August E-newsletter from @MikeJentes

533 Challenge #iam533

Whew…it’s been a busy summer lot of travel!

Kayla, Korey and I attended the Momentum Youth Conference with a theme of “I Am Second.” It was a powerful week with great moments of worship, spiritual challenge and making friends.

With Encompass World Partners we did a special project called the 533 Challenge.

We built a wall and filled it with the faces of the least-reached nations in our world – 533 people groups (approximately 70 million people) who have little or no opportunity to hear the gospel. In order to direct prayer toward these peoples, we asked students to take part in the “533 Challenge” – a challenge to pray daily for the least-reached over the next 30 days.

Students “adopted” a specific people group by removing one photo from the wall and signing a commitment card. Participating students are then photographed and replacement cards (with the students’ faces!) are quickly printed to replace the empty spaces on the wall. An Encompass staff member then prays for each student and gives him/her a prayer journal to take home along with their adopted people prayer card. For those who commit, we will be sending daily emails and text messages to equip and remind them to pray.
By Friday night, our wall was transformed from pictures of the least reached, to pictures of prayer warriors for the least reached! All of the 533 people groups were adopted!

And then the work of praying every day began. It is hard to believe that the 30 Day Prayer Challenge portion just concluded yesterday. 

Below is an excellent video which gets at the heart of why we did the 533 Challenge.