“Just over a decade ago, Open Doors ranked India as number 32 on its list of the 50 most persecuted nations, and now India is all the way up at number 11,” Miller says. Learn more here.

“It’s definitely a very bold and courageous thing – to follow Jesus in India.”

Millions of people in India have never heard the name of Jesus and have no access to a Bible or church. Those who do follow Jesus risk everything for Him.

“When people become a Christian, they’re often cut off from their family,” Miller says. “They are prevented from getting jobs, and people have even lost their lives in India for their faith.”

(Photo courtesy of Mission India)

Mission India’s new devotional will introduce you to the faces behind these facts.

“It’s a seven-day devotional starting on October 27 through November 2, which is the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church,” Miller says.

“Each day, we’re including stories and prayer points to help guide your prayers as you learn about this difficult situation,” she continues.

“We are providing stories of events that have taken place in the past year – real people who have been affected by real issues of persecution in India.”

Request yours here, and learn how persecution affects families. For example, “Bulesh and Maria became Christians after they attended one of Mission India’s adult literacy classes,” Miller says.

After these new believers made their new faith public, “Bulesh’s mom, along with other women from the village, chased the family out of their home. It’s hard to comprehend what that means for this woman to do that to her granddaughter at nine months old.”

Header and story images courtesy of Mission India. 

“Not only was he committed to his idols, but he was against Jesus,” Regan Miller with Mission India says. “He stood against Christian pastors and all the work that they did.”

Rafas was so committed to his idol worship that “he wouldn’t cut his hair or mustache because he considered it an offering to his gods. So, [he had] long hair, really long mustache,” she adds.

The Lord hears your prayers for people like Rafas. “People like our listeners [and readers] are praying for people like Rafas, and because of those prayers, a church planter named Sobrato went to Rafas’s village and held a prayer group,” Miller says.

‘This time, when he saw a Christian meeting taking place – instead of opposing it – Rafas joined.”

Rafaz’s haircut (Photo courtesy of Mission India)

Rafas heard the Gospel at the prayer meeting. He gave his life to Christ, and everything changed. “As a sign of receiving Christ and leaving his idols, Rafas cut his hair and mustache,” Miller says.

“The Holy Spirit can reach people we cannot physically reach.”

Praise God for this transformation, and don’t stop praying for those who still need access to the Gospel. Mission India offers a prayer guide focused on the ten days leading to Pentecost Sunday.

“Pentecost Sunday lines right up on the same day as the International Day for the Unreached this year on May 19,” Miller says.

“What a perfect time to invite the Holy Spirit to work in unreached people groups! India is the most unreached nation in the world; there are thousands of unreached people groups.”

Mission India selected the timing of their prayer guide with a specific intention.

“Ascension Day, when Jesus ascended back into heaven, was 10 days before Pentecost Sunday. And during that time of waiting, the apostles prayed,” Miller says.

“That’s what we’re looking forward to this year, is celebrating and recognizing that time of waiting by inviting people into prayer with us.”

Header and story images courtesy of Mission India.

Every month this year, Jesus Film Project is promoting prayer for one of the top 12 least-reached countries.

Ryan Wagner, Jesus Film Project’s associate director for digital strategies, says, “Here in America, I’m in Missouri, and I can go down the road and I’m going to pass five churches on the way to go to my church…. That is just not the way it is in most places in the world.

(Photo courtesy of Jesus Film Project)

“What we did years ago with Jesus Film Project is we wanted to look and see: Where is the Church, and where is it not?”

You can download Jesus Film Project’s prayer guide here as part of their 2023 prayer initiative called For the Least Reached: A Year of Prayer.

For example, the prayer guide features Indonesia this month. Roughly 70% of the population is totally unreached with the Gospel. Only around 10% of Indonesians identify as Christians.

“There are many great injustices in the world,” Wagner says. “The ability to hear or not hear the Gospel, we believe, is the greatest injustice on Earth. So we want to help bridge that gap for others to be able to hear and respond.”

As you focus on Indonesia and the other 11 countries in the prayer guide, please pray for unreached peoples to find hope and salvation in Jesus Christ!

Your prayers are a catalyst for change as the Lord is sending Christian workers into the harvest, and giving unreached people dreams and visions of Jesus.

(Photo courtesy of Jesus Film Project)

Wagner says, “We know through leaning into these areas that God is moving. We are every day hearing stories of people responding to dreams that they had the day before. And then, the next day, they maybe hear something from a church planter or an organization about the story of Jesus.”

Click here to learn more about Jesus Film Project.

Header photo courtesy of Amaury Gutierrez via Unsplash.

