From Every Tribe and Language and People and Nation

And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people. And they sang a new song, saying:

“You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased for God
persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.
You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
and they will reign on the earth.”

How would you like to make sure your prayers are answered? If you pray for some from every tribe, tongue, and nation to become part of God’s family, your prayers will be answered, according to what we read in Revelation 5:8-10. All of us have the opportunity to partner with God in this venture and to fill these bowls of incense with prayers so that there will be God-worshippers from every nation, including the 7,000 that are currently unreached. We call these unreached people groups, or UPGs, and they are usually Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or tribal.

Praying for God’s Will among Every Nation

The Global Prayer Digest (GPD) offers daily prayer materials for UPGs, but it takes the efforts of several organizations working together to accomplish the task. There are 4000 intercessors using our English prayer materials, 30,000 intercessors using the Chinese-language materials, and others using materials in Spanish and Korean.

Producing the prayer materials begins with a strong partnership between Global Prayer Digest (GPD) and Ethne, an organization that specializes in prayer for the unreached. Ethne has excellent contacts with people who are either on the ground missionaries or researchers. Each month involves praying for unreached people groups (UPGs) in a particular region, although we focus on South Asia for three months because a full one-third of the world’s UPGs live in India and vicinity. July is our month to pray for Northeast Asia, which includes China. We deliberately include smaller UPGs that are almost always overlooked by other intercessors.

After deciding on a theme for a given month, contacts either send in written 235-word prayer entries or give us a list of UPGs that they would like to see included. For example, Esther Fan of Mission Pathway provided two lists of unengaged UPGs in the Chinese world, each of which we have used for a month of prayer. We also include prayer entries for mission work among UPGs. Much of our information comes from Joshua Project  and Wikipedia.

After we decide on daily topics, volunteer writers, editors and proofreaders work on the text before it is prepared for print form in English. Eventually the print version is sent to the United Missions of Taiwan (UMOT) for printing.

The Chinese World Takes the Lead

Chinese speakers and English-speaking ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Canada, and the US are all heavily involved with this prayer movement.

Crossroads Publications (CP), the publishing arm of Mission Pathway (MP) in California, does the initial Chinese translation of the unreached people group entries from GPD, the daily devotional from Today's Word, and other materials before editing, doing page layout, and script conversion. The final translated script layout is then sent to United Missions of Taiwan (UMOT) who is Mission Pathway’s major partner in the quarterly printing for traditional script. UMOT also produces the traditional script app as well as the English language app. 

Partners Training Center (PTC), CP’s Southeast Asian distribution partner, produces the simplified script; and another partner produces the WeChat text app and voice recording.

Providing up-to-date, daily, prayer materials in a variety of formats is definitely a team effort!

 Pick Whatever Way Fits You to Get Prayer Materials

Apps

You can get free Chinese or English language apps at the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store (iOS) by searching for “Global Prayer Digest” for the English version or “宣教日引” for the Chinese version.

Daily Emails

You can also get daily emails of the English prayer entries by going to the GPD website and adding your email address to the upper right corner where it says, “subscribe to our daily email.” For Chinese language materials, Mission Pathway also offers a daily email option.

There are still about 7,000 UPGs that will someday be represented before the throne of grace, but it cannot happen until some from these groups say “yes” to Jesus Christ. It will take a change of heart, and you can be a part seeing hearts changed by praying for them for about three minutes a day. Why not join this worldwide prayer movement?

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