Mark Dawes, Staff Reporter
SEVERAL HOURS have passed in this all-night prayer meeting. Sleeping bags intended for children are occupied by grown-ups. Many adults are in the coffee room enjoying refreshments. Then an 11-year-old girl picks up the microphone and offers this rebuke: "It is time to pray, not play; weep, not sleep."
Stunned and embarrassed, all the adults return to the praying area to continue travailing through the night.
Esther Ilnisky related the foregoing story to illustrate that children are the biggest untapped spiritual resource of the contemporary church. She and her husband William served in Jamaica as missionaries from 1959 to 1969. Her husband, during that time, was the pastor of the Faith Temple congregation in Montego Bay, St. James. Both are now residents in Florida where William is pastor of a congregation in West Palm Beach.
Mrs. Ilnisky is in the island conducting a series of workshops to help adults better facilitate the prayers of born-again children in the life of the church.
Today, she is scheduled to speak at 4:00 p.m. at Fellowship Tabernacle Church, 58 Half-Way Tree Road, St. Andrew. Tomorrow she will speak in the same church at both its 7:15 a.m. and 11 a.m. services. These workshops are organised by the Children's National Prayer Network (CNPN) which is affliated with the Rev. George Millers' Reconciliation Ministries International.
Mrs. Ilnisky is the author of Let the Children Pray: How God's Young Intercessors are Changing the World, as well as the founder and director of the Children's Global Prayer Network.
The visiting speaker is not a big fan of separating kids from the rest of the congregation for junior church-type activities. She emphasises the utilisation of inter-generational worship and prayers. In her book, she cites a biblical pattern (Neh 12:43, Joshua 8:35, 2 Chron 20:13) where children were present during corporate worship services and corporate prayers.
The visiting speaker said in her travels to many different countries, she has noted that it is only in the West that she sees children separated from adults during the corporate worship service.
OUT OF THE MAIN SERVICE
By taking children out of the main service for junior church, the church, in effect, communicates a message which says they don't belong in 'big church'. This, she said, is the way the natural person thinks. However, she continued, "The Western world is a Third World nation in the realm of the Spirit and the Third World is a First World nation in the realm of the Spirit."
In eastern Europe during communism, she said, churches would have services for up to four hours where the congregation, including children, stood for the service. Furthermore, this prolonged period on their feet did not hurt the children who fully participated in the service.
Noting that the Scriptures speak of God honouring the prayers of those who are pure in heart, she asked somewhat rhetorically, "Who is more pure in heart, the children or the adults?" Then she stressed, "If we get the kids praying, half of the crime in Jamaica is going to stop overnight!"
She spoke of episodes in which children laid hands on adults who suffered terminal illnesses and these illnesses left their bodies. She stressed that kids have enormous faith in God and are expectant of Him to answer prayers. Furthermore, she said when kids are brought together to pray, they are not distracted as adults tend to be with matters related to colour, wealth or socio-economic status.
Christian adults need to see children, she said, as having the same Holy Spirit that they possess who specialises in equipping every born-again person with at least one spiritual gift. "I had an eight-year-old boy, Jordan, who was a prophet." She related how at a church conference where many members of the clergy were on the platform, Jordan came to her and said he had a prophesy for these pastors. After he briefed her on the prophesy, he was able to share it at the conference. Jordan, she said, told the pastors, "You must stay under the anointing so you don't mess up your lives". Immediately, she said, pastors began to weep.
The Holy Spirit, she said, works in children and enables them to understand major issues, which also form the basis of their prayers. To illustrate, she noted that at a prayer meeting for 100 kids under 10 years old, they were asked to list matters affecting their city that they wanted to pray about. The following were items listed for prayer: racism, thefts, smoking, kidnapping, drugs, TV/video violence, prostitution, divorce, child abuse, gambling, mafia, mocking, drive-by shootings, school bombings, sex outside of marriage, occult sacrifices, the homeless, poison candy, street violence, gangs, garbage piles, murder, alcoholism, children having children, vampire cult, abandonment and foster children.
When children pray, she said, the Holy Spirit works on their attention span and energises them to go for hours.
CHILDREN LOVE TO FAST
While she does not encourage children to go on long fasts, she reported that children do love to fast. Children will skip meals as part of fasting. Sometimes too they abstain from things that give them pleasure such as the television, the computer and sports.
According to Mrs. Ilnisky, children love engaging in spiritual warfare. She reported seeing children casting out demons. "You get a child under the anointing of the Holy Spirit and train him how to deal with the enemy (the devil) when that paedophile comes up to that little kid, the child will recognise the demon from 10 feet away and will say, 'I rebuke you in the name of Jesus. You go away from me. You get out'. And the man will flee," she said.
Adults, she said, must affirm and celebrate children as they pray by vocally agreeing with them as they pray becoming something of a cheering section. Also, when the prayer is over, adults should speak into the lives of the youngster by saying something like ' You are a mighty man of valour. You have the same Holy Spirit that I have in me. God wants to use you."
After more than 50 years in the Christian ministry, Mrs. Ilinisky confessed that she had learnt more about praying from children than she had from famed Bible teachers and preachers. "I tell the kids, ' When I grow up, I want to be just like you'."
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