News > North America

Last Saturday evening on May 12, 2012, the Chicago Center hosted a united worship and prayer meeting across the various UBF fellowships and student ministries in the Chicago-land area. More than 100 young leaders including HBF and several senior leaders throughout the various Chicago area chapters attended this event. The vision and theme of this united meeting originated from a couple young women who mobilized various student leaders across different campus ministries. With the support of leaders from the Well ministry, these beautiful young women planned and organized everything from beginning to end with much prayer, love, and genuine Christian friendship.

The event began with a time of meditative worship and personal prayer led by a praise team assembled from students across various Chicago ministries.

Then Francis Choi delivered a message from 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 entitled “All Things New." He focused on three points: 1) How does God view us? 2) How should we view others? 3) How has Christ empowered us? We were reminded that God reconciled us by making Jesus who had no sin to be sin for us. We must regard ourselves from now on as righteous new creations by the help of the Holy Spirit. We must regard no one from a worldly point of view either. Christ has empowered us to love. He has committed to us the message of reconciliation as God’s Ambassadors.

After the message we divided into our separate fellowships for prayer. In each group, we each shared our burning prayer topics and all fellowship members laid their hands on each other, praying one by one till everybody received prayer support. This was a wonderfully intimate time of prayer and fellowship as we came to know each other, united in Christ as dear brothers and sisters. After around thirty minutes of united prayer, we sang again for about 30 minutes of worship songs that were centered on the Gospel of Christ.

Pastor Joshua Hong gave a motivational message based on Gen 26:18: “Isaac reopened the wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham, which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham died, and he gave them the same names his father had given them.” Compared to many great Biblical figures, Isaac seemed at first to not be so great like his father Abraham. But God honored him when God identified himself as the “God of Isaac.” Pastor Joshua urged us to believe that God personally desires to be one who identifies Himself by our names, and to follow in the footsteps of Isaac who carried on the redemption history of his forefather Abraham by digging “wells” in faith. So we should dig the well of living word of God and live as deep Christians until we have fresh water of life gushing into eternity. Isaac actually re-opened the wells of his father Abraham that had been stopped up—and he continued the history of gospel work much like a relay-race, grasping firmly the baton of the gospel from those who went before him, and then running his own race with all his might—in his own rhythm and pace. Having this sense of history, we must also run our race well and faithfully pass along the Gospel in continuation of God’s redemptive history to the next generation.

Lastly, Pastor Abraham (General Director of UBF) gave the young people some personal words of encouragement: “We became new creations because the Son of God loved us and took up the cross and died for us.” He urged us hold on to two things in our hearts: that God had chosen us in his love, and that Jesus in His sacrificial love was crucified for our sake. Symbolizing the blessing of the older generations onto the new, Dr. Charles Kim, Dr. Jim Rarick, Gustavo, Amalia and Little Sarah representatively prayed for the young people. The meeting was over with the prayer of benediction by Pastor Abraham Kim. We actually did not finish the planned program because we thoroughly enjoyed praying together, and we had to cut short the prayer time because it was getting late and worship service was the next day. In the future, we hope to finish where we left off, given that we had also intended to pray for many important prayer topics concerning the UBF ministry, our nation, and the Body of Christ. Overall, it was a very deeply touching time of worship & prayer as well as a time of refreshing fellowship across ministries. May God make all things new by restoring His Church to be One as we listen to the Word together and earnestly pray together—just as the young people of our UBF ministries demonstrated so movingly through this time of united prayer and worship.