prayer snippets
AFES Australia
Nearly all major universities in Australia have a special AFES group for international students called FOCUS. At Wollongong about 50 international students regularly attend a weekly public meeting, over 100 involved in small group bible studies in English, Indonesian and Mandarin, and also one-to-one discipleship sessions.
Praise God that 70 attended an Easter event. Pray for staff worker Matthew Meek who on 26 April will begin a preaching series on Colossians at FOCUS that will look at the perfection of Christ.
UGBB Burkina Faso
On 15 April a UGBB student choir held an evangelistic praise evening to which they invited non-Christians. Now on 30 April UGBB will hold a bible study vigil. Elysee Badolo, General Secretary of the movement, writes: ‘The primary goal is to build up students and increase their thirst to study the bible. We review the different methods of bible study followed by testimonies and dance performances.
‘ Last year I was there and more than 200 students attended. I know students whose lives have been transformed through these times before the word of God. Pray for the students leaders of this event. They are trained and supervised by our national bible study department, and they lead with members of this department assisting them. Every year non-Christian students participate in the vigil, so pray that God will speak to them too.’
Central Asia
A staff worker who is back from maternity leave reported to us from a country we can’t name for security reasons:
‘At the moment I am trying to focus more on individual discipleship meetings with girls. Since there aren’t many of us in the IFES team it is difficult to grow the group. We have student meetings every week and go to the universities to share the gospel with students. Very few of them want to hear us talk about Jesus, but majority of students hate us and don’t want to listen.
‘Please pray for those students who have put their faith in Christ, that their faith will be strengthened by the Holy Spirit. Pray for good relationships among our team, that we will have love for each other. Pray for more local financial support so that our staff workers can run the ministry efficiently.’
NKSS Norway
Kjetil Spilde is team leader for eastern region of Norway. Part of his job is to work with high school students.
‘RUSS is a time when high school students have big parties, get drunk, have a lot of sex and so on. “Party buses” are our response to that. We hire a double-decker bus and park it outside the party venue. About 30 NKSS students mingle at the party and invite others to come to the bus and chat, drink coffee etc with eight or nine students and a couple of staff workers.
‘It’s a great opportunity to talk to students and even pray with them. On one occasion we saw a young girl being dragged into some bushes, and we ran and stopped the boys from harming her. A year or two ago a girl led one of the partygoers to Christ. So God is using this outreach.’
Pray for the next “Party bus” event to be held in Sandefjord on 1 May and for NKSS Norway as they seek to make a difference on campuses and high schools.
