For the past 20 years the Intercessors for China prayer calendar has been an invaluable resource for China-concerned Christians worldwide. Pursuing a vision for strategic, comprehensive, and specific prayer, the producers of the calendar have distributed more than half a million copies over the past two decades.
Although the print version of the calendar is no longer being produced, daily prayer items are available in Chinese and English at www.prayforchina.com, on Facebook (Pray for China) and via Twitter @Pray4China. Each month’s items are also available via email upon request. A Pray for China app is slated to be released later this year.
This year’s prayer focus includes:
- Days of Memory. These items focus on specific events in history, usually the history of China or the Chinese Church.
- Major Cities. These items cover the national municipalities and provincial capitals.
- Poor and Outcasts. These items cover marginalized people.
January’s prayer items highlight the contributions of a number of foreign and Chinese Christians over the past century. These include Beijing pastor Wang Mingdao, evangelist Stephen Tong, Olympian Eric Liddell, British missionary Gladys Aylward, who became a Chinese citizen in 1936, and Christian bookseller Tian Hongxia, who was sentenced to three years in prison for “illegal business activities.” Among the cities featured in January are Beijing, Tianjin, Taiyuan, and Hohot.
In a 2015 interview, the founder of the Intercessors for China Prayer Calendar told about the origins of his decades-long effort:
[M]y wife and I were part of a multi-national team of Christians living and working in a large city in north China. There had been a major revival in some rural areas for a number of years, and we knew that prayer had fueled that revival—prayer from foreign workers who had lived in China before 1949 as well as prayer from Chinese Christians who had lived through the dark days after 1949. However, we saw very little evidence of that revival in China’s cities.
Brother Bian, a Chinese Christian friend who had experienced those dark days, once shared with us that he and his wife prayed for our team every day. We were extremely moved by that remark, and it got us thinking about how we could get Christians outside of China to pray every day for China, especially for revival in the cities.
From an initial print run of 5,000, the calendar’s popularity grew with the addition of more languages and, eventually, the digital version.
For more information about praying strategically for China and how you can support the Intercessors for China team, go to www.prayforchina.com.
