Edwin Hamelink
3 Min Read
23 October 2019
We’ve received this exciting update from the 24-7 Netherlands team, who have started see students taking day and night prayer and mission pretty seriously…
For the past five years, we’ve sent summer teams from the Netherlands to Ibiza and we love supporting the work of the 24-7 community there. However, we also hoped as 24-7 Prayer Netherlands that people would catch a fire for mission and prayer in their own contexts.
Over the years, nothing seemed to happen.
But then, during the summer of 2018, something began to change. A group of students in Utrecht decided to bless the nightlife during Freshers’ week. We trained them up, and they set up a rhythm of prayer and mission.
One team was on the street handing out bottles of water, repairing flat tires of bikes so students could actually get home, praying for people, getting drunk students on their feet again. The other team was praying in the prayer room. Every two hours teams changed positions.
This summer, we saw the same thing happening again, but across more cities in the Netherlands. There were teams of churches and students in Rotterdam, Utrecht and Nijmegen doing the same thing. Praying in the prayer room, offering prayer on the streets and finding other ways to be a blessing in the nightlife of the city.
The teams started to engage with more and more students across the cities, taking home guys who were too drunk to walk by themselves; helping others to find their bikes when they’d forgotten where they’d left them; inviting students at a festival to come and pray.
Sometimes the outcome wasn’t miraculous or even always positive, but it’s so good to see more and more people excited about being the hands and feet of Jesus in the nightlife of the city.
We love that the work of the 24-7 Ibiza community is blessing the Netherlands by being an inspiration for many young people!
Find out more about the work of 24-7 in the Netherlands and Ibiza on their websites:
