well um sorry I had to record this uh presentation out of the class and it's a little bit later so uh for um for you Flex students and for everybody uh the quiz is I'll give you an extra day on U on that and in uh class next week on the 18th we're going to uh talk about Community needs assessment and we're also going to go on a Prayer walk here in New Orleans so um uh I will take this group out I wish I could take the two of you in the flex class out with the this as well but I'm going to let you take a prayer walk uh on your own and I'm giving you uh uh probably an hour and a half of class time to do this you can do it uh at at a time of your convenience but I want you to take a prayer walk Flex students of somewhere between 45 minutes and 1 hour and I'll have a discussion forum set up for you to enter in a couple of paragraphs about your prayer walk that'll be for uh all student students here in New Orleans as well as flank students uh to just to write a couple of paragraphs about the prayer walk and we'll talk about the specifics of that in class next week but essentially what we will do here in New Orleans and what you can do will will divide up into teams and for Flex students I encourage you strongly to take at least one other person with you on the prayer walk and we'll go out using some of the principles that I talk about in this presentation and you'll uh pray in the neighborhood meet people when you see people tell them what you're doing and say how can I pray for you and if they'll let you pray right there for them it's a good opportunity to to pray for folks and to uh and to be involved in in what's going on so hope that you'll enjoy that um when I talk about prayer walking I often talk up talk about in terms of a pills walk PE LS a pills walk which involves uh prayer walking with some additions as as well and uh I used to say prayer walking here in New Orleans is savoring the multiple layers of post Katrina New Orleans although 18 years ago after Katrina it didn't always smell so good but uh you do get to savor the neighborhoods of New Orleans in prayer walking so peels stands for it's an acronym for prayer evangelism expiration listening and serving so uh the biggest part of appeals walk is prayer walking and I'll spend most of this presentation talking about uh about prayer walking uh and in doing this you'll pray for the neighborhood ask for prayer request and as I mentioned pray right there if they will let you do that I uh first heard about prayer walking uh 28 or 30 years ago and I must admit my initial misunderstanding of prayer walking was not good I thought prayer walking was a copout I thought people went on trips to do prayer walking to get out of doing evangelism I thought it was a lazy way to go on a mission trip and uh I have an EV evangelism background and I just I just thought people were skipping out on evangelism by by prayer walking um I came to change my mind radically here's a uh neighborhood here in New Orleans this probably looks familiar to to you is uh the seventh war in New Orleans where I care people to they women dress like this no I'm just kidding this is a a city in Southwest China and uh this is how the Nashi ladies dress uh kind of a ma kind of hat that they wear and then then uh the other clothing is more uh more traditional but uh this is uh a place that we went in fact we had a um missionary to Southwest China that came on our campus years ago with the purpose of enlisting folks to come help him in in China and one thing he wanted to do I think to kind of introduced people to the possibility of coming as missionaries to China was to try to to put together a short-term trip to uh his part of the world he spoke in some classes and a lot of interest was developed in this mine uh was certainly developed as well as Dr Charlie Ray Jr that's Charlie Ray III who teaches now his father who is uh retired but still teaching a little bit uh so so we decided uh we wanted to go and about 12 other no obts students decided that they wanted to go and we put together this trip now the missionary he didn't give us a lot of details he said don't worry about what you'll do I'll tell you that when you get to China so in the early spring we started meeting together once a week on Mondays at lunchtime to pray for our trip and since we hadn't been given much information we uh had to decide what we wanted to pray for so we talked about it and decided we wanted to pray that our 14 students could plant a church in China while we were there we thought with all the thousands of house churches being started 14 folks including two faculty members could start a church in China in two weeks so that was our prayer we fasted at least one meal a day on Mondays met together prayed and had some really good prayer times for this trip in fact probably the most prayer for this trip of any that I've ever been on and it it paid off so uh we did this all semester the end of the semester came I think we even missed graduation got special permission to misg graduation and we flew first to South Korea we were in a conference there and then we flew to Beijing from Beijing we flew to unan Province and began working uh with the Nashi people we were met at the airport by the missionary he met us outside the airport and took us to the hotel where we were going to be staying and got us together for orientation the first thing he did in our hotel room was turn the TV in the room up full blast so loud that it was hard to hear anything and his purpose for doing that was to providing noise so that the microphones that the Chinese government had in our rooms as they most surely did would be drowned out by the loud sounds of the TV and then he talked kind of low as well one of the first things he said to us was now I hope none of you brought Bibles to give away I had bought a Bible a Mandarin Bible from the United Bible society and I raised my hand and said I have one he said keep it here in the hotel hide it make sure you don't give it away he said we have plenty of Bibles published here in China if you give that Bible away which was printed in America it'll be traced to this team so we don't want that Trace to our team so I agreed to that and then he said a real stumper he said if you have any tracks any religious literature don't give that out and then the huge stumper don't witness while you're here that blew me away my first thought was how are we going to start a church if we can't witness then he began to explain why he said that he said y'all are here to prayer walk y'all are going to be shelling the beaches just like uh before dday in war war two ships shell the beaches with their artillery to loosen up things to hopefully kill a few enemy soldiers to make it a little easier uh to land troops on Shore he said that's what y'all will be doing and uh so you know