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Prayer, Autumn 2006Since April, we regret to say the new prayer team from the Spanish Evangelists' Conference has been unable to produce a prayer letter. Do pray for the team as they attempt to add this new responsibility to their very busy schedule. We now expect there to be a new start some time this autumn. National Prayer DayThe last Sunday in October is Pray4Spain Sunday! Please join us in praying for this needy country. As people around the world remember the Reformation at this time, so we long for revival in our country and this flowing out in reformational power through all areas of society. In addition, take into account that we are at the eve of an important regional election, in Catalonia (which will unusually be not on a Sunday, but on 1st November, also a public holiday). Add the prayer requests on this and other pages of this site, together with all the background material you can get from the site and elsewhere. There are some other suggestions on our National Prayer Day page. Summer outreach resultsPray for follow-up to summer outreaches. The difference between an enjoyable and spiritually uplifting summer activity and growing healthy new believers is in the hard grind of follow-up work done by church workers in the immediate aftermath of the campaign.
Pray for children who made decisions to follow Jesus in the many summer camps and for the teenagers whose lives were changed through OM's Teen Street camp in Ciudad Real. Pray now for teachers and leaders in the less 'glorious' but highly significan Sunday School and children's and youth ministries through the school year. Back to schoolPray for the various Bible Schools and Seminaries in Spain which prepare young people for ministry. These include several denominational schools (SBU, AoG, etc) plus the interdenominational 'United Seminary' and independent schools such as GEM founded IBSTE in Barcelona and Dallas inspired SEFOVAN in Madrid. The Brethren have a number of regional and correspondance schools, plus the national Ephesus project involving weekend courses. There is a desperate need for well-prepared church leaders, but the level of vocations is falling as more evangelical young people find the option of (secular) university training more appealing and few seem to want to leave well paid work after completion of a university training to enter a seemingly precarious existence as a pastor, despite the abundance of job offers! So pray that this year the schools will get a good number of motivated recruits. Most schools start up the first week of October. Pray, also, for Sunday schools and other church-based Bible teaching programs which are getting back to work. And pray for the significant number of evangelical school teachers working within the state school system. Actual evangelical schools for children are few an far between, despite having been the backbone of education for the poor in mamny parts of Spain before the 1936 Civil War. The Fliedner Foundation has two schools in Madrid. ImmigrantsRamadan falls into this 'fall', from September 24th for a month. Pray for the ministries and churches reaching out to the immigrants from North Africa in particular who find integration with the very different western society of Spain almost impossible and are tempted to remain in ghettos. A number of ministries have sprung up reaching out with a loving welcome and are seeing some response. Job offers aplentyWe have become aware of a number of job offers in a range of varying lines of activity: Good News for evangelical TV! The program Buenas Noticias TV, which goes out on Sundays on state TV channel TVE (and on TVE Internacional by satellite), has just announced it is recruiting an assistant editor. After the recent addition of a weekly radio program to the state network this is good news indeed, although the evangelicals would still like permission to run their own station. Pray for the right person to apply and be chosen! Diakonia, the social outreach arm of the churches has a job bank service for linking people looking for ministry opportunities with the jobs available. the trouble is, there is an overflow of opportunities and a sever lack of trained evangelical professionals applying for them. The law requires that many ministries now have university trained psychologists, social workers, medical personnel and so on. There are plenty of willing volunteers for many activities, but they don't make the academic grade. It has come to our notice that a Consular service has two leading positions on offer and that a particularly well profiled evangelical has been turned down for one of the posts, possibly because he is of the wrong denomination and outspoken as a Christian. He has been awarded in the past for his exemplary service to citizens of his nation. Does religious persecution continue in the seat of government of the protestant homelands? Many thanks again for your commitment to pray for Spain. We would love to hear from you, so please if you are praying regularly for Spain let us know by sending us an email. If you have any queries or contributions, don't hesitate to get in touch! Old Arise bulletinsYou can find these from the menu to the left (top of page). If you want to read our newsletters in the original Spanish, you can read this one here. As for previous numbers, they are now available on the sister site Spanish sister site now in English!Our Spanish language sister site is now up and running in English! This is the official site of the Spanish Evangelists' Conference and shares the same webmaster and Carrelet web technology. |