Yesterday was the annual International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (IDOP) – a time for concentrated prayer for the encouragement and perseverance of believers who are attacked because of their faith. Although IDOP 2020 is over, Frontiers USA president Bob Blincoe has some thoughts on how we can continue to meaningfully support the persecuted Church.

Frontiers USA supports Gospel outreach in the Muslim world. Blincoe says rather than pull the Church out of persecution contexts like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), believers need to recognize that persecution is a hopeful sign that the Gospel is present in hostile regions.

(Photo courtesy of Imani Bahati via Unsplash)

“There are places in the Muslim world where the Church is not persecuted because there is no Church,” Blincoe says. “There are no churches gathered in many Muslim countries.

“Let’s keep pressing on, sending missionaries, and not be simply shocked and paralyzed because there is a persecuted Church. [Let’s] not simply feel sorry for the persecuted Church. Although our sorrow and grief are real, let us push on until the witness of the Gospel has gone to the Afghanistans of the world [and] the Pakistans of the world.”

When facing persecution, Jesus commands His followers in Matthew 5:44 to “pray for those who persecute you.”

For example, take Ronnie Smith, an American Christian who moved to Benghazi, Libya as a teacher and was killed for his faith in 2013. Ronnie went on a morning jog and was gunned down, leaving behind his wife Anita and their young son.

After Ronnie’s martyrdom, Anita bore witness to her husband’s legacy of faith.

“[Anita] was subsequently interviewed on Muslim networks all over the world, including American English language networks, expressing her forgiveness for the men who took her husband’s life,” Blincoe says.

“People had no category for what she was able to do. So God has borne witness to the love of Christ, even in the midst of her terrible loss.”

Please commit to regular prayer throughout the year for the persecuted Church. A good place to start is Frontiers’ prayer guides for both believers and non-believers in the Muslim world.

Click here for prayer guides with Frontiers!

Blincoe says, “We pray that the good news that has come to us will prevail in the Muslim world and they will be part of the free world now and part of God’s eternal Church in the life to come.”

Header photo courtesy of Amaury Gutierrez via Unsplash.

(Photo courtesy of Frontiers USA)

Frontiers USA has a Ramadan prayer guide for Christians called ‘Searching for a Father’. Every few days, you’ll get an email with prayer points and the next chapter in an intimate fictional story. It’s about a Muslim young man and his family during Ramadan, a broken relationship, and a search for God’s truth.

Bob Blincoe, President of Frontiers USA, explains, “You could say it’s a true story in that it happens all the time with the factors that are in this story of a lost love between father and son and the reconciliation that might take place. But, you know, wait till the end and see.”

Spoiler alert! The Gospel plays a big part in the story. Frontiers has released this prayer guide for a few years now, and have received positive responses to the message and the prompts to pray. Blincoe says, “People are very interested to know what’s going to happen next!”

(Photo courtesy of Frontiers USA)

Even the title of ‘Searching for a Father’ is meaningful because, as Blincoe explains, “In Islam, there’s no recognition that God is a father or God is a shepherd. There are 99 names for God in Islam, but all of them are objective. The Merciful One, yes, that is a great word, but none of them are tender and endearing and relational like Father.

“So once you see Jesus Christ revealing what He is really like, what God is really like in terms of love and desire and ‘come to my table and let’s start the feast’ — wow, this is what we know attracts human beings back to God.”

The Ramadan prayer guide is just one aspect of Frontiers USA’s ministry, which seeks to make Christ as Savior known among Muslim communities.

“Our mission is: ‘With love and respect, inviting all Muslims to follow Jesus’. This is the way we want to be treated ourselves, so with the Golden Rule in mind, it’s love and respect. When you treat people with dignity and respect, then you do find there is reciprocation,” shares Blincoe.

(Photo courtesy of Frontiers USA)

“We always go where we’re invited. We go where someone in the country of stature wants us there. We live legally in every country, and there are 40 Muslim countries in the world. I believe that the Lord would have us live in peace [and] bring the Gospel of peace…. I lived in northern Iraq, I opened up the work for Frontiers in northern Iraq, and that was because the Kurdish people wanted us there. It was a strong sense of invitation.”

If you’d like to sign up for the prayer guide ‘Searching for a Father’ this month, click here! You’ll start with the first email in the series, and get the next one every few days.

As you begin praying for Muslims’ eyes to be opened to God the Father, the God of the Bible, Blincoe suggests you can also begin with this prayer: “This is what we should pray for through Ramadan, that the great purposes of God will not be thwarted by the darkness of humanity or the darkness of the Devil, but that His great purposes will find the way of peace between the nations and bring about reconciliation with Himself and with one another in these last days.”

