Guinea-Bissau

Challenges for Prayer

Church leadership is solid, mature and indigenous, with increasingly well-organized training programmes for general discipleship and for pastoral training. The Bible Institute of the Evangelical Church is key to this process, with evening Bible classes and sponsorship of promising pastors to study in Brazil. But poorer and more remote rural congregations are much less appealing to workers and are therefore neglected. Those who do minister rurally must often care for several congregations at once. Pray for the vision of the evangelical Church to be fulfilled, and for trained, passionate national workers to go to the remote and unreached parts of Guinea-Bissau and to the entire region.

There is an increasing number of missionaries in the country, mostly Latin American and Asian, but notably fewer Westerners. The largest agencies are WEC, YWAM and Kairos (Brazil). Many new groups are arriving, including some theologically marginal bodies. Some set up denominations near existing churches rather than going to needy and unreached areas. The majority do not stay long term, and many are sent by their supporting churches without real accountability or support. Pray for missionaries to cooperate across organizational lines and with the national Church; pray also that a greater emphasis might be given to working among the unevangelized.

     For an additional 4 Challenges for Prayer see Operation World book, CD-ROM, or DVD-ROM.