Note from the Network
November update
“The ministry of Mahabba is preparing the ground, the hearts of dear friends from Muslim background - whether long term citizens or recent refugees. It’s happening through the cry of intercession breaking up hard ground and through friendships of trust being formed - building foundations on which the Lord can do a great work.”
This recent reflection shared by a UK missions leader is encouraging. We don’t always see the results of our praying, our reaching out in love - but we can be sure God is at work and responding to the prayers of his people. He’s moving in Muslim communities, working in hearts and drawing people to himself. Be encouraged! Our sowing in prayer and in love will reap a harvest.
Last month’s update introduced the restated Mahabba vision:
Loving all Muslims - A relational network giving Muslims the opportunity to find and follow Jesus
Encouraging prayer
Enabling all Christians
Envisioning the Christian community
Engaging with Muslims
Mahabba, in the first place, is about encouraging prayer - helping to grow regular persistent prayer for Muslims. This happens primarily through:
Helping to start and support local prayer networks. There are now 60, and growing, local networks of prayer and ministry
Sharing ‘fuel’ for prayer. We can encourage, build faith and give thanks together through sharing across the network our testimonies and reports of God at work. We can stand together to pray for new initiatives, specific needs and current struggles. The new Discourse on-line forum will be a great place for this to happen from the new year. Also look out for the new Jumaa prayer updates coming in the new year
Ideas and models for prayer. A challenge for us all is keeping prayer focused and alive, and we need different ways to do that. Here are a few experiences from one local network:
“We are finding our prayer times more God-centred through building in more worship, intentionally making time to listen for God’s priorities before praying those back to him, and praying scripture - applying God’s word to pray for different situations. We’ve established a pattern for town-wide prayer - fortnightly meetings with people from five or six churches . This we’ve extended to termly prayer gatherings hosted by each of those churches in turn, the most recent taking over a Sunday evening service with around 80 attending. Annually during Ramadan a prayer concert attracts a larger number still. These bigger events have served to draw more to the fortnightly prayer times.”
Maybe something there could be helpful for your situation. May all we do be grounded in fervent prayer.
These updates will reflect more on the 4Es (encourage, enable, envision, engage) in coming months. Do add your thoughts and comments below. It would be great to hear something about prayer for you locally - struggles as well as successes. We want to be real in relating!
This is part of a series of regular updates from all involved with the Mahabba Network. They will be published here on the blog, but the best way to stay up to date is to sign up for our newsletter; you will receive a prompt when the latest one is available. Previous updates can be found here.
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