What showing God's love can do: 200,000 Tibetans, including 62 Buddhist monks, decide to follow Jesus
Something wonderful in the Christian sense is happening in Tibet, a region in China considered as the highest in the world and the home of Mount Everest, earth's highest mountain rising more than 29,009 feet above sea level.
Tibetans are mostly Buddhist, but there are also some Muslims and Christians, according to sources.
Last year, one Tibetan Buddhist priest embraced Jesus Christ and became a Christian pastor after seeing the love of Christ shown by a group of Christian workers who helped out and provided relief goods to the people of the region when a major earthquake struck the area, according to Joe Handley, president of Asian Access, a Christian organisation seeking to spread God's Word in South Asia.
Now, the seed of Christian love has grown. In an update, Handley reports that 62 other Buddhist monks have decided to follow the footsteps of the former Buddhist lama and are now following Christ as well.
And that's not all. "Just within the last year alone, [church leaders] are estimating that more than 200,000 people have come to Christ as a result of the labours of the Christian community there," Handley says.
What is causing this avalanche of Christian conversions?
Handley says this is all due to the work of Christian workers who provided hope and healing to the people of Tibet in the aftermath of last year's devastating quake. "They haven't seen Buddhists, Hindus, or other religious groups helping in the midst of the rubble. Rather, week after week, it is the followers of Jesus who have proved the test of time, sacrificed their own lives to serve and been the hands and feet of Jesus," he says.
Asian Access is playing a key role in this spiritual movement by training church leaders with the aim of establishing long-term spiritual growth in the region.
"Asian Access just has the privilege of coming alongside key pastors like the ones that have invested in this Tibetan priest's life," Handley says. "We invest deeply, building their capacity so they can reach their communities."
"God does amazing things when you invest in people and see them grow deeper in Him, grow stronger as leaders, learn how to reproduce other leaders, and then it spreads through church planting efforts in ways that are simply remarkable," he adds.
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/what.showing.gods.love.can.do.200000.tibetans.including.62.buddhist.monks.decide.to.follow.jesus/88890.htm
Let’s pray for this wonderful turning of Tibetans to Jesus to grow and spread to wherever Tibetans are found in China, India and in diaspora. Pray that they will realize that Tibetan Buddhism is an awful deception and bondage to the evil one and that they will be liberated by coming to know Jesus. Pray too for foreigners that have gotten ensnared by the Dalai Lama and his false teachings. Many are unaware that he gets his guidance from a demon-possessed oracle (Nechung Oracle). Pray for the overthrow of this system of demonic darkness and that even Tibetan monks like the Dalai Lama himself will repent of their involvement and be delivered by the power of God from this terrible and destructive idolatry.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has just crossed a very dangerous line. He has just signed a law making it illegal for Russian followers of Jesus Christ to share or preach the Gospel anywhere outside the walls of their church, or even email their family and friends to invite them to church. What's more, he has done so under the guise of preventing "terrorism."
As I have been warning for a decade (see here, here, here and in my 2006 book, Epicenter), Putin -- who is fashioning himself as a rising Czar -- is an increasingly dangerous despot. He continues to centralize government power and control to himself. He is trampling over human rights, the media, and NGOs. He is rebuilding the Russian military. He has invaded neighboring Georgia and Ukraine. He is arming and building alliances with Radical Islamic countries, particularly Iran.
Now, Putin is positioning himself as an enemy of Christ and His Church. If he doesn't not reverse course, he risks bringing disaster upon himself and the people of Russia.
As Christianity Today reports, last week "Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a package of anti-terrorism laws that usher in tighter restrictions on missionary activity and evangelism. Despite prayers and protests from religious leaders and human rights advocates, the Kremlin announced Putin’s approval yesterday. The amendments, including laws against sharing faith in homes, online, or anywhere but recognized church buildings, go into effect July 20."
Please read and share this important article from Christianity Today with others. Please be praying for God to change Putin's heart. Please be praying for the pastors and Christian leaders and lay people in Russia. And please pray for the Russian people. This is a very dangerous road they are now heading down.
