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Topic: 24-7 Prayer Changes Violent ’Townships’
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Joined: 07/25/2004
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Posts: 6560
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Posted: 07/16/2005 at 9:00am
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24-7 Prayer Changes Violent 'Townships'
More than 25 years now Peter Sekhonyane operates as an evangelist in the South-African township Orange Farm (mostly a squatter camp), where he has also planted eight churches over the past few years. There are 1,5 million people living in Orange Farm, situated between Soweto and Sebokeng. Since the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's, he had a prayer network in 28 cities/towns in South Africa.
But Peter became more and more frustrated. All the evangelisation had led to only few salvations, and only few new believers settled down in a local congregation. After a meeting with a prayer leader in May 2004, Peter asked for a 300-seater tent. The plan was to plant a 24-hour prayer watch in each of the 20 extensions and outer villages of Orange Farm; to saturate the township with prayer and then again start evangelising, whilst the 24-hour prayer watches would continue.
Shortly after this they put up the tent in 'Extension 1'. For three weeks they intensively trained Christians of all churches on prayer and the principles of 24-hour prayer. After three weeks, they decided to move the tent to the next extension. So they slowly started to repeat the process. In August 2004, Judea Harvest donated the first tent as an experiment. Two months later, in October 2004, after seven of these 24/7/365 prayer watches were already up and running (at an average of 15 hours per day), they decided to do a full week of 24 hour prayer in these watches.
By Saturday Peter went to the police service station to ask how it went crime-wise during that week. According to their statistics something strange happened: in seven of the 20 extensions there was nearly no crime - exactly the seven in which 24-7 prayer was going on!
By December 2004 there were already three tents available to plant 24-7 prayer watches. By June 2005, the 16th prayer watch started running. Some of these watches now literally run 24-hours day-and-night. Meanwhile a tent was donated to be used in Cape Town. Another one in Soweto. With the four tents that have been used until now, 20 prayer watches were planted within 10 months. This practically means one prayer watch every two months. Then something special started to happen. People from townships from across the country started to ask for help. Just in April and May of this year, Peter and his team received people from Mpumalanga, KwaZulu Natal, the Cape Flats, Free State, Soweto and Zimbabwe to train and equip. These groups come for a week or two to experience for themselves what is happening and receive training. Afterwards they return home to start similar 24/7/365 prayer watches in their own areas.
What are the consequences of all these prayers? Crime is declining in the 'townships'. The police asked Peter and his team to come and help in one of the 'outer villages' where crime and violence were rampant. Peter started a prayer watch there. After about two weeks, crime declined rapidly and got under control!
A second encouraging thing is that people start coming to the Lord as a result of these prayer watches. Prayer is taken to the people and some are being prayed for in their homes! The number of salvations seem to be going up compared to the previous evangelisation outreaches! The positive part is that significant numbers of new believers can now be discipled as they regularly come to pray at the prayer watch. Their chance to backslide is much smaller. It is also surprising to see that most of the new converts are young people.
And the vision? Peter is now looking for another 50 tents by November 2005. This means 10 tents for every province. Each of these tents must plant a prayer watch at least once a quarter.
Source: Joel News
(c) JOEL NEWS, 2005 | republication only with full creditline www.joelnews.org
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