Keeping Apace with SEA's Rising Prayer Movements

Special Series: Prayer (Part 2)

Saturday, Jul. 4, 2009 Posted: 5:01:12PM HKT

In terms of proportion, it is one of the least reached regions in the world. But the prayer movement in Southeast Asia is anything but inactive.

According to Lena Wan, who is coordinating the Southeast Asia Prayer Council or SEAPC (pronounced 'see-pack'), the much-vaunted missionary church in Singapore is lagging behind her neighbours in prayer life.

Wan ascribes this to the observation that prayer often increases as the persecution of believers increases, quoting a Cambodian pastor who remarked that everybody came together to pray during the coup of 1977 but after it was over nobody came.

She was speaking to The Christian Post during an interview conducted last month in a public setting.

Singapore’s ten neighbours have seen some dramatic growth in their prayer movements and the number of transformation initiatives launched in them is a testimony to their development.

For instance, Indonesia, which has “the strongest movement of all of us”, records thousands of transformation projects going on across the country, coordinated by Transformation Connections Indonesia which began in 2005.

In Brunei, all except for one or two churches are represented in a bimonthly prayer meeting for the nation. There is no transformation movement yet, but the pastor of BTN church is teaching his members to kick off a marketplace campaign and “things are happening”. His wife runs the top music school in town where the music taught is either classical or Christian and the couple has open access to the national TV station to showcase their students performing. All the top officials’ children attend the school.

Cambodia has a church-planting campaign going in which church leaders are mobilising believers to put a church in every village by 2021. Cambodia Prayer Stream, the national prayer network, was launched in December 2003, but prayer has been “going for a while”.

There is no organised prayer movement in Laos; in fact, most local Christians don’t even know how to pray, but Campus Crusade has been mobilising young people to great success, moving along slowly but surely despite very difficult circumstances.

The Church in Malaysia has an active prayer network and numerous transformation projects to her name.

For Myanmar, the national prayer movement took off since 2004 and has been “going very strong”. Though transformation looks like it’s going to take a long time given their situation, they are “praying hard”.

In the Philippines, the unity of the believers has been helped by the Global Day of Prayer though it’s “still a long way to go before unity can be seen”. The upcoming presidential elections in 2010 has served to bring the body of Christ together in prayer while transformation is taking place in pockets around the nation.

Thailand’s prayer movement has been “taking off” especially since the unrest ensuing after former PM Thaksin was ousted. “What we see in the news is the direct result of Christians rising up to pray for their nation”, said Wan. Much of the north and northeast of the country has been transformed, but poverty is still a major issue.

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Edmond Chua
Christian Post Reporter