October 10, 2024
Since its inception in 1981, PrayerLine has been a reliable source for daily prayer requests from the International Mission Board, enabling callers to listen and pray for international missions.
Dedicated people like Joey Bosch and David Ratliff have been using this service for years, finding joy and purpose in praying for missions across the world. As PrayerLine continues to connect people to critical prayer needs, it serves as a testament to the power of prayer and its role in advancing God’s kingdom.
Bosch lives in Texas and has been calling PrayerLine for about 20 years. “I enjoy keeping up with missions requests and missions expansion,” he said.
Bosch said he has always been interested in missions. “I was a member of an evangelism team for over 35 years. That was evangelism in prisons,” he said.
Bosch would play worship music in prisons and “set the stage” for the pastor to speak to inmates. He also played the piano in the atrium at Houston’s Second Baptist Church. Now, he plays the piano and sings for the other residents in his senior living community.
“It’s a little bit of an unusual way to go to church, but that’s how I do it,” he said.
Thousands of people get prayer requests from the IMB website, IMB Pray app or social media. But Bosch likes his long-standing routine of calling the PrayerLine, listening to the new requests and praying for God to work around the world.
Ratliff in Kentucky calls PrayerLine too. “Usually on a daily basis,” he said. Over the past decade, missions and prayer have become more important to him.
Ratliff shares that calling PrayerLine allows him to pray for people who are continents away, knowing he is part of the mission. “It really means a lot.”
It means a lot to the missionaries who send in those prayer requests too.
When Sharon Pumpelly and her family arrived in Uganda in 1981, they knew they needed prayer.
“Our first five years, we never went 24 hours without hearing guns shooting, sometimes near the house,” she said.
Before email and social media, missionaries sent prayer requests to the U.S. through mailing physical newsletters and through a new prayer ministry, at the time, out of the home office called PrayerLine.
“We sent out a lot of prayer requests,” Pumpelly said. “There were so many situations that we just had to be praying.”
The Pumpellys faced multiple armed robberies and illnesses. At the time, Uganda was in the middle of political turmoil and was one of the most dangerous places to live.
While Uganda was a hard place to live, Pumpelly said she “loved being there” because “when a country is in crisis, people are waiting for the gospel.”
While the Pumpellys were there, the AIDS epidemic in Uganda was a national emergency, as infections increased rampantly. Pumpelly shared the gospel with local high school and college students and taught them about purity and living according to God’s way.
She boldly charged young people to follow God and change the course of history for their country. But Pumpelly knew she could not do this ministry alone. So, she asked the U.S. churches for prayer support.
Here’s one prayer request she sent almost 30 years ago, in 1995:
UGANDA. The abstinence program has been taught in many areas by missionary Sharon Pumpelly. Pray that the young people of Uganda might come to have a true love relationship with the One who can help them wait.
People read this prayer request in newsletters and listened to it over PrayerLine, then they prayed — sometimes for years. God answered by drawing many young people throughout Uganda to love and follow Him.
“We were seeing people come to the Lord like crazy,” Pumpelly said. “We knew we were supposed to be there.”
After years of people praying and missionaries sharing the gospel, Uganda became one of only two countries in the world that saw the HIV epidemic’s progression reverse.
“I know we can be cynical and think the Church doesn’t pray, but there are some churches that pray for years and years,” Pumpelly said. “When I think of everything that we went through, there had to be people praying.”
God’s people have been praying throughout history, following the example of the early church recorded in Acts 2 when believers dedicated themselves to prayer “and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47).
“I am convinced there has never been a great, spiritual evangelistic mission effort unless it was preceded by prayer,” said Keith Parks, Foreign Mission Board (now IMB) president from 1980-1992, in a 1987 Commission Magazine article about PrayerLine.
In that same article, Minnette Drumright, then-special assistant for intercessory prayer, added, “The most magnificent strategies are powerless without prayer. In fact, the ultimate strategy is prayer.”
April Bunn, the current director of the Prayer Office, agrees. “If we truly believe that we can do nothing in our own strength and that God is the One who draws people to Himself, then we must first and foremost prioritize prayer in our mission strategies,” Bunn said. “Prayer is central to all our efforts, including entering new mission fields, engaging the lost and making disciples.”
In the early years, PrayerLine was only operational during the annual Week of Prayer and the Foreign Mission Study season. It began running daily throughout the year in 1987.
Today, callers can still expect a new, strategic prayer request from IMB missionary teams daily, Monday-Friday. Dial PrayerLine at 1-800-395-7729 (PRAY).