I said okay I'm not happy but okay and then he uh further explained he said I've got after y'all are here in two or three weeks I've got another team coming in and they're going to be passing out packets of gospel material literature CD ROMs cassette tapes they're going to be spreading those far and wide and um uh I'm not going to be seen with that group I'm going to be seen with your group we're going to go places I want the government to see Mo with your group and you're not going to do anything illegal that's why I'm telling you not to witness so we kind of understood disappointed but we understood this next group was going to pass out to literature many many hundreds of packages and the missionary was not going to be seen with them he uh prepared them for coming he arranged for them to get the material but he was never going to be seen with that group so that when the government came to him as they surely would and said hey we had a group doing all kinds of Rel legal things passing out gospel literature all over the place and he would be able to say I wasn't with that group now the group that was here June 1st through 14 did you have any reports from them and if we did what we were supposed to do they would say no we didn't he said I was with that group I wasn't with this other group and so we were providing validity for his platform his platform was bringing in primarily American teams to study and look at the Nashi culture it was a this was a United Nations world heritage site in this city a culture that was widely studied so there was an excuse to bring in groups to study and to look at their culture uh so we said said okay and then his plan was we came into prayer walk and provide his platform validity a second group came in to distribute literature widely which he wasn't going to be with and then a third group was coming in some Weeks Later these were going to be Mandarin speakers from another location and they were going to come in and try to find Persons Of Peace persons who had gotten the literature sure had studied it and hopefully were interested in finding out more and they were going to try to win people to Christ and and find people of peace and hopefully start the beginnings of of churches so you know we said okay a little disappointed but we said okay so uh we prayer walked in the city where we were and then we went on a long bus ride uh two-day bus ride to get to uh an area in the foothills of the Himalayas and we walked out into tiny Villages way off the road we walked on Rice patties there was water everywhere coming off the mountains it was beautiful rice was growing and uh we had balloon toys animals that we were making for the children but it was such a remote area area the children had never seen white people and they ran to their mothers grabbed hold of their legs they had didn't want anything to do with our toy balloons balloon animals they cried and held on to their mother's legs it was remote there were no Christians at all in the in the area uh we came back to the T little the somewhat larger village where we were going to spend the night we had supper we went to bed uh and the next morning we're going to catch a bus and go back to the larger City where there were Western toilets which we were anxious to get to hot showers which we were very anxious to get to and a little wider variety of food although I have wonderful memories of the food in these tiny villages we were hungry and the food was fresh and it was good it was cooked in walk over fires it was it was delicious so we spent the night got up the next morning to um uh eat breakfast we went down to this little cafe uh by the way we we saw Buddhist lamaseries uh in the area that was quite quite exciting and we went to this lady's Cafe uh early that morning we saw a tiny little motorcycle truck bring a quarter of a hog to her restaurant where she cut it up and cooked it for us along with some vegetables and it was very good this little boy that she's holding uh I don't remember how to pronounce his name in Chinese but his name meant Little Mountain one of our students uh from Alabama was with us we had all brought snacks because we didn't think we would have good food which we were very wrong so we had plenty of extra snack food and uh we gave the food to this little boy and you see his dirty face he had that food all over his face and one of our students started calling him Ralph and uh the team that came back to distribute literature a couple of weeks later uh went in her restaurant as well and she was still calling her son on Ralph so somewhere around Southwest China there's a young man named Ralph walking around speaking Mandarin so we uh had breakfast we went up to the uh Road where the bus was stopping and at 9:00 the bus got there and the bus was packed there was not room for us to to get on the bus and uh the bus driver said come back at noon in Mandarin to the Mandarin speakers come back at noon and maybe you can get on the noon bus so we went back down to her little restaurant we had a brief worship service it was on S Sunday morning and I had a good time of worship the missionary said keep it down we don't want to arouse too much attention we started singing that song that has Hallelujah in it over and over and we started getting louder we just almost without trying we got louder in Praise of of the Lord and Chinese people from the neighborhood started coming up to her restaurant to the windows and the doors looking in and I remember one man standing at the door he was singing Hallelujah with us he didn't know what it meant as far as we knew there were absolutely no Christians there but he was singing and I was praying Lord one day may he come to know you so that he'll understand what it means to sing Hallelujah we finished after that wonderful worship service by the way the missionary said I'll go ahead and let it rip if I get kicked out of China for worship that's all right so uh we finished police didn't show up we made it up to the bus this time the bus was totally empty and uh the bus except for the bus driver got on the bus driver asked uh the missionary where you going he told him he said well that's a two-day Journey going back to your uh starting point going this way he said if I turn around and go over this new road I can have you in your final destination in four or five hours we were all excited about that Western toilets hot showers and a little wider variety of food so we said sure thing so we headed down this new road and as we drove down the road the missionary looked in little valleys below us and we could see up to 10 Nashi Villages uh and from one spot high on the road missionary didn't even know that they existed so it was it was wonderful we kept driving and we came to the young sea River we had actually cross this River earlier it's a huge