Prayer at Work

God has been hearing from us a lot these past few days. Viva’s World Weekend of Prayer for children at risk was a huge success, with myriad prayer events going on around the world. We’re still waiting for news from many of these events, since it’s not uncommon for the people organising them to have no access to the internet, or even to electricity! But keep an eye on our website, since they’ll be coming through over the next couple weeks.

(Also, if you organised an event, please let us know how it went and what the results were on our feedback form!)

But for now, here are some of the things that went on during the World Weekend of Prayer that people have already told us about...


Livingstone, Zambia: More than 100 children from local projects came together for a prayer event on Saturday, to pray for themselves and other children at risk around the world. Then on Sunday Covenant Community Fellowship Church, also in Livingstone, held a service run by children. During this service children used drama and songs to tell the adults in the congregation about difficulties they face regularly, and then led the adults in prayer for the rest of the service.

Delhi, India: 150 Christian leaders (like church pastors and project leaders) and 50 children got together to pray and worship at Centenary Methodist Church on Saturday. We’re very excited to have so many Christian leaders join forces for this, since as we heard from Nitin in last week’s blog it’s common to find Christian projects trying to ‘go it alone’ in India.

Addis, Ethiopia: More than 250 children at risk from seven projects throughout Ethiopia’s capital city gathered to hold a prayer service at Full Gospel Church. This was the first such event for Ethiopia and they’re planning to run similar ones all over the country next year.

Cape Town, South Africa: Children and grown-ups came together to hold a prayer event where kids learned about trafficking and then prayed for trafficked children and other children at risk. The CONNECT team used great metaphors: the tale of Cinderella and the Bible story of Joseph (of the Technicolour Dream Coat, not Jesus’ dad!) were used to help kids understand trafficking. The children spent the day praying and waiting for answers from Jesus, and then released their prayers (in the form of helium balloons!) at the end of the day.

Kampala, Uganda: The World Weekend of Prayer fell during a month of events focussing on prayer and advocacy, held by our city-wide network. Later this week they’ll release hundreds of helium balloons into the Kampala sky, each one of them with a slip of paper inside teaching the finder how to report abuse and reading, “We’re committed to protecting children – are you?” When the balloons land, the hope is that whoever finds them will write “Yes!” and then send them back to Viva’s Africa office in the mail.

Oxford, UK: At Wokingham Baptist Church, everyone was invited to take off their shoes in order to identify with children at risk, and then shout out prayers or protests. Some examples of shouted protest-prayers: “My feet hurt” and “I don’t want to do this any more!” (meaning kids didn’t want to be miserable and sick, not that they wanted to stop praying!) and “Peanuts!” (from a boy pretending to be a child street-vendor).
And in our International Office, staff members and their families came out on Saturday morning to pray at various stations throughout the office, and spent several hours in worship and prayer.

Did you take a minute to pray, or were you at a prayer event? Go onto our Facebook fan page and let us know, or give us feedback on our website. We’re so excited to hear how God moved in people’s hearts and lives over this World Weekend of Prayer.


~ Prayer Team in Oxford


It’s not too late to pray! Go to www.viva.org/pray.aspx to check out how you can keep praying for children at risk.

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