4-14 European Prayer Conference: empowering youth through prayer.

“Seeing the synergy between prayer and activism was a great awakening!”

Our International Prayer Co-ordinator, Chrissie, recently had the privilege of seeing what children can accomplish for their nations when you just give them the chance.

Friday 18th - Tuesday 21st February witnessed the 1st European 4-14 Consultation of Children in Transformational Ministry, hosted by Viva and Hope for Europe. 4-14 gets its name from a variation on the 10/40 Window theme. It refers to the fact that children between the ages of 4 and 14 are the most open and receptive to every form of spiritual and developmental input.

Chrissie says, “This is an opportune window for a previously silenced group of people to become key figures of transformational ministry. God is calling us to alter the way we view children and to respond to their importance and rightful place in his kingdom.”

Working for Christ in India ...

… is HARD WORK. I have just taken up the post of Regional Director in Viva’s Indian office, and I have been on the road for weeks - first to England, then to a conference in India, then moving my family from Mumbai to Delhi. Finally I’m in my new office, getting to know the intricacies of how Viva works in India. The need is huge, and individually we are so small. But together we can accomplish many things, and I’m very excited to be here, at work for Christ! Let me tell you a little of how I came to be here.

I became a Christian as a teenager living near Mumbai. Shortly after my conversion I was prophesied over, that I would “set the captives free”. I started my career in a mutual funds company, but saw that my real calling led in a very different path: working in social and church issues.

I began working with a Christian organisation in Mumbai, helping to free drug addicts from their addictions. During my time there I witnessed many miracles. Our method of rehabilitating drug addicts was this: pray constantly for ten days. We would never give them any alternate medication, but rather did the only thing we really knew how to do: share the love of Christ and pray. Often by the sixth day the man we were praying for would be free from his addiction, with no withdrawal pain! Now that’s what I call Jesus at work! There is no denying that prayer is a powerful thing.

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...

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...

Protagonismo Infantil - Child Advocates

Have you heard? Children are standing up for themselves in Bolivia and getting the word out about child rights! Through our city-wide networks of local projects and churches in Bolivia, Viva is bringing up child leaders who are making a lot of noise about their rights in their own neighbourhoods and communities.

In Bolivia, education and child health are being improved in the interest of national development. But the root problem isn’t being addressed, and Bolivia still has a culture of child neglect. UNICEF says children in Bolivia are often thought of as property, which explains the astronomical level of abuse in schools.

The easy thing to do would be to tell Bolivian adults to respect children, and then hope for the best. But that solution would hardly last generations. Instead, Viva is teaching the children themselves how to bring about change. Through our networks we’re reaching children at more than 130 local projects and 41 local churches, all over the country. This is why working together is so great – we can reach so many more children than just one project working alone.