World Prayer Report 7 June 1986 — George Verwer

Prayer as the Source of Ministry Victories

First Corinthians 9, a familiar passage. I really want to thank you for praying. I don't take that lightly. I believe God's work, as I'm sure you've heard me say before, is done through prayer. I believe O .M.'s greatest victories and greatest defeats are on the same sentence.

The victories have been the lessons we've learned in prayer, the times we've persevered in prayer. Perhaps O .M.'s strongest point. At the same time, the thing that concerns me the most in O .M.'s, not the lack of money, but the lack of prayer, still are not experiencing personal reality in their own prayer lives and in the prayer fellowship, in the half-nights of prayer.

And it's easy in O .M. to take these things for granted. Perhaps I have the privilege that most of my life has lived outside of O .M. these days. It hasn't always been that way. When I was directing the Lagos ministry years ago in India, many of my years have been spent very much within the O .M. community.

But now I'm more on the road, out of the community, leading often nights of prayer for other people. Tomorrow I'm all day with YWAM and their whole national conference of all their workers in the whole country.

And as some of you know, I've been with Campus Crusade for the last short time, an expo in Berlin where four and a half thousand were gathered. And I was asked to lead the prayer time, sort of extended prayer time in Birmingham before going over to Berlin.

And you know, it's amazing, people just so appreciate these meetings. In fact, in the Birmingham meeting, after sharing these very short sentences on the unreached people, I asked how many had never really been gripped with this before, what the whole thing of world vision and the unreached people is all about.

Ninety percent raised their hand that they never had really seen this before. That's about 2 ,000 people. And I think one of the greatest dangers in O .M. is we become so accustomed to spiritual things.

And a night of prayer, for some it's a bore, for others they don't bother to go. For others it's, of course, a chore. Not that we expect it always to be easy because we don't. Just imagine in the Soviet Union if they had a privilege for a prayer meeting like this.

I will tell you, with the information we have, they would, you know, can't believe it. The most appreciative people, I think, in my ministry in the past weeks was just a few days ago in East Berlin, Communist Germany.

And going through the famous checkpoint Charlie, which you see in all these spy films, too many of which I have watched, is quite an experience. You know, you're just waiting for someone to shoot. But it was all rather dull, actually.

Except the meetings and the privilege of meeting these believers who, you know, just are so appreciative of people willing to come from the West. And they want to give. Their money isn't worth anything out of East Germany.

One dear lady came to me and gave me her watch right off her wrist. And she said, I'd like you to give this to a Christian worker in the West. Do you think anybody could use it? And I was reluctant, but I said I'd try to get it to someone in India.

And I took it and I wondered, you know, going back through the checkpoint Charlie, are they going to find this woman's watch on my arm? And somehow it was late at night and they didn't even have any customs inspection going out of East Germany.

Anyway, it's good to be back for this short time. And I thank you for praying. And I know many of you have prayed. And I know that it's more difficult, at least for some people, week after week to be in the same somewhat chilly location interceding than it is to have perhaps the variety I face in praying with so many different people.

Running the Christian Race With Discipline

Anyway, 1 Corinthians 9 is the New Year's message the Lord gave me that I shared this past Sunday evening in a tremendous sending church up near Birmingham back here in England. And I just thought I'd share a few thoughts from this before I share prayer burdens.

Verse 24, 1 Corinthians 9, Know ye not that they who run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize, so run that ye may obtain. Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate or self-controlled in all things.

They do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run not as uncertainly, so fight I not as one that beateth the air. But I keep under my body and bring it into subjection, lest that by any means when I have preached to others I myself should be a castaway.

Is this the first night of prayer for the New Year? Did you have one last Tuesday? You did. Well, that's great. And was last Tuesday New Year's Eve? That's even better yet. But if it went past midnight, then you prayed into the New Year.

Otherwise, this is your first prayer meeting in the New Year. I don't think it's too late in the year to set goals, and I hope you will be setting realistic goals for 1986. And I often think of this exhortation, so fight I not as one that beateth the air.

The person, the team, the fellowship that doesn't have goals is easily the fellowship or individual that is beating the air. And God wants to give us personal goals. Some people type up goal sheet. I remember one of the leaders from India typed up his goal sheet when he was headed back for a year home in Canada.

So I wrote him just recently. I said, could I have a summary of how you did on the goals? I think I sent him a photocopy. And I got a very interesting reply back. Most of us idealistic zealots fall short of the goals that we set, but better to have goals and fall short than have no goals and drift or beat the air.

