today.[ii]
God continues to fuel global prayer for CPMs:
- For movements to be born especially among the roughly 300 largest FPGs which each have more than 1 million in population.
- For a domino effect which will multiply movements in these largest FPGs to remaining people groups.
- For movements to be born in all remaining people groups more swiftly than we can ask or imagine.
CPMs are characterized by simple reproducible obedient disciples of Jesus. They are increasingly common in local indigenous settings, especially in global locations where it is not possible to have a visible building and large meeting of believers. The church is multiplying in small groups under the radar, meeting in cars, under trees, in apartment blocks, and online.
Individuals in tough places who come to Christ on their own often hide their faith or revert under family pressure. However, CPMs – a model of disciples making disciples – tend to spread most effectively when households fall in love with Jesus, follow him, and demonstrate the fruit of his Spirit together. Their collective light becomes evident to their wider relational network, even in the darkest and most distant places. This becomes a contagious force for God’s kingdom and his Spirit.
A hallmark of CPMs is fervent, preserving, and desperate prayer. As disciples of Christ grow in intimacy and corporate prayer, they begin to see the world as our Father sees it. As they pray together as small, local bodies of believers, their grassroots prayers echo the Luke 10:2 cry for more workers for the harvest and transform into the response, “send me.”
The statistics indicate that church planting movements are seeing the greatest impact in making prayerful reproducing disciples. The rate of growth is greater than the population rate and is therefore impacting and transforming societies and communities with God’s kingdom values. To read more about stories from the movements, go to the resources page on the 24:14 website and download 24:14 A Testimony to All Peoples (2414now.net/resources/).
Prayer From Global to Local
“Think global, act local” has always been part of Christian witness for 2 millennia, but now we see a re-centering of this concept which gives more space and more voice to indigenous peoples who often live amongst FPGs or Unreached People Groups (UPGs).
Jay Matenga, executive director of the World Evangelical Alliance Mission Commission, says “indigeneity”[iii] is the future for Christian mission. He explains, “It is time to flip the script and centre the local. To put authority in the hands of the recipients of the gospel and allow the gospel to take root and grow endemically, indigenous to its new context.”[iv]
He includes all collectivist-oriented peoples under the category of Indigenous because of cultural commonalities shared by people who are still guided by the ideals, the principles, priorities, and responsibilities of a collective.[v] And he further says, “I believe we need to start reframing our transboundary ministries as opportunities for co-learning. To see missions as an opportunity for us to share the message we have authority in Christ to share, but then explore the meaning of that message together as the recipient grapples with what it means for them in their context, and let it challenge what we assumed it meant from our context.”[vi]
And as we look at co-learning as a form of collaboration, we need to consider that there are different views of collaboration. In a Western framework, collaborative partners may be seen more like autonomous participants working together on a project with contractual expectations. Whereas Indigenous/collective people are more likely to view such relationships in familial terms, as covenantal, with everything being interconnected, decision-making shared and the resources and outcomes collectively celebrated, rather than individually owned. Jay’s summary helps us blend and harmonize both frameworks (Western/Majority World) together in a creative tension.
Long term mission workers may be able to identify with what he means as they consider the deep life change that happens when living for long periods of time with those who are very different from themselves. Processed well, culture shock (like any traumatic experience) can provide the platform for a transformation that goes beyond being merely enculturated to becoming hybridized – they return to their homelands changed.
Let’s look at Luke 10:2 once more. Clearly Jesus commands us to ask the Lord of the harvest, to send out workers. This unites our need to pray for workers to be sent. However, what about Indigenous/collective people who are working already in the harvest? They are intrinsically linked to their land and location and are in every way grassroots. Whilst outsider/foreign mission workers are still needed to fulfill the Great Commission, the role of the local indigenous reproducing disciple is proving to be the most effective in reaching peoples that have been very resistant to the gospel or who have had very little access to the gospel of the previous centuries.
Local and Indigenous people are also in tune and informed about the needs of people who have yet to hear about Jesus. This gives them a particular spiritual authority to pray specifically and powerfully to see transformation and disciples made in their local area. Praying for healing, against demon possession/oppression, for comfort, for release from curses, for relief from guilt, for reconciled relationships, etc. becomes more powerful and effective when it is specific and prayed from a heart who identifies in the context and people.
God’s heart for unity does not give birth to uniformity, but a harmony achieved through diverse groups working together. In Great Commission prayer, local and Indigenous people who pray from the grassroots have unique spiritual insight and authority for the land and peoples that they live amongst. But outsiders also can play a part as they listen and learn from the local context and may discern situations to pray into that might be blind spots for those who are local.
Connected to this is the acceleration of global urbanization and migration. In places where Indigenous/collectivist peoples and Western people live together, the Lord is cultivating unique grassroots prayer movements. Like-minded believers from diverse national and ethnic backgrounds who live side-by-side can come together and share God given love and compassion for those who have not yet heard the good news. Grassroots prayer in these instances is locally embedded and globally focused. Diaspora and local people pray together for the nation where they live and peoples from the nations, peoples, and locations from where people in the group came.
