The Call

Less than a week after being in the country, Kim & I were asked to assist with one of CBN's stories, The Call/Global Day of Prayer/ God TV event. For those who aren't acquainted with the event,
The Call is a 12-hour prayer conference that takes place all over the world at various times, is sponsored by the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, and includes a time of worship and optional fasting. For the Jerusalem Call, The Global Day of Prayer also participated, and God TV simulcast the Call to various stadiums and auditoriums across the World. In fact, something like 122 nations participated, making the event the largest organized prayer conference in pretty much the history of Christianity.

The event was also significant for Jerusalem. As you may know, the body of believers in Israel (including Messianic Jews and Christians) is small. Believers experience a good deal of persecution and threats, especially from the ultra-orthodox Jews. Some rough numbers suggest that there only 14,000 Messianic Jews residing in Israel (Messianic Jews, aka those who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, do not usually use the label "Christian" due to the negative inference oftentimes drawn from the label...think the Inquisition). Also, Messianic Jews do not exactly broadcast the fact that they are believers. The good news is that the number is growing. The downside is that Kim & I have to be pretty careful
as to how we describe who we work for. For example, we can't describe CBN as a "ministry" or refer to ourselves as "evangelists", "missionaries", and so forth. All that to say, when we attended The Call in Jerusalem, we didn't enter a huge 30,000+ seat stadium or an arena packed with people. Instead, we entered a convention center auditorium that seats maybe 2500, filled with a majority of people not from Israel at all. Also unique to this Call was the number of times the Shofar was blown and the emphasis on Zion & the Messiah's return.

After sitting in the auditorium for only a short while, we went outside to interview all those in charge or helping to direct the event including Lou Engles, Mike Bickle, Misty Edwards, Graham Power, Jill Austin, Heidi Baker and several others. The time of interviews created interesting work situations and challenges which can be read about in another blog describing our daily internship duties.

All in all, we spent the majority of Sunday working and diving head-first into the internship. As usual, Kim has put together a video showing highlights of the event including a few interviews.





Kim & I exhausted after working all day.