Sometimes, occasionally I meet people who are on OM beating the air, and the main thing they seem to be thinking about is when they're going to leave. And God has often challenged me, live where I am now.

I also can get caught up thinking about the next big challenge coming up. But again and again the Lord has rebuked me and brought me back to the day in which I was and say live for today. It may not be any big events today, but each day is important.

I was jogging along the beaches in the Netherlands a couple of days ago at this tremendous youth conference of a movement I'd like you to pray for called Young and Free. They certainly have a good name, almost a better name than OM.

Young and Free. And I had brought with me from Australia. I'm pushing Australia these days, as you can see by my koala bear. It's proven to be an embarrassment actually in some of the meetings, especially in Berlin when they had this giant television screen behind me.

And I think unconverted people on the cameras. And when I was trying to drive home this very strategic point, people started laughing. I wondered what is going on. I'm obviously not communicating. Apparently the man with the camera had blown this up giant size on the screen while I was trying to pour out my heart.

So I have taken it off in the presence of video cameras, which we also had over there in the Netherlands. But I brought this message with me from an outstanding Methodist minister in Sydney who's obviously a sportsman.

And he was giving this message just before the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane in Queensland. And he gave these tremendous illustrations from sportsmen. Started with Eric Little. I had just seen Chariots of Fire again, the fourth time on the plane.

Only wept six times, I think, this time. Decided I'm going to, whatever the cost, purchase at least 100 copies of that videocassette and circulate them around the world. And I know when I get to heaven I'm going to see the results.

Videocassettes and the Global Spread of the Gospel

I really, I don't want to get into this because it would be a sidetrack, but I feel the greatest area where OM is missing the boat is in the use of the videocassette. We're about 10 years behind. Most groups are 20 years behind.

We're only 10 years behind. But when I think of some groups still distributing phonograph records, which is probably good for certain parts of the world, in an age when the videocassette is just everywhere, it's just literally everywhere.

People are renting mainline movies now for two pounds. And we ought to pray, and maybe we can include that in our prayer requests, that as God's people we may do more with videocassettes, and that there'll be a day when the videocassette will appear on every OM book table just like books.

Most young people are not reading books, at least in the Western world, certainly totally different in many Third World countries. And I just have very much that burden on my heart and had that confirmed again on this trip.

So he shared a bit about Eric Little, things that I hadn't known before, and the tremendous challenge of him running the race. He used this same passage of Scripture. And then he shared about a woman who was a swimmer, a world champion swimmer, and her goal was to get her swimming one more minute less.

Now, you'd think one minute, you know, that isn't much. But in this particular race, not a very long race, one minute is just like, you know, going over Mount Everest again if you were a mountain climber.

And she worked at this such a long period of time and could not break that minute. But she stuck at it, and stuck at it, and eventually she broke that world record through cutting down her swimming time by one minute.

And then he told of a man who was a discus thrower. You know, if you've watched the Olympics, these men sort of whirl around and then heave this heavy disc into the air. And apparently this man had won three gold medals over a period of 16 years, forgive me for not knowing the names.

Then went into retirement and came out again and started throwing and broke the world record again. But at one of the major events, something unbelievable happened within him. You know, he sort of began to rip apart his ribcage and started spewing blood and just about died.

And they put him in the hospital, tied him up, but they couldn't keep him. They didn't tie him to the bed, they tied up his chest, strapped it up, and he went out. I think it was in the Olympics again or some very major sporting events, and he decided to throw.

In excruciating pain, I think they take a number of throws, he cut down the number of throws, and somehow in his last throw as he felt this pain ripping through his body, he said in God's name, I don't know if he was a Christian or a believer in God, let this discus throw, and he beat the world record.

Twenty years this man, he wasn't young any longer, had been training and working on that. You know, we have an enormous problem in O .M. We have about a hundred problems, and I'm thinking of one right now, that our whole goal, one of our main goals is love.

Love, Excellence, and Christian Discipline

And if love isn't kept in balance, it becomes very soft, it becomes very insipid, and it becomes an enemy of excellency. Anybody who trains any of these sportsmen, they have to be vicious. If you saw the man who trained Abraham in the Eric Little film, you know, this old Italian who won some award for acting, you know, he was really rough.

And all these people who win these contests, almost all of them have trainers. And to properly train someone, believe me, you cannot just have the doctrine of 1 Corinthians 13. You have got to really be rough and hard and firm.

