The 40 Day Fast - pray for a nation

There are many many needs all around me. I live in a city of between 20 and 25 million people, one quarter of whom live in total poverty. It's a city of massive contrasts.

Porsches and BMWs and Mercedes sweep past the city of the dead - this is the city's cemetery, also home to between 30,000 and one million people who are still alive.

Glittering skyscrapers and five star hotels (Four Seasons, Marriott, Grand Hyatt) are jostling for space with decrepit and crumbling buildings and homes, gradually returning to the dust of the Nile valley from which they were built.

One of the seven wonders of the world (the original ones!) dominates the skyline to the west of the city, and yet some of the most awful stories of suffering and pain originate here.


I work for Maadi Community Church, an international congregation in a suburb in the south of Cairo. Apart from gathering worshippers from fifty different nations and over fifty different denominations every week to meet and worship together in unity, we are trying to do something to bring a redemptive ending to some of those stories.

Cairo is the home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Sudan, mostly from the Christian/Animist south. They fled from civil war and injustice, from terrible stories of brutalisation and trauma. They came to Cairo seeing it as a gateway to refuge and safety and prosperity in the west, but got trapped here by a mixture of neglect, racism, broken promises and a UN office overwhelmed and demoralised by sheer numbers.

Having planted five churches in these Sudanese communties in the last year, our vision is to raise up Sudanese leaders who love God, and train them up to one day return to South Sudan and become the leaders who rebuild their nation with God at the centre. We think we have a five year window to accomplish this. So we are running vocational programmes to train teachers, nurses, carpenters, plumbers, electricians and pastors in their crafts and callings so that they can be the next generation of leaders in South Sudan.

So on today's 40 Day Fast we are praying and fasting for the nation of South Sudan.

Please pray for us to find a new property that is large enough to house all of this activity on the same campus as our church and the school that we are partners with.

Please pray for a release of funding from the West to enable these programmes to take off and reach the people that God is highlighting.

Please pray for hope and light to dawn in the lives of these broken and damaged people, and that their Saviour will lead them back to rebuild their nation as part of His story of redemption.