Interview with Wendy Andrews: Praying for missions
by Paul Nielsen
Wendy Andrews is the national co-leader of 24-7 Prayer USA. She hails from Madison, Wisconsin, where for three years she served as the ministry assistant to a pastor at Mad City Church. Her role there was to coordinate a discipleship training community. Then, early in 2005, God supernaturally pulled Wendy into this wildfire movement, to resource and catalyze prayer all across the USA. In the summer of 2005, Wendy uprooted and relocated to Kansas City. She lives the values of 24-7 and carries a deep burden for Asia.
Propel: Is prayer for missions — the completion of the Great Commission, for all nations to worship God — a regular part of the menu at 24-7 Prayer?
Wendy: Yes, prayer for mission is absolutely core to the DNA of who we are at 24-7 Prayer! We like to say prayer and mission — or intimacy and involvement — are like two legs on a body: you can’t walk anywhere without both. We want to live lives that are open and desiring to be the answer to our very own prayers, and I believe that something God is doing in the Church right now, that I see particularly within the younger generation, is bringing about a marriage of prayer and mission.
Propel: Do you have any stories of how your intercession bore fruit?
Wendy: For years, I have had a deep, personal burden for and love of the Chinese people. In the last four years, I have begun to learn to pray for the Chinese, and I’ve seen God open up insight and understanding to me along the way as to how I can effectively pray. Also, in the past four years, God has given me a particular heart for women. I feel an intercessory, stand-in-the-gap kind of calling to oppressed and abused women, and I’ve been particularly captured by the horrible reality of women and children caught in human trafficking. I’ve spent a good bit of time in prayer over this, asking God for His purposes to be accomplished with women, and asking that we would see His Genesis 1 design of “male and female, made [equally] in the image of God” take root in our families, churches, cities, and nations. In May of 2007, God brought an opportunity my way that was a direct answer to prayers I’ve prayed for both China and for women: Read the rest of the story in this 24-7 Prayer article (In the photo below, Wendy and her friend Juliana Au cook Chinese food for Chinese victims of human trafficking.).
I’ve been involved with the Coalition Against Human Trafficking here in Kansas City and Western Missouri for the past 18 months, along with the girl I called Mandy in the story above and now with another dear friend as well. Many in our church community (the Kansas City Boiler Room) 
and in the Church of Kansas City have prayed concertedly over these past few years about human trafficking in particular. Last month, we saw another amazing answer to prayer take place in our city! Law enforcement and FBI officials have started an effort called Operation Guardian Angel, a unique undercover law enforcement investigation targeting the demand for child prostitutes in the Kansas City area. As a result of this investigation, a total of seven defendants have been charged within the past month in the nation’s first-ever federal prosecution of the alleged customers of child prostitution under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Read the press release if you’re interested in more details. This is incredible, and it’s happening in our city, we believe, because of all the prayer being prayed that is targeting this issue of trafficking!
Propel: Do you have any tips on how to pray for missions or missionaries? Do you have guidelines you could share for missions directed intercession?
Wendy: I think it’s always a good and easy idea to pray out of the Bible, and when it comes to missions or missionaries, I’d say the same thing. Pray the prayers Jesus tells us to pray, or pray back to God something He promises He will do, or take Jesus’ advice about how to pray, or grab a prayer prayed by an apostle like Paul and pray it for the mission work or missionary you’ve got on your mind and heart! Here are some examples from Scripture that I immediately think of: Matthew 6:9-13, Matthew 9:37-38, Matthew 24:14, Colossians 1:3-6, Ephesians 1:17-19, Ephesians 3:16-19.