EXCERPTS FROM THE CT ARTICLE:
......Though opponents to the new measures hope to eventually appeal in court or elect legislators to amend them, they have begun to prepare their communities for life under the new rules, reported Forum 18 News Service, a Christian outlet reporting on the region.
Protestants and religious minorities small enough to gather in homes fear they will be most affected. Last month, “the local police officer came to a home where a group of Pentecostals meet each Sunday," Konstantin Bendas, deputy bishop of the Pentecostal Union, told Forum 18. "With a contented expression he told them: ‘Now they're adopting the law I'll drive you all out of here.’ I reckon we should now fear such zealous enforcement.”
“There are potentially very wide-sweeping ramifications to this law,” Joel Griffith of the Slavic Gospel Association said in a Mission Network News report. “It just depends on, again, how it is going to be enforced, and that is a very huge question mark.”
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Earlier CT reporting (June 29): Christians in Russia won’t be allowed to email their friends an invitation to church or to evangelize in their own homes if Russia’s newest set of surveillance and anti-terrorism laws are enacted.
The proposed laws, considered the country’s most restrictive measures in post-Soviet history, place broad limitations on missionary work, including preaching, teaching, and engaging in any activity designed to recruit people into a religious group.
To share their faith, citizens must secure a government permit through a registered religious organization, and they cannot evangelize anywhere besides churches and other religious sites. The restrictions even apply to activity in private residences and online.
This week, Russia’s Protestant minority—estimated around 1 percent of the population—prayed, fasted, and sent petitions to President Vladimir Putin, who will have to approve the measures before they become official.
“Most evangelicals—leaders from all seven denominations—have expressed concerns,” Sergey Rakhuba, president of Mission Eurasia and a former Moscow church-planter, told CT. “They’re calling on the global Christian community to pray that Putin can intervene and God can miraculously work in this process.”
Following a wave of Russian nationalist propaganda, the laws passed almost unanimously in the Duma, the upper house, on Friday and in the Federation Council, the lower house, today.
“If this legislation is approved, the religious situation in the country will grow considerably more complicated and many believers will find themselves in exile and subjected to reprisals because of our faith,” wrote Oleg Goncharov, spokesman for the Seventh-day Adventists’ Euro-Asia division, in an open letter.
Proposed by United Russia party lawmaker Irina Yarovaya, the law appears to target religious groups outside the Russian Orthodox church. Because it defines missionary activities as religious practices to spread a faith beyond its members, “if that is interpreted as the Moscow Patriarchate is likely to, it will mean the Orthodox Church can go after ethnic Russians but that no other church will be allowed to,” according to Frank Goble, an expert on religious and ethnic issues in the region.
Russian nationalist identity remains tied up with the Russian Orthodox church.
“The Russian Orthodox church is part of a bulwark of Russian nationalism stirred up by Vladimir Putin,” David Aikman, history professor and foreign affairs expert, told CT. “Everything that undermines that action is a real threat, whether that’s evangelical Protestant missionaries or anything else.”
Sergei Ryakhovsky, head of the Protestant Churches of Russia, and several other evangelical leaders called the law a violation of religious freedom and personal conscience in a letter to Putin posted on the Russian site Portal-Credo. The letter reads, in part:
The obligation on every believer to have a special permit to spread his or her beliefs, as well as hand out religious literature and material outside of places of worship and used structures is not only absurd and offensive, but also creates the basis for mass persecution of believers for violating these provisions.
Soviet history shows us how many people of different faiths have been persecuted for spreading the Word of God. This law brings us back to a shameful past."
Stalin-era religious restrictions—including outlawing religious activity outside of Sunday services in registered churches and banning parents from teaching faith to their kids—remained on the books until the collapse of the Soviet Union, though the government enforced them only selectively.
Some have questioned whether the government could or would monitor religious activity in private Christian homes.
“I don’t think you can overestimate the Russian government’s willingess to exert control,” Aikman told CT. If history is any indication, the proposed regulations reveal a pattern of “creeping totalitarianism” in the country, he said....
If passed, the anti-evangelism law carries fines up to US $780 for an individual and $15,500 for an organization. Foreign visitors who violate the law face deportation.
