Posted: 2/02/07
| Four Japanese students in school uniforms asked to have their picture taken with Jennifer Jendrusch as University of Mary Hardin-Baylor students went on a prayerwalk through a Tokyo subway. |
UMHB students put feet to their
prayers in the streets of Tokyo
By Jennifer Sicking
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor
BELTON—A group of University of Mary Hardin-Baylor students recently put feet to their prayers in one of the world’s largest cities.
Four students journeyed to Tokyo, Japan, as part of Go Now Missions. In addition to sharing Christ through Christmas music and English practice, they also participated in prayerwalking.
“Prayerwalking would be described as spontaneous praying while walking around a city or building,” said Jennifer Jendrusch, a freshman performance studies major from Corpus Christi.
Every day, the students took a walk through the city and prayed for the lives around them.
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“This involved walking around the city of Tokyo praying for whatever God put on your heart, whether it was praying for someone that walked by you or a building,” Jendrusch said.
Students prayerwalked the city’s streets, as well as a Shinto shrine, a Buddhist shrine, around the emperor’s palace and through universities.
“Prayerwalking was huge,” said Cody Callen, a junior Christian studies major from Hearne. “It was ridiculous how faithful God was to our prayers.”
In one such instance, Callen said, they were going to visit a Shinto shrine to pray for the people and place. They were supposed to meet Journeymen missionaries at the train station, but one couldn’t attend. They also were running late. But everything turned out to be just right.
“At the shrine, we met nine college students looking for foreigners to take on tours to practice their English,” he said. “There happened to be nine of us.”
The following day, Callen and another student missionary were prayerwalking through a Japanese university campus. They ended up walking into a building and encountering a billboard with “Jesus loves you” posted on it. They found the nearby room vacant and left the building, but then they saw a Japanese man entering and returned.
“It turned out 15 Japanese met there for Bible study,” he said. “We got to go and meet them.”
That also led the student missionaries to attend a prayer meeting and Christmas party with the Japanese students. Callen and the Japanese student leader of the Bible study also went prayerwalking together through the campus.
“It was awesome,” he said.
With only 10 days in the city, it was difficult to see how effective their prayers were, Jendrusch said.
“I believe that if more teams go and continue with what we were doing, then the people of Japan can start to believe in Christ,” she said. “This was my first time ever prayerwalking, so it was definitely different for me to pray with my eyes open and also to pray for everyone that walks by you.”
While Callen said he had heard of prayerwalking before going to Japan, he hadn’t practiced it.
“I definitely saw the impact and the power of prayer,” he said.
Now, he plans to put it into practice in America.
“I want to try to do some prayer walking around my campus,” he said. “It works.”
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