Other guidelines that come to mind — God wants to show us how to pray! So, listen to Him, and ask Him for what’s on His heart and what He’s doing with the missionaries or mission work in consideration, so that you can be in agreement with Him. He will show you what He sees and what He’s doing – He’ll give you thoughts, Scriptures, impressions, pictures, dreams, or words that you can pray right back to Him for those you’re praying for, and in so doing, you pray in agreement with God. Romans 8:26-27 expresses God’s desire, though His Spirit, to help us pray according to the will of God: ”In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”
Pray in an informed way. By this, I mean pray with knowledge of what or who you’re praying for! If you’re praying for a sphere of society (like the entertainment industry) or for a campus, city, people group, or particular country, do a little research on it first. What has God historically done in that sphere/location/people, and what might He want to do again? What social (or other) problems are facing those people, and how might God want to break in there with His mercy and justice, His righteousness? Also, if you’re praying for specific missionaries, consider asking them what their needs are and how you can pray for them, and then join with them in prayer for the very things they’re asking God for.
Propel: How do you mobilize people to prayer for missions?
Wendy: We mobilize people to prayer for missions by both modeling and calling people to pray vertically and horizontally. In the prayer that we do together as a Boiler Room community (we pray 24-7 one week per month as a church family) and as the 24-7 Prayer team, and in prayer that we lead or facilitate with students on campuses or at conferences or in other settings, we model and invite prayer in three directions. As we like to say here in Kansas City, we pray according to the Three Loves: that we will Love God, Love One Another, and Love the Nations. Jesus, in His life on earth, modeled a seamless flowing between prayer and His purpose in mission. Prayer and mission are married together in the life of Jesus, and it is God’s desire that followers of Jesus marry the two as well. All Spirit-led and Spirit-filled endeavor comes as a by-product of communion and right relationship with the Father, through Jesus, by the Holy Spirit. Nothing can replace the time spent with the Father through prayer, in its various forms, when talking about powerful and effective mission.
We also have a broad definition of mission, as incarnationally taking the presence of Jesus into places and to people who are not yet living according to their design by God. This includes every single sphere of society (family, church, government, education, arts/entertainment, science/technology, etc.) and both local and global engagement. Each person has a sphere of influence that touches people whom the Father misses and wants to bring home where they belong, through Jesus, and so we encourage people to pay attention to who their heart beats faster for, and to pray missionally for those people according to the grace to them! For the teacher, her coworkers and students. For the mother and father, their children. For the business man, his coworkers and clients. You get the picture.
Propel: How does your organization see prayer as part of missions? (How did you connect the dots between prayer and the Moravian’s mission movement?)
Wendy: We believe that prayer leads into mission leads into more prayer leads into more mission. We see the reality of this with what happened in the early 1700’s with the Moravians in Eastern Germany (and then to the nations), as well as with our own story here in the States of prayer movements that sparked and catalyzed mission to the nations unlike anything we’d every seen before (or have ever seen since).
With the Moravian story, we see 300 rag-tag refugees in eastern Germany, whom the Holy Spirit chose to visit powerfully, and who started to pray as a result. In 1727, these Moravians started a 24-7 prayer chain, interceding hour by hour in pairs as they walked their village. This prayer meeting lasted for more than 100 years! Five years later, the first large-scale Protestant missions movement was birthed, with Moravian missionaries being sent to the very ends of the earth, some selling themselves into slavery to reach the very slaves that God had put in their hearts. If there is not a connection between five years of continual, faithful prayer, day and night, and a powerful movement of sacrificial (even to death) men and women giving themselves to Christ’s purposes and His kingdom in the nations, then I don’t know how in the world something like this happened!
Propel: How do you find missionaries to pray for as individuals or as an organization?
Wendy: The missionaries I pray for are my friends! I have so many friends from college (UW-Madison, ’98-’02), from the church I was part of in Madison, WI (’00-’05), and from my involvement with 24-7 Prayer USA (’05-present) who are missionaries. Some are based in the States, working with students on campuses or with inner city youth. Others are based in other nations – I have friends who are studying Arabic in preparation for long-term work in the Middle East, some who are working with trafficked women and children in Thailand, and others who work as missionaries in Spain, England, China, New Zealand, South Africa, Tanzania, etc. I could go on and on! I have plenty of missionaries to pray for (whom I also know well) because I have been fortunate enough to have diverse experience with mission-minded churches and organizations over the past 10 years.
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