Releasing children to hear God

All around the world, there are children with tragic stories to tell. Some of them live on the streets, others in warzones, some face hunger, others have been cruelly exploited or abused by adults, and some have simply never known love. In spite of the tragedy, God is raising up a whole generation of children such as these to be children of prayer with a heart to end injustice like never before.

Last weekend, millions of Christians around the globe joined in the World Weekend of Prayer for Children, an initiative led by the international children’s charity Viva. While many of those who took part were adults, Viva estimates that around 70 per cent of those praying were actually children.

Chrissie Wilkinson, Viva’s International Prayer Coordinator, is in the process of developing a child ambassador programme that the Viva around the world can adopt and use to empower children participating in its humanitarian programmes to be prayer activists.

She has just returned from a visit to South Africa and Uganda, where she met members of the Viva and spent time training them to hold prayer sessions in which children could feel safe, secure and confident enough to lead in prayer and hear what God has to say to them.

Surprisingly, one of the first steps towards creating a positive prayer space for children does not lie in changing the children, but rather the adults.

“When we as adults teach children about prayer, we don’t need to be the teacher because we don’t want the children to be in learner mode, but rather participatory mode, where they are almost on an equal level with us,” says Chrissie.

“We want adults to realise that children can take their place alongside us. There isn’t a junior-sized Holy Spirit! When the children move in the power of God, they have as much ability to hear the voice of God as we do. There’s quite a cultural shift that needs to take place to get to the point where adults actually believe that children can hear God and give space for that, and then hear from God through the children.”

It is all about helping children to realise that they can have an intimate relationship with God and even take the lead in prayer. In Uganda, children in the Viva network took the lead in organising prayer gatherings for the World Weekend of Prayer.

“It’s not about children sitting in rows with their hands together but it’s about them really relating to God in a personal way and trusting the Holy Spirit in them,” Chrissie continues.

The idea is not to press a prayer agenda onto the children but to allow them to discern the issues that God is giving to them. Very often those issues relate to problems affecting their own country and peer groups.

On the final day of her visit to Viva in Kampala, Chrissie and the staff there decided to put theory into practice and hold a prayer party for some of the children being served by the network’s support programmes.

“The children were just grabbing the mics to pray! For children, there’s nothing quite like being given the opportunity to try something. All it took was giving them the opportunity and they were able to do it.”

It is Viva’s hope that these children will become prayer ambassadors for their generation and take on even more leadership in the future.

She said: “Children can very quickly catch the compassion of God towards issues of injustice or need and it is a real challenge to us as adult believers. It was a challenge to me when I saw them weeping before God. There is just such a connection. It’s not a religious duty. And there is a real sense of injustice.

"Sometimes as adults in the church, we hear the issues so often that we become hardened and it’s just tragic, because when you do begin to pray and touch into the heart of God, the tears flow. Somehow the children are closer to that than we adults are with all our religious trappings.”

Releasing children to pray is only one side of the coin, however. Viva also wants to see more adults engaging in sustained prayer for children. In the run-up to the World Weekend of Prayer, the network ran a campaign called ‘Got a minute’, which asked adults to pause for even one minute in their day to spend a moment listening to God and allowing God to open their hearts to the needs of the children around them.

Chrissie hopes the annual event will help to captivate the heart of adults for this generation and help them to realise that they can make a difference in a child’s life through prayer.

She said: “It doesn’t have to be a revelation of children in Africa. My own desperate cry is actually for the children in this nation. There are so many children with mental health issues because of the needs of this nation.

"The needs are so great that we could shelve the needs of children in other nations for a while and focus solely on children in Britain.

"What’s happening to this generation is just tragic. They may have material things but in terms of love and real attention, there are very few children today who get the sort of attention you know that the Father God intends for each one – that special awareness that we are all precious and significant.”

There are some children in the world who are in need of especial prayer and they are the children who are trafficked abroad or kept holed up in a hidden room without their own identity and without anyone in the world knowing they exist, except their enslavers and those who partake in exploiting them.

In South Africa, Chrissie was able to visit the boiler room set up in Cape Town for 24/7 prayer in the 50 days leading up to the start of the World Cup. The room left a deep impression on her. Done up like a dingy brothel, with dim red lighting, corrugated iron, a partition and teddy bear on the bed, it served as a powerful reminder that an event which means fun and excitement to most people, means untold misery and suffering for the women and children abducted and exploited against their will by the sex trade syndicates that typically move into town whenever an event as big as the World Cup takes place.

Chrissie concluded: “The South Africans stood up against the syndicates and said, ‘No, not in Jesus’ name, not on our watch.’ It’s a real challenge to us in the UK, with the Olympics coming up in 2012. I’m pretty sure the syndicates are already putting things in place around the UK and the Christians here need to be just as alert and intentional in saying, ‘Not on our watch.’”