INDONESIA (BP) – It started with a map and a book.
The map laid out the sprawling city in which International Mission Board worker Howard Brackey* lives. The book challenged Howard to put feet to his prayers for the city.
The book hit close to home. In “That None Should Perish: How to Reach Entire Cities for Christ Through Prayer Evangelism,” author Ed Silvoso described undertaking the task of prayerwalking a large South American city. As Howard read the book, he thought about his well-creased map of his large Indonesian city.
“God put the vision of this particular map in my head. I thought, ‘All right, we’re going to prayerwalk this city.’”
As part of an urban city team, Howard figured he and his teammates could at least prayerwalk major roads in the city that is roughly the same size as St. Louis but, like most Asian cities, is densely populated with millions of people.
“I thought, ‘Even if no one helps me, I can personally get out and walk these big roads,’” Howard said. When he was walking a major road one day, however, he glanced sideways.
“I’m down one of the roads and I look down a side alley and there’s these two or three little grandmas and some little kids running around,” he recounted. “And I found myself gravitating toward that road and praying for those people. That’s when I realized we needed to pray for every [single] road. We needed to pray for the entire city.”
Howard’s team members joined him in the task and once they had committed as a group to pray for every street, he said the Lord provided a surplus of church volunteers from the United States that summer. More than 50 volunteers came to help partner in other ways but also invested a portion of their time to prayerwalk. One volunteer specifically came to prayerwalk.
It was a Friday when Howard’s wife Rosemary* and two others chose the area around the city’s largest mosque to prayerwalk. They were able to climb the stairs up into one of the towers, and after they came back down, a man invited them inside the mosque. Rosemary had not been in this mosque since moving to the city.
When a man who wanted to practice his English approached them, Rosemary was able to ask him questions about Islam. “I asked about how one gets their sins forgiven [in Islam],” she said. This question led to a conversation that allowed Rosemary and her prayerwalking partners, another woman and a man, to share with the man – there in the mosque – about the forgiveness of Christ.
For more information on prayerwalking or other ministry opportunities, email urbanseap@gmail.com.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Indonesia is the country of focus for the current International Mission Study by Woman’s Missionary Union. IMB workers featured in this study are supported through the Cooperative Program and Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. Find IMS study resources at imb.org/ims and wmu.com/IMS. (*) denotes name changed.