And that's the only way you'll create excellency. If you took a secular public speaking course, some of you who take meetings, they'd rip you apart. Christians won't tell you anything. You'll go your whole life, a lousy preacher, with a few shaking hands with you at the meeting, and always some results.

And you'll never know that you're just a C-League speaker. You'll always wonder why you don't get invited back. But if you took a secular course in public speaking, they'd tear you apart. And you'd learn to communicate if you're going to graduate from the course.

And this is the enormous dilemma we find ourselves in, O .M., as we go into 1986. I mean, let's face it, in places O .M. is getting very soft. Very soft. We had another young person quit not long ago.

He said, this is a joke. It's so easy. I heard this movement was hard. I don't believe, of course, that paints a true picture. He'd only been on a summer campaign. I don't know whether he expected he was going to eat just bread and water and sleep on nails or what.

But he went home disillusioned with this movement. That has gone soft. Now, if we go soft, we will never create excellence. And I'm not a fanatic on excellence. I even attack it if it becomes extreme, because I know God uses all kinds of people.

And I know God uses ordinary efforts. God can use the world's greatest singer, Amy Grant, or Sandy Patty, or Sheila, to sing in her local church. And I really get upset when messages come across that give the idea that only the best, you know, God can use only the best.

I mean, God is merciful. That's the bottom line for all of us. But we must not take that mercy and forgiveness and grace as an advantage for slothfulness, slipshod work, lack of discipline, and all the kind of thing that we do see in the sports world.

We see it in the world of acting. Whatever the Christian church may say about Hollywood and about acting, many of those people are very disciplined people in their field. They may drink some things that you don't drink and go places that you don't go to, but a lot of them are very disciplined people.

The state of the church in terms of memorizing Scripture could make the most optimistic depressed if he takes surveys as I do all over the world. God's people just don't memorize Scripture. In Holland, when I took a survey recently, just a couple days ago, 90 of the young people in the meeting had never read the Bible through even once.

That also is just lack of discipline, perhaps also lack of motivation. Any training program, and we realize that OM is many things, and that's been emphasized a lot lately, but it is, among other things, a training program.

You know, you will only get out of it what you put into it. There is no way we can force people into spirituality on OM. We have tried for a long time. In fact, some of the people who we thought were going the furthest fell on their faces the quickest when they left.

Spirituality is a very personal thing. There are people growing in grace as much as any of us who don't know anything about Operation Mobilization or YWAM or any of the other great movements that God has raised up.

They just have a personal, deep walk with God in the midst of their own tough, vicious, often secular environment. I don't think we should be intimidated by our environment. Each environment has pluses and negatives.

OM has a lot of pluses. It also has a lot of negatives. You will all change environment as life goes on, and you'll just get different pluses and different negatives. Do not think all these people in the communist countries are all spiritual people.

That is a great miscommunication. They are just like many of us, and among them there are some very spiritual people. They're the ones we usually incorporate into our message illustrations. I just read something by quite a famous British writer about the people of Poland.

It was an absolute laugh. He compared the people of Poland with the people of America and made the people of America look like absolute sawdust, lazy bone, materialist Christians. And the people of Poland, the most dynamic, sold-out, committed, anti-non-materialist saints that have ever lived.

I just had considerable feedback from Poland, and the state of the church in Poland is extremely mixed with a very high degree of materialism running rampant throughout the nation. We're all more similar than we'd like to admit.

And in the communist countries, I remember the last time I was in the Soviet Union, the first girl, not many people talked to me because they didn't know English, but this one girl took me aside in the kitchen and started to pour out her heart, the same struggles that the average woman has on operation, mobilization back in the western world.

It was really quite interesting. But I think as we go into this new year, it would be so tremendous if we could sit down and write out some goals for 1986 and to determine by God's grace to improve in various areas that we have already talked about and discussed endless times.

I don't want to take the time, and I know the Holy Spirit can point out specific areas in each one of our lives. To me, all this, of course, indicates that the whole Christian life is so challenging because no matter how far you are along, there's just so much ground to take.

And in my own life, I just, of course, I get over esteemed in many parts of the world. I mean, some of the introductions I get in some of these countries where they don't know me, it's just quite a laugh.

But I just see so much ground yet to be taken in my own life in various areas. And I want to, by God's grace, make 1986 a fighting year for God. Sheila Walsh, a tremendous fighter for the Lord, has written a book which Hodder is publishing and I hope we'll distribute.

