Target Europe: An Important New Prayer Initiative
Many of us will have heard of the 10/40 Window but might know very little about the 40/70 Window. This important new prayer initiative, called Target Europe and Target Silk Road, was launched in Hanover, Germany during October 2001.
The aim is to focus the prayers of the world Church onto Europe that is right in the centre of that window, together with the nations of the old Silk Road on through Central Asia and into China and the North of Korea and Japan.
However, there are major questions facing us at such a time as this. The second day of world mission, the European day, took an unbelievable two millenia. Clearly, the seed was good to survive that long and yield such fruit in the end. Not only did the gospel take a desperately long time to break forth from Europe, the continent is in terrible disarray.
The Church is shrinking and the culture has become starkly post-Christian - even increasingly like Sodom and Gomorrah. If the gospel has arrived with such vibrancy in the ends of the earth, yet the lands that held it for so long are in such disorder, what went wrong?
Surely this poignant question should cause us to consider carefully at this moment of new opportunity what we need to understand and, where possible, repent as Europeans for what has been done with the gospel on our continent to blunt its edge, slow down its progress and corrupt its content.
We can be grateful for thos of our fathers who remained true to it [the gospel] and lived and died for its progress and survival. But we cannot avoid our corporate responsibility. If we have courage enough this could prove to be in part the redemptive purpose of the history of the European continent.
Even more, it could mean that the renewed progress of the gospel in Europe that is surely coming will not fall prey to the same wiles of the devil second time round. As far as Europe is concerned the prayers, the prayer of possibly fifty million intercessors targetting our continent represents an extraordinary new opportunity for the gospel.
True revival and a new destiny in the purposes of the Kingdom of God on earth await us if we can embrace the moment.
Contacts:
www.targeteurope.org
Suggested further reading: Target Europe, by Roger & Sue Mitchell