By Bill MacLeod, Executive Director
If you’ve ever been in a setting where a country is mentioned and you wondered where you could
turn to learn more about not only its location, people, or culture, but also about its spiritual condition, chances are you may have turned to Operation World (OW) – the “definitive volume of prayer information about the world”.
Seven editions of OW have been published. The original edition was produced in 1964, from South Africa, and was only 32 pages of basic information about 30 countries. Today’s most recent version is from 2010, which is a complete update of the 21st century edition, released in 2001. It is a large, bulky encyclopedic volume, but now…
Operation World has its own App!
By simply typing “Operation World” in the App Store on your smart phone, you can now easily hold the free version of this world changing resource in your hand! I recently downloaded it and found it easy to navigate to:
- An Alphabetical Listing of all 196 Countries (and 7 Continents) in the world today – including Taiwan which many do not consider a country – that also shows when clicked on, a map of where the country is located on the globe.
- Under “Status”, data is provided on a country’s population; total People groups, total languages, largest religion, the per cent of largest religion; the percent of the population that is Christian; the percent of evangelicals, and what the percentage is of those living in cities, called “Urbanites”.
- Each country’s national flag is shown – all in color.
- Under “More”, additional insightful facts are provided for the savvy believer who desires to see the gospel infiltrate every corner and people group of our globe.
- Under “Prayer”, there is a brief synopsis for each country of how it can be prayed for…and you can see, on specific dates, how many people were praying for any country using the OW app!
Out of curiosity, I looked up a few of the “hotspots” that are often in the news, to see just how many people were praying, on that date, for these countries. Here are some of the results I found:
Afghanistan: 24 people praying on Feb. 9th…Iraq: 4 on July 17…Iran: 2 on July 14…Somalia: 4 on Oct. 29…Syria: 4 on Nov. 14…United Kingdom: 10 on Dec 4…United States: 10 on Dec 7…France: 121 (!!!) on May 24
Ignatius of Antioch, an early Christian Bishop, is attributed with the saying: “Pray as if everything depends on God, work as if everything depends on you.” Hopefully, this Operation World App will help you to do both!