Russia has already moved to contain foreign missionaries. The “foreign agent” law, adopted in 2012, requires groups from abroad to file detailed paperwork and be subject to government audits and raids. Since then, the NGO sector has shrunk by a third, according to government statistics....
From joelcrosenberg | July 13, 2016 at 10:29 am | Categories: Epicenter | URL: http://wp.me/piWZ7-5eZ
Please pray for religious freedom to be preserved throughout Russia and for the strengthening of the followers of Jesus wherever they are in this vast nation. Pray for true revival to hit the Russian Orthodox Church and its hierarchy as well as for Vladimir Putin and members of his government. Russia has had such massive revivals in the past and we pray for another visitation of His Spirit there.
This movement of praying children has been facilitated by a network of children's prayer coordinators across the country since 2003. This network now exists in 72 (seventy-two) regions / cities throughout Indonesia. The functions and duties of the facilitator is to teach children to pray at his local church and to invite Sunday school teachers each week from churches in the area and city. They gather together in a church or in other facility that is sufficient to accommodate the children from all the local churches in that region to pray together with specific prayer requests according to the situation of their city and the nation as a whole.
Every year, when the children are out of school, churches or local children's prayer network administrators hold prayer training for children. Prayer requests from the leadership of the national network of children's prayer and the reading of the Word of God are prepared and shared with the kids by the church Sunday school teacher.
In addition, every year, in the month of June, all network administrators mobilize children to pray for children at risk . They pray about the condition of children in the world as well as those in Indonesia with material supplied by an international organization called VIVA Network. Through such training and prayer for specific requests, the children's prayer movement continues to grow around the nation.
To ensure that the children's prayer movement is still being strengthened and continues, at both the annual prayer activities and the routine monthly ones, we assign a mentor for each of these activities. One of his or her tasks is to ensure the delivery of the monthly prayer requests and invocations of prayer for children at risk. This practice has also encouraged the movement of children to pray.
There are many testimonies of how children's prayers have been answered powerfully by the Lord. Miracles of any sicknesses healed and other wonderful transformations, such as the closing down of dark places of criminal activity, have happened. Also, children who engage in prayer have a character that is much more obedient along with a fondness for reading the Word of God and praising the Lord. They also have a concern for the protection of the environment.
We continue to expand the network with those who have a love and concern for the spiritual nurture of children. Our goal is that by 2017 there will be 200 children's prayer networks with teams of facilitators, so that more churches will get involved in the funding and there will be a greatly increased number of number of children who pray.
Please pray with us that we will keep praying and working until all areas / regions / cities in Indonesia have children that pray. Thanks be to God!
The Workers Are Few:
“Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” Matthew
The fields ARE ripe unto harvest. God’s heart is for all peoples to have the opportunity to come to know Him and have the opportunity to receive the gift of salvation because of His Son. Prayer brings us directly into the larger perspective of what God is doing! Jesus’ solution was always prayer. Prayer changes things!
When we pray, we recognize that prayer…
- Ushers us into God’s presence
- Reveals God’s plans
- Obeys Jesus’ command to ask the Lord of the Harvest to send workers.
- Invites God’s presence
- Removes hindrances to the gospel
- Prepares hearts to hear and respond
- Releases resources
- Gives protection for all
- Releases spiritual power
- Exercises divine authority to change situations and people
- Prayer IS the battle, and prayer brings the victory
Praying Effectively:
- Pray that believers will see the hearts among every least-reached people group that are ready to hear and respond to the Gospel. John 4:35
- Pray that the Lord of the Harvest will send laborers into His Harvest fields. Luke 10:2
- Pray that the Lord will help the Body of Christ to labor together in the unity of the Spirit to bring good news where it’s never been heard before. 1 Cor. 3:9
- Pray that God will supply and multiply the resources necessary to support His workers and their work. 2 Cor. 9:8-11
- Pray for 100-fold fruit that remains for God’s glory and transforms each group by its presence. Matthew 4:20
See more at: http://www.globalprn.com/praying-for-the-unreached/ 9:35-38
How to pray specifically for Oral and Oral Bibleless People:
The remaining Unreached Unengaged People Groups are predominantly oral societies. We need to shift our understanding to include prayer for the Oral and Oral Bibleless peoples as well. Realizing that large portions of the globe still do not have access to Scripture, we need to learn to pray for those who communicate in oral ways or prefer oral methods. Let’s ask God to teach us to understand the needs of oral communicators, recognizing that they need to hear the gospel story in a different way or format in order to properly understand its message. Let’s pray for God to use technology to bring His story to the masses of this day so that soon there are ZERO peoples left to hear the name of Jesus. Let’s pray for new gateways and new pathways for the gospel to every tongue, tribe and nation.
