Have you ever heard people use the phrase, “That’s a dangerous prayer”? It means when you ask God for things that he will almost certainly grant it will also probably mean challenging times for the person praying.
For example, you could pray each day that God would bring challenges into your life so that you would be drawn closer to him. You could pray each day that God would give you an opportunity to witness about Jesus with somebody. These could be considered “dangerous” requests because God will likely grant those requests, but it might mean hard or uncomfortable times for us.
How God is Challenging Us
In the Outreach group for the One Africa Team, we often pray the prayer, “Lord, present us with more opportunities to reach more people with your gospel in Africa.” You could call that a dangerous prayer. What if God actually granted that request? What would we do with all the opportunities?
By God’s grace, that’s exactly the position we are finding ourselves in. We find ourselves high in opportunities and low in the ability to take advantage of them all in the way we would like. In addition to the 8 African mission partners we’re already in fellowship with, we are currently actively working towards fellowship with another 8 church bodies!
These are located in Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2 church bodies there), Liberia, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia (2 here also, different from the Lutheran Church of Ethiopia, which joined our fellowship a few years ago). We are also offering support to two of our sister churches as they reach out to establish fellowship with other churches in their areas. In addition, at any given time we usually have around 40 individuals that come into contact with us online that we are trying to get to know better to see if we can work together in gospel ministry. Finally, many of the churches and contacts we are beginning to work with are in countries where the predominant language is French. We find ourselves in need of more people who are capable of working in this language.
What We are Praying For
Admittedly, these are great challenges for us to have to face! We thank God for his grace in leading us to all these opportunities. Now we ask that he also give us the capacity to overcome the challenges we are facing.
Please join your prayers to ours about these things! Pray that God would send us more workers to fill the three empty positions on our team. Pray that we can excel in language learning so that we can better communicate the truths of the gospel in different countries. Pray that these new groups would have a love for the pure word of God and that we would find ourselves in agreement with them on doctrine so that we can work together for the sake of the gospel.
And yes, pray that we will have even more opportunities for gospel outreach in the future! It may be a “dangerous” prayer, but is one filled with God’s blessing!
Missionary Ben Foxen lives in Lusaka and coordinates One Africa Team’s work with new mission partners
Please pray for those working in fields that are ripe for harvest. Share their story, engage with future news, and receive updates. Learn more about our mission fields in Africa and how the Holy Spirit is working faith in people’s hearts at https://wels.net/serving-others/missions/africa
