Holland: Prayer invades campusEdwin Hamelink - 16 Feb 2012
Prayer is contagious. Over the years we have watched prayer rooms cross borders and spread around the world. Often, in a Prayer Room, people find a place to intimately meet with God and in turn get inspired to go home and start their own. This is was the case for Edwin Hamelink, National Student Alpha Coordinator for the Netherlands. Here is Edwin sharing about his personal journey of meeting God in a new way in a Prayer Room and going home to inspire a passion of prayer to spread among students and university campuses in Holland.
It has been a few years since I first set foot in a prayer room. It was in Poland, and I still remember it as a very exciting, very refreshing experience. Meeting God in such a new way made my heart pound a little quicker. And so when I returned to the Netherlands a spark was lit: I planned to decorate a prayer room for one of our biggest student conferences. I sensed that many students enjoyed this form of prayer – I was eager to see God working in their life's and drawing them closer to his side.
About the same time I read ‘God on campus’, an amazing book covering many stories in which God used students to bring about change at universities around the world. This only increased my longing to see more students getting passionate about prayer. The book was passed on to more student leaders and before long we came together. With only one question in our minds: what would God do when students started to pray at their campuses? It seemed that things already began to happen: some student prayer groups had started and there were rumours that in several places Christian faculty members were praying for students together.
We decided to host an event – ‘prayer as a heart beat’ – 200 students joined in as we spend the evening praying for students and listening to the teaching of Pete Greig. Only three months later we were able to welcome Pete again for a huge student conference with over 1100 participants. The theme: you see bones, I see an army. What an amazing opportunity to stress the importance of prayer. We set up a prayer room and it only took an hour for it to be fully booked!
We prayed for God to stir a desire in the hearts of students, a desire to spend more time with Him, grow closer to Him. We prayed that more students would want to set up a prayer room in their own cities as a means of fulfilling that desire. And even before the conference started we already saw an answer to that prayer: a group in Leiden, one of the oldest university cities in the country, decided to pray 24-7 during their mission week. After the conference two other student groups from Groningen and Rotterdam , joined in by deciding to organise a 24-7 Prayer week in February.
And this is only the beginning... I am so excited to see God working amongst students in the Netherlands!! I cannot begin to express how much I long to see God moving through of all their prayers.
Would you like to experience a 24-7 Prayer Room? Check out the Prayer section for a host of great resources on setting up a Prayer Room in your hometown.
Have you had a great experience in a Prayer Room? We would love to hear from you, please share a little in the comments section below.