I don't know if it's out yet. It's coming out this year. You saw it in the Hodder catalog. There's a lot of great books coming out in 1986. She just shared, you know, she was a little shy Scottish girl that was afraid of relationships with anybody and how God just took her and made her an international fighter in presenting the gospel to the rock and roll generation that is still out there growing bananas.

It's just unbelievable the interest in rock and roll right around the entire world. Somebody like Bruce Springsteen has a meeting. It can be the biggest stadium in the world. Everything will be sold out 21 days before the guy even arrives.

People are paying $200 a ticket by the time the night arrives. People just go in there for hours. The commitment even of people in the music world sometimes is quite a challenge to me. So I guess I'm still where I was many years ago, wanting to get a greater grip on my own body, my tongue, my eyes.

Bringing the Body Under Submission

You know, I had another one of those interesting phone calls from a pornaholic. I seem to be setting up almost a pornaholic anonymous agency around the world. They phoned me from overseas. Can't imagine how thankful people are to talk to somebody who understands their problem.

This fellow called me from the continent, and he had just had a defeat. He'd been going for months. His fellow is absolutely hooked on pornography. He's a Christian. He loves Jesus. He's studying theology.

He'll probably be a minister. And his wife knows his problem, and one of the ways he overcomes his problem is by not, you know, letting his wife give him any money because then he can't buy anything. But he persuaded his wife in a moment of weakness to give him some money to buy toys for the children and went out, actually this morning went out and blew his mind on some pornography.

He called up again discouraged, broken. Asked me to pray with him on the phone, and we shared together. And then he called back, and he said he read in a magazine that actually in New York City they have a sexaholics anonymous.

They didn't have any address, so we can't join. But it's amazing how many people are enslaved by their bodies. Some habit has just got a grip on their life. It may be something else. It may be jealousy.

Jealousy with God is just as evil as lust. It may be bitterness. I would say that's far more evil and does far more harm than lust. That's why we have so much killing around the world. So I have this goal, and I hope you have the same goal.

That in 1986 I may bring my body into subjection, it says in some of your translations. Keep it under. Bring it into subjection. Lest that by any means when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.

One of the encouraging things, as I've looked back over the years of OM, is that there don't seem to be many ex-OM people, who have been with us say a year or two, who are castaways today. I have castaway research in one of my subsidiaries.

You can do anything to find out any ex-OMer, especially in your program, who is away from the Lord. There are people, of course. But wherever you go in the world, you find quite a number of OM people, I saw in Australia and New Zealand, going on for God.

And it seems somehow, despite all of our weaknesses, many have learned something quite significant during their time in OM, about buffeting that old body. It takes quite a bit of buffeting these days, doesn't it, to get out of bed in the morning and just get into orbit.

It's slushy and cold and snow. And most of the cars that we have don't just leap into action. This thing that we drive around here is like, you know, a turtle who's lost its head. And then you're out scraping off the windshield.

Interesting, right? This time of the year. But I believe it's all a challenge. If we could see each problem, each problem as a challenge. This man shared on this tape about the handicapped Olympics. And all these people running in these handicapped Olympics have serious handicaps.

And they have hurdles for people with only one leg. I don't know if you've ever run hurdles. That is not easy with two legs. And here they were running down the field with their one leg heaving themselves over these hurdles.

And this one man was running, winning the race. He bumped his knee on the hurdle and his leg fell off. And he grabbed his leg, picked it up, and kept running and finished the race. You know, it's so easy for us, isn't it?

Overcoming Self-Pity Through Empathy

I don't know about you, but it's so easy for us to get into our self-pity syndrome. People don't love us enough. They don't appreciate us enough. Or I'm not, you know, why didn't God make me more gifted?

Why am I a scatterbrain? Why do I lose my wallet once a week? Whatever other great, you know, disadvantage you seem to be facing in life. And I would really like to get to see one of these handicapped races.

I did see a film once about X. I don't know if they're focusing in on my equilibrium. I did see a film once about all these Vietnam veterans. That has been so much on my heart in 1985. All these Vietnam people.

So easily, I could have been born just a little bit later, gone out to Vietnam so easily. Do you ever picture yourself in the shoes of other people? Come back without legs, without eyes, napalm burned all over you.

And I saw this film, I think I saw it when I was in Pakistan. Of people coming back from Vietnam at the time when nobody wanted to talk to these soldiers. And this was all taken in a hospital. Jonathan McCrosty had just had his accident.