Technology is opening doors that previously have not been available. Repositories of Scripture are available through the internet like Bible.is and YouVersion. There are websites such as OneStory: Listen Now http://www.onestory-media.org/ that offer multiple language story sets and Afghan Radio: The Sound of Life http://afghanradio.org/en/scripture/oral-bible-stories where God’s Word is available in the Dari language. God is making a way.
Over the past few years we have seen a shift in our network of ION to be given the opportunity to influence the Body of Christ to make disciples of oral learners in ways that go far beyond our original ideas of orality. For the past several summers, theological schools have been hosting ION Theological Consultations to discuss and bring awareness in the seminary world of the reality of oral learners in their classrooms. And discussions are wide open in regard to formal and non-formal theological education. Please continue to pray for more open doors such as this. God the “WayMaker” of Isaiah 43 is making a way, where in the past it seemed as if there was no way. Isaiah 43:14-21
Prayer Mobilization:
The focus has shifted us from what “we are doing” to “what God is up to.” We are moving into a fuller appreciation and operation of being God-centered and Spirit-driven, remembering the 18 months in praying for the Unengaged Unreached People Groups (UUPG) listing, name by name. We linked it to the larger prayer initiative of Ethne/Harvest Prayer (see a sample from Dec. 2013 ION Prayer Focus). We did not give up, but we continued to press in calling others to join to pray for each people group to have SOMEONE who would be willing to reach toward them. Pray for more workers in the area of prayer mobilization. The Body of Christ needs to be mobilized to pray in this area into the future.
Commitment to Pray in a different way:
From that 18 months, we began to ask God, “How do we pray for the oral peoples of the globe?” In October 2014, we began to ask the intercessors and pray-ers to move into a different format of prayer: To listen to the Bible in 90 Days (https://orality.net/prayer/bible-in-90-days-prayer-initiative/) as a way of connecting to oral peoples and those peoples who do not yet have Scripture in their heart language or mother tongue. We were wondering what it might be like for Scripture engagement to involve listening and praying. Now we are asking more boldly for God to send the workers into His harvest fields in the area of Bible translation.
The reality of the need for a new strategy of prayer:
How is it that after 2000 years, still not everyone has access or the ability to hear of Jesus Christ? How is it possible that those of us in the West have stacks of Bibles in our homes and there are still 1,778 peoples who do not have one verse? As we allowed God to open our ear gates to His Word, something different began to happen. God began to bring a greater reality to us of the 5.7 Billion people (with over half of those numbers being children) not having the same access to Scripture that we knew, it shifted us. It shifted our prayers.
God’s heart is for the every and all to have access to Him and to hear the name of Jesus. He can and will bring a new awakening to the Body of Christ. We are believing that the Body is being reset this year of 2016, the year of REFRESH. Having finished a year of intentional listening, we acknowledge that as we shift into this second half of the year, we are allowing Him to recalibrate us. We are asking God for some very big things. He is a very big God! The globalization of ION is upon us as a network. Praise God, we are seeing people all over the globe catch the vision of reaching the oral peoples.
Prayer and fasting is the key to moving into next levels. That reminds us of a story. After the experience of Transfiguration, the disciples had the opportunity to come to a new awareness of what would be needed. You remember the story in Mark 9. They tried unsuccessfully to deliver the young boy, but to no avail. “After Jesus had gone indoors, his disciples asked him privately, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” He replied, “This kind can come out only by prayer and fasting.” And this same story back in Matthew 17, “Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you. ”But this kind doesn’t come out except by prayer and fasting.”
Do you know how you fit into being a part of God’s Great Commission plan:
Prayer is a part of His foundation, because of who we are as sons and daughters of God. We must help everyone feel able and needed to pray. We must “demystify” the call to prayer as being something more than what it is. . .
