Helping Churches Respond to War

As Viva’s International Prayer Co-ordinator, I get to travel around to conferences and events worldwide, as well as helping local children get involved in prayer right here in Oxford and throughout England. I’ve recently come back from Sri Lanka, where I was a keynote speaker for a conference on intercessory prayer for Asia. Needless to say it was exciting!


Viva doesn’t have an official network in Sri Lanka, but we’re building relationships with projects and churches around this beautiful island that want to work together to address the enormous needs facing Sri Lankan children in the aftermath of decades of war and ever-present poverty. After my speaking engagement in Colombo I did two days of workshops with children’s workers (and children!) to help the adults learn to involve children in prayer, teaching them to hear God for themselves from a young age.

Ready, Set, PRAY!

As you may have heard, this weekend is our World Weekend of Prayer for children at risk. Around the world millions of people – the majority of them children! – will be involved in prayer events in churches, hospitals, orphanages, city streets and around breakfast tables.

But you don’t need to hold a special event to pray - if you’ve got a minute you could even just spend 60 seconds devoting prayer to children at risk. If the same numbers as last year are involved, then that would mean more than two million people taking a minute to pray – which amounts to almost 4 years’ worth of prayer for children over one weekend! Very exciting. So let’s look at what we can pray about...

David Cameron, Feeding Centres and the MDG's

Only a few days in power and already the pressure is on! Our new Prime Minister David Cameron has a huge opportunity to impress Britain and the world by doing his part to reach the United Nations’ eight Millennium Development Goals.

These goals include things like reducing child mortality, combating diseases like HIV and malaria, making sure primary education is accessible to everyone and ensuring environmental sustainability. These sound like such big objectives, but lots of great work is already going on around the world to make these goals a reality. Like what Viva is helping to do in Costa Rica to meet Goal #1- Eradicating Extreme Poverty and Hunger...