And it’s ‘in these last days’ indeed, as reports of Muslims seeing miraculous visions of Jesus and embracing the Gospel are becoming more and more frequent. God is moving in the Muslim world, and Frontiers USA bears witness to the spread of Christ’s hope in these communities.

“We have seen amazing things happen in the last 30 years, and in the last 10 years, in particular. Some of our teams have borne faithful witness without seeing results, and some of them are now seeing results the kind of which Abraham was promised, families coming to faith.”

Click here to learn more about Frontiers USA!

(Photo courtesy of Jeff Attaway via Flickr)

This quote is an excerpt from Frontiers USA’s Ramadan prayer guide this year titled Searching for a Father.

Today marks the second week of Ramadan, the holy month for Muslims to pray and fast. There are several prayer guides out there for Ramadan and how Christians can be praying for Muslims.

Perry LaHaie with Frontiers shares what makes Searching for a Father different. “It’s more than a prayer guide. It looks at the Muslim world through the eyes of a Muslim family—Firas and his family—characters who in many ways represent Muslims everywhere…. It’s seeing the Muslim world through the eyes of a Muslim.”

There are currently 1.6 billion Muslims who don’t yet know Christ as their personal Savior. Many Christians don’t understand much about Islam or the Muslim community. So even if someone feels a burden for their Muslim neighbors, it’s hard to know what their needs are or how to pray for them.

Mosque in Kazakhstan. (Photo courtesy of Ken and Nyetta/Flickr)

“We just wanted to do something that was unique to Frontiers, that tells a story, follows a particular family throughout the whole season so you can see it through their eyes and feel what they feel and hopefully get more a heart through the Muslim world,” says LaHaie.

“Story is so important because it draws us in and we can identify with the different feelings and emotions that people have. So it’s really a desire to draw us into the experience so we can pray more deeply and more realistically.”

This narrative-driven prayer guide during the weeks of Ramadan is a unique opportunity. While Muslims are praying and fasting from June 6-July 5, many are open to exploring the truth of their faith.

For some, this time of Ramadan leads to a miraculous awakening through the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and coming to see the truth of the God of the Bible. They see that Islam and its rules do not have the answers.

(Photo courtesy Frontiers)

LaHaie explains, “[Muslims are] working really hard to earn God’s favor, earn salvation. And it just kind of gives you an inside look at what it’s like to be in that kind of a system where you’re trying to earn God’s favor.”

Sign up for the Searching for a Father prayer guide, and get short chapters delivered to your email inbox each day. Just go to www.calltopray.net, follow the prompts, and sign up to receive the prayer guide.

(Image courtesy VOM Canada)

International (MNN) — No matter how long you’ve been a Christian, there are likely times when you’ve wondered: how important is prayer? God knows our every thought; He knows them even before we do. So, why is prayer important?

Well, for starters, prayer is mentioned more than 250 times in Scripture. Prayer is important to the Lord for a multitude of reasons and should therefore be a priority for us as His followers. It would make sense, then, that prayer is also the best way to help missionaries. However, money is often the first thing that comes to mind.

“When people think about missions, a lot of times they think about the resources, the finances, the personnel. But the request we get the most is for prayer,” says Advancing Native Missions (ANM) CEO Oliver Asher.

That’s why ANM has created a daily Prayer Guide with 31 different ways you can pray for native missionaries. Native missionaries, or indigenous missionaries, are believers who stay in their own country to tell people about Christ instead of going overseas to share the Gospel.

“Prayer is a way of life around here, so it only made sense that we should emphasize prayer and make sure that people don’t forget the importance of prayer,” adds Asher.

“Any great awakening, any great spiritual movement, any opening to the Gospel always begins with prayer.”

(Image courtesy Vision Beyond Borders)

ANM is highlighting the 31 Ways to Pray for Native Missionaries Prayer Guide on their Web site during the month of July. But, Asher says this resource can be used year-round to intercede for native missionaries.

Download a free copy of the prayer guide here.

Would you take time to pray for a native missionary today? Pray that God would bless native missionaries and their families with every resource they may need.

Listen to the conversation with Oliver Asher about the importance of prayer.

(Image courtesy Wikipedia)

Indonesia (ODM) — An Open Doors colleague who recently spoke at a Standing Strong Through the Storm seminar in Indonesia shared an unexpected message.

(Photo courtesy Voice of the Martyrs Canada)

Most of the 800 pastors attending were victims of attacks by Muslims on the island of Ambon. They had lost homes, churches, and even family members during these attacks. They were hurt, devastated, and needed answers to the challenges they faced.

