June 11, 2010: It started in O'Hare Airport. I was coming back from a business trip, and as always, I miscalculated how much reading material I would need for the flight. Usually, I bring way too much. This time, not enough. So I walked through the bookstore and grabbed what looked like an interesting book in the Religion section, David Platt's Radical.
It is a very good book that I recommend. I am in the midst of studyingForgotten God by Francis Chan with a Facebook group, and Radical is very similar in outlook but with different emphases. One of them is on our calling and responsibility as Christians to serve and witness to the entire world. He has tons of stories about traveling on foreign missions and make a compelling case that we all have a role to play in spreading the gospel globally.
Not to give the book away, but one of his challenges to readers is to pray, over the course of the year, for the people of every country in the world. He offers a great resource, Operation World, which is devoted to this and includes a daily country (or region of a country) with scads of information about it.
I don't consider myself an evangelical. I won't go into why, but my evangelical friends will agree with my self-assessment. And I am Catholic. So looking at the Operation World site left me wanting something different. So I went searching.
I found the World Council of Churches, a mainline Protestant organization, has a rotating weekly calendar of countries to pray for (which seemed more manageable than the daily thing), and some good information, and like Operation World has prayer requests.
But what I wanted to know is, not what people in the US think we should pray for, but what the people who are members of the universal Church in that country want us to pray for. And because one of the reasons I am Catholic is the knowledge that there are brothers and sisters in every country on the planet celebrating the same faith, I wanted to find out what Catholics in those countries arethankful for and what they are struggling with.
This week, the WCC countries are Angola and Mozambique. Know what I know about Angola? '92 Dream Team destroyed them in Barcelona. Mozambique? Nada. I have already benefited more in a couple days of praying for these two countries than I have in a lifetime of praying for vague concepts like global missions or the church universal. Throughout my day, I keep being struck by questions: I wonder what time it is in those countries? I wonder what people are doing there? What are the problems that have them both ranked so terribly high in mortality rates, and what can we do to change that? What can be done to address the incredible poverty there? What are their church services like? What is the mood of the faithful, the priests, religious groups that are serving there?
To underscore that the Spirit is really in this, I got an e-mail this week from a friend who is, I guess, a social media pastor. He was e-mailing a big list saying he would miss a prayer meeting due to travel and did anyone have a request for the group. And one person hit "reply all". There's always one. This one, though, is a missionary in Myanmar who gave a brief assessment of the work there and the trouble they are encountering and asking for prayers. I know less about Myanmar than Mozambique. My daughter knows more than me, I'm pretty sure, about Myanmar, and she is in first grade. But this underscored for me that this global vision was real, Spirit-led, and immediate in need.
So I'm hoping to find some help in a project. I'd like to build a resource on each country that coincides with the WCC schedule, that has that kind of information. Some of it is readily available (ironically, I guess, the CIA has great info on its website about each country that these other sites pull from). Some, I think, we'd have to ask people who serve in that country. It seems to me the easiest way to do this is set up a website called a wiki (as in wikipedia) in which collaborators can post pages and information as they find it.
I have looked on the USCCB site, the Vatican site, and several others that popped up in Google searches, and it does not exist. I e-mailed the folks at the USCCB who are responsible for the national collection for supporting the global church, and they said such a project, chronicalling everything the Church does in every country, was way too big. But if there are a few people willing to give a little time over an extended period working together to learn a little more about what life is like in Brazil (next week's country), and what the Church is thankful for and needs there, it seems to me it isn't an impossible task. What do you think?
June 29: I would add that this week the Spirit brought a new wind and new direction to this. I've begun getting requests from non-Catholics who have connections to this week's country, and it is a blessing to share them. I see at least two tracks for this work now - one working through the institutions of the Catholic Church and perhaps other established denominations, and one through personal contacts with individual churches.
