Massive growth in Protestant and Independent churches creates a great expectation for further harvest. Pray for:

a) Revival and growth to be sustained and for divisions and carnality to be avoided.

b) Effective means for generating income to support Kingdom workers, to develop the needed structures and facilities and to fund social programmes that are essential in the prevailing conditions of deep poverty. The Church must minister as the poor to the poor; pray for creative solutions to the challenges this brings.

c) Continued unity and cooperation among leaders, qualities forged through past suffering. Relationships among denominations seem stronger than the divisions that occur within denominations; pray against the dividing influences of the enemy and human pride. Pray especially for the Evangelical Churches Fellowship (ECFE), which represents the majority of evangelicals in the country.

d) Missions vision was birthed out of suffering during the Marxist regime and the withdrawal of Western agencies during that time. Through ECFE, a long-term strategy for evangelizing Ethiopia has emerged, one that includes intercession, focus on unevangelized peoples and church mobilization – only 3% of evangelical churches are regarded as being “mission-mobilized”. The vision entails planting, cross-culturally, thousands more churches in all regions of Ethiopia and even sending to the Horn of Africa and South Asia.

Foreign mission workers will never regain their pre-Marxist-revolution numbers or influence, but their role today is different. Lutheran and Pentecostal missions from the four Nordic nations have a long tradition of faithful service, as does SIM. The growing and maturing Church needs co-labourers and partners in areas such as training, Bible translation, reaching the last remaining unevangelized groups and especially in holistic ministry – health, agriculture, education and community development. The largest agencies are: SIM, Norwegian Lutheran Mission, Swedish Pentecostal Mission, Word for the World.