This was all taken in a hospital and they were all amputees. And they had one of these handicapped races. What a great challenge it is, isn't it, to think of the Apostle Paul also with all of his disadvantages.

Most of the churches misunderstood him. He was a man, apparently, that wasn't so pleasant to look at. He had these terrible three, this problem that he prayed would disappear three times and it didn't go.

God just said, I'm going to give you grace, press on. You know what the present day prosperity extremist movement teaches about Paul? And all of his problems and his illnesses and his lack of clothing and his, you know, you've read about Paul.

They say, you know, if he'd only had faith. That's what they're teaching about the Apostle Paul. If he had faith, he wouldn't have any of these problems. I tell you, that doesn't make you barf. I don't know what it does.

And I hope you don't know that term. But really, it really does make me very, very upset. So the Apostle Paul, with all of his disadvantages and weaknesses, he says, I therefore so run, I therefore so fight, not as one that beateth the air.

I keep under my body and bring it into subjection. There's no shortcuts to this. Cannot be done in a one-year OM program. This is a lifetime marathon. So don't get discouraged if you've fallen along the race.

Don't get discouraged if you're trying to increase your prayer life a little bit, like that woman was trying to decrease her swimming time, if you don't seem to be making progress. And I thought of this in terms of our financial problems.

Gratitude Amid Financial Burdens

The finance committee's meeting in Belgium. I've had them on the phone. We're in an awesome situation in one sense. But you know, as we look back over 1985, the amount of money that's overdue as we go into this year, which we feel very burdened about, and we're not happy about moving into the year with overdue bills, probably a quarter of a million dollars.

But as we go into this with this huge amount of bills that we're trying to pay and all the agony that brings, we realize that money is only a tiny percentage, a small percentage, a few percent, of all the money that God has brought in in 1985.

And so though we have this burden, and we're going to be praying about that in this meeting, the priority really needs to be, even when it comes to money, the giving of thanks. The Word of God says, With food and shelter be thou content.

We've had no problem getting the money for food and shelter. There may have been occasions when, through organizational problems and cash flow and other things, we didn't have it right in the hand. But the reason OM has financial problems is we are trying to evangelize the world.

That's why I don't believe it's just a simple claiming of a promise for God to supply our needs. What we are trying to do is much bigger than that, much more complex than that. We're trying to evangelize the world.

We produced another 10, 15, 20. No one seems to know anymore. Millions of pieces of literature in 1985. We've seen the ships continue in their ministry every single week. We've seen a massive summer campaign.

We've seen so much. And 97 of all of the bills for the whole year are paid. Or 95, I don't have the exact amount. So I think even as we think of these overdue bills, it's easy to focus on the problems and the negative and no one's saying it's not a problem.

But we have a lot to thank God for. We really do. The growth that He's given, the strength, also His miraculous watch over us in the area of accidents in 1985 is quite amazing. I don't have the exact statistics, but we have had very few accidents at all in 1985, the greatest year of air disasters in history, even before the last American Air Force charter flight crash.

It already was a record year. Always interesting to hear this on the radio each day as I flew around the world. But the Lord gave lots of grace, not without struggle, as I'm sure you can be. Well, we're recording this for teams around the world, and we'd like to welcome any OM team that's got the patience to listen to this recording.

We're going to stop now and spend a little time in thanksgiving. And then we're going to go on a little world tour. And I'm just going to share some prayer requests on each place I've touched since I was last with you here in Bromley.

And I think that will keep us busy for quite a while. So let's just stop and pause. Let's pray together on the basis of 1 Corinthians 9, the new year facing us, and thanksgiving. Let me just share a couple of burdens, and we're going to go right back to prayer for this area known as the Arab Gulf.

Prayer for the Arab Gulf and the United Arab Emirates

This was our first stop off. I think most of you know Bob Rose and I traveling together. About 40 days ago, flew directly to Dubai. God really opened the way, because Friday is the one key day for meetings in Dubai.

That's their sort of Sunday when they have the day off because it's a Muslim country. My main contacts there are Indians, and it's always just such an emotional and great challenge to meet ex-OMers and to meet Indians, to have time in their homes and to minister in their churches.

But a group of brethren assemblies, a number of assemblies, they were the first group really to have churches in Dubai among the Indians, had arranged a united meeting. And, you know, even as soon as I got there, they presented me with a love offering of over $1 ,000, which was, you know, we were sort of, I wasn't really believing, but I was praying somehow my ticket could be paid for just in the first day in Dubai.

