For more information, see: http://blog.andy-moore.co.uk/fantasy-formula-1/

Registration closes at 8pm on Thursday 11 March 2010.

Military junta seizes power in Niger coup: the junta, called the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, has captured the president and his ministers. – The Guardian

Pray for our brothers and sisters, the members of GBEEN, the IFES movement there. Pray that they would be assured of God’s sovereignty in the midst of this situation and that “nothing shall separate them from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” – International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES)

And here is another update from The Guardian. This further highlights the need to pray for Godly leaders, for Christians who will live out their faith in all areas of society; this is a goal towards which IFES is working.

Why not have a listen and let me know what you think? Would you like to hear more?

God made me realise how hard my heart had become to the gentle touch of his Spirit.

Following Urbana, God opened my eyes to see this, and is now gently breaking my heart with a desire to see His glory in my life and in the lives of those around me; the ones I love, and the ones he is calling me to love.

Praise God for his patience and persistence with us.

The story continues…

It was Martin Luther King’s description of the black community being ‘an island of poverty in an ocean of material prosperity’ that gets the pastor thinking; both that today’s prosperity is still not shared equally, but also of the truth that ‘many are drowning in the ocean of material prosperity’.

They’ve swum in it and the tide has carried them out into the ocean and there isn’t the strength to reach a safe shore. When so many are drowning in debt, drowning in self-indulgence, drowning in depression and anxiety, drowning in our own fat, drowning in greed there are too few voices that can be heard that say, ‘I have a dream.’

This year in the UK we will have an election, we will hear from those who aspire to govern us, but what I want to hear and what I fear I will not hear, is a dream. A dream of a society that turns its back on the god of the individual and seeks the solace of community, a society that ends its fruitless pursuit of self-interest and seeks the harvests of partnership, that rejects the sour dreams of happiness through acquisition and discovers the sweetness of generosity and sharing. A society more interested in the quality of life than the quantity of wealth.

I will add my ‘amen’ to that!

You can read the full post here.

My sister, Hannah, has safely arrived in Zambia for her 6 month African Quest with the charity Soapbox.

The ministries we are likely to be involved in are “St Anthony’s Children’s Village” (orphan care centre), “Eagles Wings School” and “Lifeline Zambia” (HIV/AIDS home based care project). Our studies will include Basic Christian Doctrine, African Culture and a week long course with the African Quest founder, John Miles. On Sundays we will be involved in local churches.

I guess my biggest prayer, that I’d ask you to join me in, is that God will equip me, and the others on the team for all He has prepared for us to do over the next few months.

You can follow her blog, which I guess will be updated infrequently during the trip, at: http://hannahafricanquest.wordpress.com

This week’s prayerline comes to you direct from the last day of Urbana 09, InterVarsity’s 22nd missions conference, in St Louis, USA. Over the last five days, 17,000 students, staff, supporters and missions agencies have gathered here to worship, pray, and consider the theme ‘he dwells among us’.

A few weeks ago we asked you to pray for Urbana – that delegates would be challenged by the spiritual and physical needs of the world. Thank you for your prayers – God has been mightily at work here. We have been challenged to see mission as incarnational, following the model Jesus set before us. Thousands of students have committed or re-committed their lives to Christ, thousands more have declared their intention to serve in cross-cultural mission.

Now please join us in praying for everyone who has heard God’s call on their life this week – that the seeds sown here at Urbana would be nurtured in the coming days, weeks, months and years. Please pray that God will raise up workers for his harvest. nd praise God with us for the faithful service at Urbana of staff, organisers, speakers, volunteers and so many more. To hear more about how God has been working in the lives of IFES delegates here at Urbana, we invite you to take a look at this short film.

Thank you for praying with us in 2009; we look forward to seeing what God will accomplish through the prayers of his people in 2010.

Andy

Andy Moore
IFES Global Communications

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For more prayer news, see www.ifesworld.org/pray

The International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) is a fellowship of students, staff and supporters right around the world. A third of a million people praying, working and giving to see a vibrant gospel witness on every campus in the world.

But amidst the growing speediness of the day, there is more and more that is drawing us to stop and think deeply. In the morning bible study, which focussed on John 2:13-25, Ramez Atallah reminded us of the enormous shifts that have taken place in how we think about mission over the past few decades. He recalled the courage and risk-taking of Rene Padilla, Samuel Escobar and John Stott at the Lausanne Conference in 1974 which encouraged evangelical Christianity to move  beyond the past injustices of the missionary movement and seek to engage in holistic mission. He asked us to pray for next year’s Lausanne Congress in Capetown – “that it would challenge the Christian world to reach out with a holistic gospel.” Ramez also challenged us to guard our integrity in mission, amidst a results-driven culture.

The focus of the day began to shift to money: how to give, what to give, stories of those who have given sacrificially for mission. In the evening meeting, after talks from Shane Claiborne and Oscar Muriu, Urbana was called to contribute to an offering. The target total for the offering is $1m, which will be given away to mission causes, including future IFES mission conferences.

I’ve been trying to make these blog entries fairly generic: to give a taste of what’s going on here to anyone in the IFES world who would have liked to be here. But I guess it’s also OK to write as myself, as one individual among thousands.  I have been finding the sheer spectacle of Urbana – crowds, technical wizardry, big personality-driven moments – amazing but hard. I find it hard to meet with God in carefully orchestrated ‘moments’. So tomorrow my challenge to myself is this: shut out the spectacle, and seek God with all my heart and all my soul.