Growing Local and Global Prayer
Several global and multilingual platforms, some online and others not, have made prayer engagement accessible to many more people. Wonderfully, many of these platforms are connected to grassroot communities of believers: prayer villages in West Africa, mountain prayer meetings in the Horn of Africa, national city-wide campaigns across Indonesia, prayer gatherings of children in India and across Africa. The Go Movement (gomovement.world) provides further information and testimonies about this global shift in prayer and mission to the grassroots.
Here are a few examples of collaborative international prayer and what God has been doing over the past couple of years and where this interfaces with local grassroots prayer movements.
- Disciple Keys (disciplekeys.world) is a 52-week prayer guide developed with prayer points from the 52 key scriptural principles of CPMs, one per week of the year. It includes the top 52 neediest groups of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and unengaged from those networks representing outreach to those groups.
- Global Family 24-7 Prayer (globalfamily24-7prayer.org) is a virtual prayer community that has been using the Disciple Keys prayer points every week in most hours to pray for the specified groups. It includes specific prayers for 110 cities named by 24:14 Coalition’s network as cities within which are represented 98 percent of all FPGs. These are locations where movement practitioners are engaging to ignite movements to Christ. Efforts are being made to synchronise with ongoing prayer walking in these cities done by local, grassroots teams of believers.
- One Miracle Night (gopray.world/one-miracle-night) took place during Ramadan in April of this year, and culminated on Ramadan’s Night of Power. Over the 24 days that led up to the Night of Power, participants prayed for 24 cities, one city one per day. Then on the Night of Power, participants prayed for 24 hours straight, one hour for each of the 24 cities. This also included fasting. We are already hearing incredible testimonies of breakthroughs even just during the final 24 hours.
The 110 cities initiative is another an instance of unity and collaboration between local and global prayer movements and those involved in making disciples in the 110 cities in focus.Initiative partners include mission agencies, church planting teams, and global networks including the 24:14 global coalition for CPM, Finishing the Task, International Prayer Connect, World Evangelical Alliance, Pray4Movements, and others.
Ninety-eight percent of the remaining unreached peoples are represented in these 110 cities. The initiative involves mobilizing prayer globally through two websites (110cities.pray4movement.org and gopray.world/110-cities). Participants commit to pray 15 minutes a day using prayer information emailed to them in six languages.
Participants located in those 110 cities are also encouraged to mobilize people to prayer walk with them in their cities and discern challenges or needs that can then be relayed to those who are praying globally. All of this is linked with mission partners who desire to see church planting movement engagement in city’s many demographic sectors – language groups, or interest groups like sports ministries, different aged groups, etc.
This level of integrated collaboration – with outsiders and insiders, those with a western framework and Indigenous/collective people, intergenerational and multicultural and multilinguistic – is a great example of the recentring of missions that cultivates grassroots prayer movements. Different parts of the body of Christ get involved in different logistical styles, but the desire and passion to be involved is shared across all those involved.
Praying with God’s Heart
Grassroots prayer movements linked with global prayer movements are unleashing the power of prayer in a way never seen before. This decentralized and recentred connection to the Great Commission simplifies missional engagement for all kinds of communities and churches. It cultivates a love for Jesus and our neighbours both near and far. Echoing the words of the song Hosanna by Hillsong United, “Break my heart with what breaks yours, everything I am for your Kingdom’s cause,” these prayer movements mobilize the priesthood of all believers to pray with the compassion of our Father’s heart.
Jenny Oliphant (ethnejenny@gmail.com) and her husband, Stuart, have two adult children. They served in Argentina for 15 years with IFES and Latin Link in both university campus ministry and latterly in mission and prayer mobilization. Now based in the UK, Jenny serves in prayer mobilization for unreached people groups, church planting movements, and advocates for collaborative partnering across networks. She is also a synergist for prayer with World Evangelical Alliance Mission Commission.
NOTES
[i] “Frontier Peoples: Interactive,” Joshua Project, https://www.joshuaproject.net/frontier/interactive.
[ii] “Resources,” 24:14, https://2414now.net/resources/. “Resources,” Bless Frontier Peoples, https://blessfrontierpeoples.org/resources. Robby Butler, “Are Believers Outpacing Non-Believers?” MULTiplying MOVEments, updated June 2020, https://multmove.net/believers-outpacing-non-believers/.
[iii] Jay Matenga, “Indigenous Future of Missions: Authority, Indigeneity, and Hybridity,” February 14, 2022, https://jaymatenga.com/pdfs/MatengaJ_IndigenousFutureMissions.pdf.
[iv] Matenga, “Indigenous,” 2.
[v] Matenga, “Indigenous,” 3.
[vi] Matenga, “Indigenous,” 4.
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.
