🙏 Back from the 2023 Wales Prayer Mission

Prayer mission dates: July 3–12, across Wales. My participation: July 3–8 (Mon–Sat), five nights and six days in Newbridge, Wales.

How We Got Here

The week I spent in Luton on the 2017 prayer mission was one of the most important weeks of my life [2017-prayer-mission]. Praying over England alongside Korean intercessors who have made intercession their entire way of life—learning what it means to cry out, not just pray quietly—was something I still think about with deep gratitude to God.

So when Pastor Kim Nam-jin reached out early this year with the message, “We’re planning another prayer mission for Wales—please keep it in prayer,” our family took it seriously. Every morning at dawn prayer, we lifted up that July mission and pressed in. Maybe because we kept at it so consistently, one morning after dawn prayer my mother-in-law quietly made a suggestion: “I’ll watch Junsu and Juno for the week. What if you and your wife go together and bring the baby?” The moment she said it, a strange peace settled over me. There were plenty of unresolved details—how would we both get time off work? Would any team even have space for us? Wouldn’t a two-year-old be a burden to the prayer team?—but instead of anxiety, what I felt was confidence that God would work each thing out one by one.

He did. Pastor Kim responded immediately and placed us with the team called “부흥의 마중불”—which roughly translates as “The Kindling Spark of Revival,” the fire that lights the fire. The couple leading that team, Pastor Han Sang-gyu and his wife, were people we had prayed alongside in Luton in 2017. This would be their seventh year on a UK prayer mission. To be reunited with those same prayer companions, on the same ground, was itself a gift. And both my wife and I got our time off work without any trouble. Every door opened. You could feel God’s hand threading it all together.

Arriving in Newbridge

The day came, and we loaded the baby into the car and drove to Newbridge—a small town in the Welsh valleys where we would spend the week at Tabernacle Baptist Church. Pastor Cho Young-tae, who has pastored that church for thirteen years, and his wife welcomed us warmly and shared how God had been faithfully guiding them through everything. That evening, the six members of the “Kindling Spark” team arrived from Korea, and the day ended with all of us together.

The Daily Schedule

Pastor Cho had laid out a full itinerary for Tuesday through Saturday:

9 am–12 pm: Visiting surrounding churches, leading joint prayer meetings with local believers
1–4 pm: Prayer-walking the neighborhoods around each visited church
7–10 pm: Evening services and prayer meetings with Tabernacle congregation
10 pm–12 am: Pulpit prayer

What follows are the episodes that stood out to me.

Tuesday Morning — Newbridge Primary School

The team from Tabernacle moved into that school like a well-practiced unit, presenting the gospel to the children with real skill and confidence. This was not a one-time thing—the school had welcomed the church team back repeatedly, and that familiarity showed. The presentation centered on the story of Zacchaeus, pitched perfectly to every age group in the room. Then came singing and movement, with all the children—every single one of them—belting out “Jesus Loves Me” at the top of their lungs and throwing themselves into the actions.

Standing there watching those Welsh children sing with everything they had, I caught a glimpse of what the next generation of Wales could look like.

The influence Pastor Cho and his whole family have built in Newbridge is extraordinary. Walking through those streets, I could not find a single person—child or adult—who did not know Pastor Cho, who goes by Peter among the locals. He greeted everyone we passed, and the warmth was unmistakably mutual. That is what years of loving a place looks like.

Wednesday Morning — Clyde Street Pentecostal Church, Risca

This church in Risca had gone without a pastor for about two years. The deacons were taking turns preaching. The lead deacon explained their situation to us, and what struck me was how openly desperate he was—remarkably un-British, in the best sense. He must have said “we are desperate” more than ten times. He was not exaggerating. The congregation kept holding funerals as older members went home to heaven one by one, but no younger generation was filling in behind them. Most of their own children and grandchildren had walked away from the faith. The sadness in his face as he described that was real—and it was the kind of sadness that produces intercession rather than despair. There was nothing left to try except God.

After the deacon sat down, one of our pastors came forward, shared a brief word from Scripture, and explained why a prayer team had come all the way from Korea to Wales. He said it simply and humbly: “Your ancestors came to Korea over a hundred years ago and brought us the gospel. The Korean church exists because of that sacrifice. We are here to repay a debt of grace—even a little. We want to pray with you.” Every church we said that to opened up. Every time.