Prayer is simply part of our ordinary life as a believer.
Have you thought of yourself as a prayer mobilizer or a prayer strategist? In the Scriptures, many times, those who led in prayer also mobilized prayer. They too, were the ones who brought the strategy of prayer to the people. We are in a very critical time in the history of the church. It will take everyone doing their part and being willing to link together in the area of prayer to pray in those who still wait.
Prayer is not a formality, but a responsibility of every believer.
Prayer is not a department or a small group who “takes care of our prayer requests.” In prayer we must allow ourselves to simply “be” with Him. To understand prayer as the foundation of everything we do is critical for every believer and every group involved in the work of God.
Prayer is essential to the work of God. It is His work.
Prayer is how we come into agreement with Him. That takes listening to Him and trusting Him fully.
Trusting the Holy Spirit for the power to accomplish, because we simply join the Son as He intercedes to the Father.
As a son of God we join in prayer for the Every and All.
Join in believing God is able to finish in and through His body what He has set before us.
In the ION network we have many working in prayer who are helping others to see how they can fit into God’s plan raising the level of awareness and advocacy for prayer.
Check out the great resources for praying for many of the world’s unreached that are oral learners at https://orality.net
You can find out more information about praying for unreached peoples in general at http://www.globalprn.com/praying-for-the-unreached/
By Linda Bemis, International Orality Network [ION]
Thousands of potential voters stood with open arms waving American and Israeli flags and vowing that for Zion’s sake their voices would be heard. The Christians United for Israel (CUFI) group’s annual summit was booked years in advance of the announcement that the Republican Party would hold its nominating convention in the same place during the same week. The grassroots-based organisation sees itself as playing a central role in the 2016 election drama. CUFI spoke out in advance of the Republican convention when the platform committee drafted party doctrine for the coming election. Their lobbying organisation had the word ‘divided’ changed to ‘undivided’ on the Republican platform with regards to Jerusalem. ‘We want to see Jerusalem the eternal capital of the Jewish people undivided today, tomorrow and forever.’ said CUFI. In US politics there is strength in numbers and CUFI’s strength and mobilisation was noticed.
USA: Black lives matter
29 Jul 2016
Video footage has emerged of a policeman violently throwing an African-American female school teacher to the ground, and a second officer telling her, ‘whites are afraid of black people because they have violent tendencies and are ‘intimidating.’ Austin police officer Richter pulled over Breaion King for speeding. He told her to close the door. She refused, saying, ‘Would you please hurry up?’ He lost his temper and dragged her out of the car. She shouted, ‘No! Why are you touching me? Oh my God!’ He shouted, ‘Stop resisting!’ and violently threw her to the ground, ordered her to put her hands behind her back, saying, ‘I'm about to taser you.’ When she managed to stand up, he body-slammed her to the ground again. The video came as demonstrations continue across the US by 'Black Lives Matter' campaigners.
Global: Poverty and development
29 Jul 2016
The failure of much of the world to meet the first Millennium Development Goals of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 highlights the need for research to go beyond the measuring of poverty and give more attention to its causes and dynamics. The department of History and Ethnology at Jyväskylä University, Finland are inviting anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists, socio-economists, political scientists and development researchers to submit paper proposals at a conference on urban poverty on August 4-6, 2016. This three-day conference will explore new findings and developing theories on the causes of poverty, especially urban poverty or poverty at the interface between the urban and rural. Possible themes will be climate change, water and sanitation, economy, governance, health, religion and technology.
Amnesty International has credible evidence of Turkish detainees subjected to beatings, torture and rape since the failed coup. ‘It is absolutely imperative that the Turkish authorities halt these abhorrent practices and allow international monitors to visit all these detainees in the places they are being held’, said Amnesty Europe. Erdogan extended the maximum period of detention from 4 to 30 days, increasing risks of torture and maltreatment. Pray for Erdogan to be cautious as he signs laws without prior parliamentary approval in his drive to remove supporters of the coup. Pray for an end to indiscriminate crackdowns on ‘opposition’. Pray for justice for the 60,000+ detained or suspended: soldiers, police, judges, teachers, civil servants and others.