Stacey D. Wheeler | EFC-MAYM Director of Communications and Church Planting Support
There is exciting news to share about intercession now happening through MAYM Friends Women with prayer teams forming to cover three mission fields.
As the newly appointed Prayer Coordinator for Friends Women, I’ve been asked to help establish at least three new Field Prayer Teams to cover Mexico, South Sudan, and Tanzania in prayer. So far, we have five prayer groups regularly meeting and hope to have more in the future.
Evangelical Friends Mission requested EFC-MAYM pray specifically for these three cities/countries, so we’ve created three regions of MAYM and paired them with a mission field given to us by EFM:
Region 1. South Sudan – Central Kansas Area
Region 2. Mexico – Western Area, Tri-State, Central Oklahoma, and Texas
Region 3. Tanzania – Northeast and North Central
A big thank you to these five Field Prayer Team leaders who have stepped up and agreed to oversee prayer groups for these mission fields as they’re being developed:
Janet Penna (Northridge Friends/Kansas/South Sudan)
Donnetta Carpenter (Northridge Friends/Kansas/South Sudan)
Anna Cyr (Hutchinson Friends/Kansas/Tanzania)
Shelda Cay Kearns (Booker Friends/Texas/Mexico)
Diane Newman (Bayshore Friends/Texas/Mexico)
On October 22nd we held the first Online Hour of Prayer for all three fields and for current and future missionaries through ZOOM with 11 women praying. Twenty-two women have signed up, but not all could attend. We will pray once a month starting back up in January and praying through October on the fourth Tuesday of the month from 6:00-7:00. This meeting is not just for women—we just don’t have any men signed up yet! As James 5:16 states, “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.”
Please contact me at [email protected] to be added to the ZOOM list or if you would like to start up a prayer group. It’s never too late to join!
It’s an exciting time to partner with EFM as the Luke 10 Initiative five-year goal is coming down the final stretch into 2025. In October 2023, in Portland, Oregon, EFM held a think tank where six new mission fields were approved: Mexico, Ecuador, Greece, Northeast Brazil, Persian Gulf States, and South Sudan. Tanzania and an unreached people group in Southeast Asia are continuing to be explored as well. By November 2024 EFM had made a commitment to launch seven of the nine fields that were under exploration (the Balkans were recently approved). Those seven fields are now moving on to the prayer and pre-launch planning phases, and this is where our Field Prayer Teams become crucial.
EFM has seven newly approved fields and few missionaries to go out into them, with the goal being to have at least two missionary families on each field. Our greatest need now is to find those who are called to GO. Prayer is becoming crucial in that we, alone, cannot “cast out a worker into the field.” As Matthew 9: 37-38 explains, . . . “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” Only God can do that.
According to the Joshua Project, there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups who have never heard about the gospel of Jesus Christ. For example, in South Sudan there are more than 63 different ethnic groups with varying cultural and linguistic differences. There are 4.5 million Dinka, the largest tribe, followed by the Nuer with 2 million. Many of them have never heard about Jesus.
Matthew 19:26-30 has a lot to say about being sent out to tell people about the good news of the gospel: “Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’
God is moving!
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