Of course, praying with British believers brings its own cultural friction. Simultaneous voiced prayer—what Koreans call tongsung gido—is second nature to our team, but even to Pentecostals in England it can feel alien and overwhelming. So rather than just launching into it, we always explained: this is biblical, this is the natural expression of urgency, this is the spirit behind Daniel 9:19—crying “Lord!” three times before everything else. We invites them into it rather than performing it at them. And these desperately earnest British believers prayed with us.

After about thirty minutes of that kind of intercession, the church leaders said something that clearly surprised even themselves: “We haven’t prayed like that in a very long time. Thank you.” Then the leaders slipped into a side office for a brief meeting—and came back to quietly hand Pastor Cho an envelope containing £2,000. “Please use it for this precious prayer mission.” Pastor Kim Nam-jin later told us he had never seen anything like that happen in all his years of leading prayer missions. The groaning of that congregation had reached our team’s hearts, and our team’s groaning had reached theirs. All glory to God.

What I heard afterward from Pastor Kim’s team has stayed with me: that church is not an exception in Wales. It is the rule. Across Wales, most churches are in exactly that situation—deacons rotating through the pulpit, no pastor, and a five-to-ten year window in which many of these congregations will either see God move or simply cease to exist. That is not hyperbole. That is the reality on the ground.

Thursday Morning — Cross Keys Pentecostal Church

This church had also gone through a prolonged stretch without a pastor after their previous one left suddenly. Attendance had fallen so far that they had stopped using the main sanctuary entirely and were holding services in the adjoining education hall. About a year and a half earlier, Pastor Matthew had come on board as a part-time minister—but for the past eighteen months he had been battling an unnamed illness that left him perpetually exhausted, with no energy. He asked us to pray.

We prayed earnestly, then went out for a prayer walk through the neighborhood before the congregation’s lovingly prepared lunch. Walking through those streets, we came across a small windowless building with a name on it we had never heard: Spiritualist Church. Pastor Matthew explained it later—a group that claims to summon the spirits of the dead. Barely worth calling a church. And directly next door to it: a Morbitorium, an exhibit dedicated to the theme of death. In a village that might not even have a post office. A few doors down the street, some of the houses were decorated with skulls and all kinds of genuinely dark imagery. Pastor Matthew told us this area ranks among the most militantly atheistic in all of Wales.

Seeing that with my own eyes—and thinking about the pastor who had moved into this community to serve and then fallen into this mysterious, exhausting illness—I found myself wondering whether there was something spiritually intentional about it. The prayer that rose up from inside me after that walk was a different kind of desperate.

A Shared Burden: The Left in the Korean Church

In the conversations I had with Pastor Han Sang-gyu, Pastor Ryu Ju-hyun, and Pastor Han Sung-mo of the “Kindling Spark” team, I found a shared concern that runs deep in all of us: the infiltration of left-wing and liberal theology into the Korean church. I shared a post I had written earlier, “The Pure Gospel and Tim Keller’s Left-Wing Ideology” [2023-keller].

That conversation opened something. Pastor Han Sung-mo confessed that he had once been a left-wing pastor himself—and that only the grace of Jesus brought him through genuine repentance and restoration. After the mission ended, he was kind enough to write out that story and send it to me. [2023-pastor-han]

Friday Morning — Cardiff, in Front of the Senedd

Cardiff was once the coal export capital of the world. At its peak, more trade passed through Cardiff Bay than through New York City, and the wealth was staggering. But as global competition mounted, the mines closed one by one—by the 1970s and ’80s, the mining industry had collapsed and tourism became the primary economy. The city never quite recovered. Standing in front of the Senedd—the Welsh Parliament—praying over it, I felt something like anticipation. When revival fire sweeps across Wales again, I believe it will bring not only spiritual renewal but economic restoration. That kind of hope is not naive. It is scriptural.

Thursday Evening — The Joint Service in Pontypridd

Three prayer mission teams serving the Pontypridd region gathered with the local believers they had been ministering alongside for a joint evening service. The worship was hot, the preaching was direct, and the prayer was thick with expectation. I caught another glimpse of what Welsh revival looks like in seed form.

We couldn’t attend the final gathering on Wednesday the 12th, but I heard about it afterward: all nine prayer mission teams—110 Korean intercessors in total—gathered with the local Welsh congregations they had been hosting them, and the worship and prayer that evening was described as something extraordinary. Hearing that, I thought of Elijah’s servant seeing a cloud the size of a man’s hand rising from the sea. It is small. But it is there. God is going to do something in Wales in these last days.

