Internet initiative links millions of intercessors around the globe in push to fulfill the Great Commission
Four years after it was opened to fanfare, the multimillion-dollar World Prayer Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., has launched a low-key initiative intended to fulfill its vision of mobilizing global prayer for world evangelization. The 55,000-square-foot complex on the campus of 9,000-member New Life Church is home to the new World Prayer Team, a round-the-clock Internet-based effort to link millions of intercessors around the globe.
Members of the team, who can sign up free of charge, receive weekly e-mail prayer alerts and can join with others in responding to prayer requests–including major current events and personal concerns–streamed live at the movement’s Web site. Visitors there are welcomed by an inflation of Jesus’ words: “Where two or three million are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them.”
In addition, the prayer center has been equipped with a bank of telephones to be manned by volunteer intercessors ready to respond to prayer requests prompted by regional secular radio and TV advertising that will be bought in the wake of major events or crises.
“We will never have another shooter catch us off guard again,” said center president and New Life senior pastor Ted Haggard, referring to the Washington, D.C.-area sniper killings. “We will pray him out of the woods before he gets his second shot fired.”
Among the early prayer topics posted at the Web site, formally launched in December, were the need for peace in the Ivory Coast and a united evangelism effort by Boston-area churches. Ralph from New Jersey sought prayer for his non-Christian boss, whose dealings “sometimes leave me wondering if I’m in the right job.”
Though major international prayer requests are repeated, Haggard said that the more personal requests featured only once were also important.
“That problem is a big deal to that person,” he said. “If a woman in the Ukraine who is responsible to care for her family and doesn’t have medical care gets a bunion that puts her in bed, it could cause her children to be without heat and food, so that’s a big deal.”
Huge church growth, deeper unity, and greater ease of communication and travel are among the factors that poise this generation to fulfill the Great Commission, he
said. But that calls for “the most massive prayer movement in the history of the world, and the only way to do that is Internet-based.”
Churches in the same city can share local prayer concerns through their World Prayer Team link. The Web site also features reports of “book of Acts-quality” miracles, and brief teachings on prayer. Team members sign on as pastors, prayer leaders, intercessors or “someone interested in prayer” and receive regular e-mail teaching material tailored to their level of awareness.
The World Prayer Team is a simpler, streamlined version of the effort intended but never fully realized when the prayer center opened as a partnership between New Life and C. Peter Wagner’s Global Harvest Ministries. The plans then were for different levels of access to information, for security purposes.
Since then the prayer center has been taken over by New Life, though Wagner’s ministry is still based at the complex, which also has prayer rooms and a conference suite.
For Haggard, the initiative is the fulfillment of a long-held vision. While on a prayer and fasting retreat in 1984–long before the advent of the World Wide Web–God showed him a picture of someone using a computer to pray for the needs of the world. He said that in recent years many people have tried to run prayer networks on the Web, “but nobody has been as successful as we know the Lord wants it to be.”
For more information, log on at www.worldprayerteam.org.