As soon as the Open Doors colleague began preaching, one pastor stood up and interrupted, “Must we accept the persecution from the Muslims, or should we retaliate? We are tired of forgiving just to be attacked again. We believe it is time to defend the honor of God and retaliate. What must we do?”

Then another pastor interrupted, “No, Pastor, tell this brother he is wrong. The Bible tells us to accept our suffering. We will dishonor God if we retaliate. Seventy times seven we need to forgive. Isn’t this true?”

(Photo courtesy AMG International)

Register to receive the daily e-devotional Standing Strong Through the Storm, offered by Open Doors. Click here to get started.

“When the storm has swept by, the wicked are gone, but the righteous will stand firm forever.” Proverbs 11:25

Ask God to strengthen Christians living in Islamic nations to retaliate in incomprehensible ways, not with angry words or guns, but with the love of Christ and prayer.

President of Russian Ministries Sergey Rakhuba grew up in Ukraine, and his family still lives there; this week has been difficult for him. “First blood was shed a couple of days ago. The violence is escalating, and unfortunately, the government–the president–is not taking any decisive steps to bring any reconciling, non-violent solution to the situation.”

Cars are being turned over and burned. Ukrainians are attacking Ukrainians.

Faith community takes action as Ukraine gets more violent. (Photo Russian Ministries)

Rakhuba, through his tears, says the faith community is asking those involved to stop the violence and to unite. Believers “are gathering together, praying for peace. So, I appeal to the global Christian community to lift Ukraine, to lift my homeland, to God. ”

The protests began in November when President Viktor Yanukovych failed to approve a trade deal with the European Union, instead aligning Ukraine with Russia. When police attacked protestors, Ukrainians took to the streets by the thousands.

Then, just last week, in an attempt to end the anti-government protests, the majority party pushed through anti-government protest legislation that categorizes protesting against the government as “slander,” punishable with a 15-year prison term. The legislation also calls organizations who receive funding from outside Ukraine “foreign agents,” penalizing them with a tax.

Rakhuba says they have decided to temporarily close the Russian Ministries international headquarters in Kiev. “There is some potential for provocation because of this. We’re mobilizing the evangelical church for the peace-making ministry and reconciliation ministry this time. We thought we might be the target for possible provocation.”

Former President Mikhail Gorbachev is asking Presidents Putin and Obama to demand peace. Former heavyweight boxing champ Vitali Klitschko agreed to a truce with riot police, giving the government time to answer their calls for snap elections and the end to new anti-protesting legislation rammed through last week.

Many Christians around the world have a difficult time knowing how to pray specifically for Ukraine and other parts of Eurasia. Rakhuba says Russian Ministries wants to help by offering an annual Eurasia prayer guide to help in this time of urgent call to prayer. “In that annual prayer guide, there is discussion and description of how to pray for each country where we are involved with our ministry, and specifically for Ukraine, too.”

Get more information here.

It’s the Muslim holy month where followers of Islam pay special attention to their religious duties as they seek out God and truth. Ramadan comes from the Arabic word ramida or ar-ramad, meaning “intense scorching heat and dryness, especially the ground.”  Some Muslims say it’s because Ramadan scorches out the sins with good deeds, as the sun burns the ground.

However, it’s also been a traditional time where other religious minority groups have seen a sudden spike in persecution, stemming from the Quran’s commands to eliminate Christians.

With all of the turmoil plaguing the Middle East and North Africa, many more Muslims have been asking deep questions and getting answers from the Bible.  As a result, there are reports that man are coming to faith in Christ, making this an especially daunting time for Muslim converts to Christianity (AKA ‘MBBs’—Muslim Background Believers).     Many will have to resist the pressure from family and friends to recant their new faith.

Between that and the search for truth, Ramadan represents an opportunity to talk about Christ.

Muslims fast (one of the five pillars of Islam) as an act of faith and worship towards Allah, seeking to suppress their desires and increase their spiritual piety. Fasting together as a worldwide community – Ummah – affirms the brotherhood and equality of man before Allah.  The key here is: community.

Operation Mobilization, the Voice of the Martyrs, Open Doors, and many other ministries active in the Muslim world are calling believers around the world to pray during this special time. Many Christians want to participate in this prayer effort but don’t know where to begin.

“30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World” is specifically designed to help you do just that. This prayer guide is a 30-page booklet that focuses each day on a specific area of the Islamic world. As you pray, you’ll gain knowledge and understanding of the Islamic culture and a heart for the people that transcends the headlines.

Also, would you be willing to join with Christians around the world for the next 30 days to pray?  Pray that Jesus will reveal Himself through an increase of dreams and visions.  Also, pray that God would reveal creative ways for followers of Christ to be both bold and loving with their Muslim neighbors.