We carry interesting things on our trips. To the Gulf, we carry mainly music tapes. They sell at a very interesting price, nothing illegal. But we sold 700 pounds sterling in music tapes in that one day, and we were able to send most of that money back in a bank draft here to Bromley.

But it indicates a potential in the Gulf that I'd like you to pray about, and that is to see financial support for the work in India. And these places are not easy to get visas, and airfares are also expensive.

Mine wasn't because I just was a stopover on this cheap around-the-world discount ticket. It would cost almost as much just to fly to the Gulf and back than it would to go halfway around the world on a discount ticket.

And I'd like you to pray for the Indian believers in the Gulf. Now, many of them are being sent home. The great day of big money for large numbers of people in the Gulf is over. Many of them are going home.

Others are desperately trying to immigrate to America. But there are now enough Indians overseas, if they became really committed to world missions, to be the largest single help for financing the work of God.

I'm speaking in general terms in India today. Let's give thanks. Bob took a meeting, and I took about three or four meetings on that day. I can't go into details, but we thank the Lord for the response, people who committed their lives.

And a number of people came from a place called El Ayn. That's down here. It doesn't show on this map. But there's a hospital there reaching the Arab population. And the pastor came and sort of was hoping I'd go back with him the next day.

I had to tell him early in the morning we were flying to Singapore. He seemed a bit disappointed. But pray for that Arab pastor without mentioning his name of the church in El Ayn, which is a work, you know, among the Arabs.

There are very, very few national Dubai or United Arab Emirate people who are followers of Jesus Christ. It's just incredible, really. These believers we're talking about are Indians or Americans, British, a lot of expatriates, especially in Dubai.

Pray for them. Very hard to have contact with the local people. There's a wall bigger than what I saw in Berlin. Let's pray for the breaking down of this wall. Somehow, something could happen there that the Arab people would ask some of these other people, you know, what's this all about?

And for the few Arab believers that are there, I met some of them because it's an overwhelming task to be such a minority in such a totally Muslim-dominated area. So let's pray right now for Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.

And if you feel that's too limited, you know, branch out into any of those Gulf countries. Kuwait is a similar situation. Oman, similar situation. Qatar, Bahrain, I've heard of some exciting things happening there.

Few here and there professing Christ. And it is a neglected area of the world. So let's cry out to God. There are a number of exoemirs in these areas. Some of them have jobs. Some are tent makers, usually in disguise.

But if you know some of them, maybe you could pray not by name, but pray by country for people you know down there, public meetings. It's not good to pray for high-security areas for people by name in your flat.

You know everybody. You might want to do that. And we might just pray for the real problem of security in these countries. There's certain kinds of freedom. Like these Indians, they have freedom to worship.

But I tell you, when it starts moving over among the Arabs, it gets very, very tense. Let's cry out to God. One other prayer request for that area is that's the country where our good friend Irving Sylvia, we can mention him, I think, by name, is translating the Baluch New Testament.

He is in that country. I didn't see him on this trip. Working away, trying to get that New Testament into Baluch language because there are a lot of Baluch people in the United Arab Emirates who he's using to test the translation, et cetera.

Amen. Let's just focus now on praying on Singapore. Just some specific prayer requests for Singapore. It is not getting easier to get recruits out of this country, though it's got enormous potential. Upon arrival in Singapore, the stock market there crashed.

So desperate, they closed it. Malaysia followed. And the government said the great heyday for Singapore economically is over. This is already affecting the church. They have all kinds of building programs and projects.

They're going to battle to meet their own local needs, much less start sending out missionaries or supporting missionaries. If you could pray in retrospect, especially for the pastors' meetings we had in Singapore, we'll pray for Malaysia separately.

They are separate nations. I'm sure most of you realize. Pray especially that we may have greater rapport and breakthroughs with the real sort of Chinese pastors whose churches are in one of the Chinese dialects.

We don't have a Chinese prayer letter, so some of those people don't get any information. Our letter there is in English. There's considerable tension at times between the English congregations, they often meet in the same church, and the more Chinese congregations.

One of the sisters who's been on OM, went back to Singapore early, was just sharing with me, because she's of the very Chinese kind of church, that OM tends to be mainly people, of course, of the English side, even though we meet them, they're all Chinese.

There are actually quite large differences in their thinking. So we'd like to see a greater breakthrough among these churches where they do largely work in Chinese languages. We had a prayer breakfast with some of those men.