Why Your Prayer Closet Is a Mission Field

Picture him for a moment.

A man in a remote, mountainous village in Nepal. He’s never heard the name of Jesus – not once. Before the sun comes up he’s already awake, lighting incense in front of a clay idol, quietly bargaining for protection from spirits he fears but can’t see. 

He works in his field. He feeds his family. And tonight, like every other night, he’ll go to sleep having no idea that someone on the other side of the world – maybe even you – could be praying for him, by name, by people group, and against the specific spiritual darkness that has held his village for generations.

This mental picture is not hypothetical. That’s the world we actually live in right now. More than three billion people still live in areas where the Gospel has never really taken hold. 

But the encouraging truth is that they’re not unreachable – they may just be unprayed for. The International Day of Prayer for the Unreached is an invitation to change that, and a reminder of why your prayer closet, by which I mean your prayer life, is a mission field.

You Can Pray Against Spiritual Darkness

From prison in Rome, Paul made a declaration that can permanently reshape the way we pray for the unreached:

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:12)

Notice he doesn’t say we wrestle “with” or “because of” these forces. He says we wrestle “against” them. The cross of Christ already settled the verdict against the spirits of darkness. However, the spiritual battle still requires us to show up and engage in the fight.  We do this in prayer.

An important note is that not all spiritual darkness is the same. The unreached world isn’t simply far away geographically. It is spiritually occupied territory. 

The billions of souls living in the 10/40 Window aren’t unreached because nobody cared. They’re largely unreached because those regions represent some of the most deeply fortified strongholds of spiritual darkness on earth. 

Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Animism, and folk religions aren’t just cultural preferences. They are living, spiritual enemies that suppress the Gospel and resist missionary access.  We can ask the Lord for discernment about how to pray against these strongholds, and how to pray strategically to reach the precious unreached.

You can also download strategic prayer resources from trustworthy sources like us.

You Can Pray Strategically

In John 17, Jesus doesn’t pray a vague blessing over everybody. Instead, He prays with precision for His disciples, for those who would believe through their testimony, for their protection, unity and sanctification. 

His prayer is laser-focused.  Strategic prayer for the unreached requires the same intentionality.  Here are some suggestions:

Pray by people group, not just by nation. 

There are roughly 17,000 distinct people groups in the world. About 7,000 of them are unreached, meaning fewer than 2% of their population is Christian, and there’s no indigenous church with the capacity to reach the rest of them. 

 

The Pashtun of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Fulani of Nigeria. The Salar of China. The Dungan of Kyrgyzstan. These are not statistics. They are image-bearers. Sons and daughters whom Christ died for, who have simply never heard. When we name them out loud in prayer, we are making a declaration to the powers of darkness: these people belong to God. 

 

I would encourage you to visit Joshua Project and ask the Lord to help you pick an unreached people group to support in prayer. Learn their name, where they live, and what spiritual strongholds have the deepest hold on them, then pray for them by name. You might be the first person in your country to pray like this for that particular people group.

 

Pray against specific strongholds.  

The spirits of deception that hold a Muslim community captive are different from the ones binding a Hindu village or an Animist tribe in the jungles of the Amazon. Strategic intercessors learn to identify those specific lies and spiritual strongholds, and they pray against those directly. 

As Paul says “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4). So let our prayer become specific and targeted to the spiritual strongholds over the people group we are praying for. Let’s pray the blinders would fall from their eyes and they will see the light of Christ.

Pray for doors only God can open – especially for native missionaries.  

2 Corinthians 2:12 speaks of God opening “a door for the Gospel.”  Many of the world’s most unreached nations are closed to conventional missionary work, such as North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan. Western missionaries cannot simply travel there to plant a church. 

But native missionaries can. They already live there and they already speak the language. This is exactly why Advancing Native Missions exists: to equip believers already inside the hardest-to-reach places. 

Pray that God would open doors of access for native believers, that He would protect them from persecution, and that He would give them supernatural boldness. After all, it is Jesus who “opens a door no man can close” (Rev. 3:8).

Pray for laborers, not just for conversions. 

Jesus looked at the multitudes and was moved with compassion. And then He said something rather unique: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt. 9:37-38). He didn’t just say to pray for people to be saved. He said pray for missionaries to be sent. 

This is a helpful prayer, but it can also be a dangerous one. We often don’t think of praying as dangerous, but it can be. As we pray for the unreached and pray for the Lord to send workers to reach them, sometimes He makes us the answer to this prayer He authored – and He will indeed send us!  This happened to me, but that story is for a later time.

Pray with fervor.  

James 5:16 tells us: “The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.”  The words “effective fervent” were derived from the Greek implying energy from the Spirit.  We need to tune our hearts to the Holy Spirit and pray passionately for what is on His heart – not out of duty, but out of actual love for the people.  

Fervency in prayer for the unreached also means staying engaged in the battle even when you can’t see results. The harvest can sometimes be slow. Don’t give up. (Gal. 6:9)

Your Prayers Are a Connection

Here is the extraordinary thing about prayer: when you close the door of your room and pray in secret, you are not isolated.  Not at all. You are connected to a throne room that governs nations. 

Through that throne room, you are connected to the man lighting incense in a village in Nepal, to a woman in Turkey searching the internet for something she can’t quite name, to a child in North Korea who has been told there is no God, but feels a hunger that won’t go away.

God is not waiting for a political solution to reach the unreached. He is not waiting for borders to open or budgets to increase. He’s waiting for His people to ask.

“Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” (Ps. 2:8)

The unreached aren’t asking for anything. They don’t know they can.

But we do. So let’s be the ones who ask. After all, that’s why your prayer closet is a mission field.

Stock your prayer closet with free strategic prayer resources for the unreached.