Fasting—and Stopping

About five years ago, through Derek Prince’s teaching on the power of prayer and fasting, I adopted a weekly Wednesday fast that I have kept consistently ever since—and I have received enormous spiritual benefit from it. When circumstances don’t permit Wednesday, I fast Tuesday instead. Weekly fasting has become for me what Sunday worship is: not an obligation but a discipline I love. Earlier this year, my wife and I undertook a twenty-one-day fast together, and the grace we encountered during those weeks—the goodness God stores up for those who fear Him and take refuge in Him (Psalm 31:19)—was one of the richest spiritual experiences of our marriage. I believe the breakthrough that made this prayer mission possible came partly during that fast. I wrote about it here: [2023-fasting].

So when I first connected with the “Kindling Spark” team, I was burning to suggest that we all fast together as a team. The idea felt so obviously right to me that I shared the fasting post in the group chat before thinking it through. The problem: that kind of suggestion—however good it might be in principle—belongs to the team leader first. Pastor Han was gracious about it, and I told him I would drop the subject entirely and not bring it up again. And so this prayer mission became the first stretch in five years where I did not fast on any of the weekdays.

Reflecting on it now, I realize group fasting is genuinely more complicated than I had appreciated. Throughout the week, every church we visited prepared food for us. At Cross Keys Pentecostal Church, one of the congregation members had gone online, watched a tutorial on how to make Korean miyeok-guk (seaweed soup), sourced premium beef, and made it from scratch for us. If we had declared a fast that day, what would refusing that have communicated? What would it have done to her?

Here is what I learned: even a genuinely good thing must be disciplined when it becomes the enemy of the best. I still hope that someday this prayer mission movement will include a coordinated group fast—but next time, with everyone’s understanding and consent secured well in advance.

Brothers in Faith: Pastors Kim, Cho, and Lee

One of the unexpected blessings of this trip was learning the story of how three men became something like sworn brothers in the faith. Pastor Kim Nam-jin, who leads the prayer missions; Pastor Lee Sang-bo, who pastors in London; and Pastor Cho Young-tae, our host in Newbridge—all three are the same age, and God brought them together a few years ago. What started as a providential meeting deepened so rapidly that they formed the kind of friendship where you can say the hard things, where you lay down the real burdens, where you find genuine rest. God gave them to each other as gospel partners.

And this, I found out, is partly the fruit of a prayer. Pastor Cho’s wife had been praying for years: “My husband is out here in this rural community, doing this ministry alone, with no real friends. God, give him a friend.” God answered that prayer—with two.

Our God is a Father who attends to every detail.

VBS — Vacation Bible School

Running concurrently with our prayer mission, an American Korean-church team of 1.5- and second-generation young adults had come to Wales to lead Vacation Bible School at several local churches—bringing the gospel directly to Welsh children. Throughout our week of intercession, we were praying over that VBS effort as well. It was a beautiful thing: the prayer mission and the evangelism mission running side by side, each covering the other. I am praying for much fruit and revival through that kind of sustained, layered kingdom work.

Guitar Aid

The greatest story of the week, for me, came from John Palmer—a deacon at Tabernacle Baptist Church who has walked with Jesus for seventy-five years, since he received Christ as a teenager. His mother, he told us, was a woman of prayer who personally led every member of her family to the Lord.

One evening John spotted the guitar used in the church’s worship and said there was a testimony attached to it. Back in the 1960s, when John’s monthly salary was fifty pounds, the son of the pastor at his church came to him with a request: “I want to serve in worship ministry, but I have no money for a guitar. Could you spare ten pounds for a second-hand one?” John didn’t have ten pounds to spare at that moment. But he started saving, and three months later he handed the young man the money. The guitar was bought. The young man threw himself into worship ministry.

Decades passed. That same young man eventually founded a charity called Guitar Aid—partnering with guitar manufacturers in Wales to source quality instruments and donate them to mission fields around the world. To date, roughly four thousand guitars have been given away through Guitar Aid.

John looked at us and said: “The truth I have experienced more times than I can count in my life is this—when you make a small sacrifice for the kingdom of God, He takes it and multiplies the fruit a hundredfold, not just years later but decades later.”

I have been thinking about that ever since.

Lord—we lift up the tears and the sacrifice of this “Kindling Spark of Revival” team before You. Lord, in Your time, pour out a spirit of grace and supplication upon this land of Wales, so that its people would look again to Jesus. Lord, as the gospel of Christ is proclaimed to the next generation of this land, pour out upon them a spirit of genuine repentance and mourning—so that these churches would be revived.

— End