river that runs from the Himalayas all the way uh to Eastern China and uh uh we came to this Gorge that the Yi river runs through and imagine the Grand Canyon and that the US government cut a Road halfway down the canyon that's what it was like they built a road that look something like that and we were driving down it looked something like that as well although this is actually a hiking path instead of the road but that's that's kind of what it looked like we were driving the bus along here and looked straight down a couple of thousand feet into the river it was absolutely incredible we were ooing and a like little children it was so so beautiful uh this was the young sea river right right below us that rock is probably half the size of a big school building and um as we were driving along someone flagged the bus driver down and said you can't go any further there there's water over the road and there are rocks on the road I couldn't imagine how a th000 ft above the river there could be water on the road and why would there be rocks on the road well sure enough there there were we didn't get this far somebody else stopped him and told him the police stopped him and this is what it was like snow melting higher up in the mountains had come down had loosened rocks and put rocks on the road and that melting snow water was covering the road the bus driver said can't go any further he turned around on that narrow road and told us I don't have enough gas to get back uh This Way said uh you know I'm I'm going to run out of gas before I get to anywhere where there's gas so y'all are going to have to walk down to the river take a little boat across the river and uh hike up to another Village and catch a bus tomorrow now remember that's what I had seen of the river at that point I thought how are we going to take a boat across that well we hiked uh a good ways a bus driver let us off we walked down a very steep Bank to the young SE River and uh hired a boat it wasn't this very boat but it was one very much like that we paid them and they carried us across the river he aimed it upstream and gunned it and we went to the other side the river was very Swift very rapid got across there were two paths up the other side and uh we asked the the men on the other side which path is the easiest path they said we're from the other side we don't know which is the best route so Dr Charlie Ray said I'll try this way so he began climbing up this steep path and when he got near the top I saw him stepping over a large expanse between two rocks and I thought he's going to fall straight into that River and I was trying to decide who do I call First our president or uh Dr Ray's wife fortunately he didn't fall but when he got Across The Rock he said don't come this way so we climbed the other route it wasn't so so bad and um uh we we made it up there halfway up it we came across a petrified log excuse me I'm going to stand up and get something as an illustration we came to a petrified log that was probably this big around at least at 15 or 20 fet long and laying under that petrified log was was this piece of petrified Rock right under the uh the huge log so I just picked it up and put it in my backpack you can't do that here in uh the Petrified Forest in the Arizona desert but uh I thought there was nothing wrong with that somebody was going to get it or it was going to fall on down to the river so I have that to remember that height we went up to the top and nshi people lived along the edge of the path that we were on and they kept inviting us to come spend the night at their house as it was getting near dark uh we decided we better go on into the small village there was a hostel there where hikers stayed we went there we ate supper and we got rooms to sleep in uh so that we could catch the us the next morning the missionary said we've heard there's a lot of evil activity in this Village we're going to uh pray walk in the morning and then get the the noon bus so we um uh went to sleep was kind of an interesting night workers from the hostel would come into our room during the night at various times and if we had more than one piece of cover they would take it telling us that uh other hikers had come in in they didn't have enough cover to go around so that was an interesting interesting night we got up the next morning had breakfast and then divide up into groups and began walking through town prayer walking I somehow got separated from my partner and wound up on the edge of the little village and as I was out uh in a somewhat rural area I saw a truck coming my way and as I looked it was a Chinese army truck coming right toward me and I thought this is not going to be good I've seen movies like this I'd watched the old show MASH with Chinese soldiers in it and I thought they're going to stop and they're going to hurt me so it came and I was scared and it passed me and as it passed me a Chinese Soldier looked out from the canvas covering stuck his head out and went hello so I wasn't afraid anymore of of Chinese soldiers um we uh another group about that time was prayer walk walking at the center of this this Village uh as they uh they had actually stopped and were bowing in prayer normally when you prayer walk you pray with your eyes open walking they had bowed in prayer and when they said amen and looked up uh this man and his son one of his sons were standing there the little boy had a bandage around his hand his arm in a sling blood oozing from the bandage and the father said to our the Chinese speakers can you help my son the missionary and his wife spoke Chinese Mandarin and Tim Yin who and his wife Fanny were on the trip they were both born in China immigrated to the United States he became an engineer and uh uh went to work for an oil company retired came to Seminary and was about to graduate and he uh went with us on that that trip turned out that morning the little boy had got and his hand stuck in a piece of farm machinery that was on the on the farm and it had almost severed his little finger and it had cut tendons around his his knuckles and he said can you help my son well the missionary's son not too long before that had run through a plate glass door and cut tendons in his wrist and he had taken to the hospital where they did surgery on his tendons in the town that we were were about to head to on the bus and he said yes we can we can help you uh Chinese people get free treatment in the hospital unless they have to have surgery or unless they have to stay over a week and uh so he um uh was able to to do that and uh we we collected some money to give to him and and uh uh they got on the bus with us and rode with us uh on the to the town that we were were going to so I'm going to stop the story right here and put the rest of it in another video that I will post a little later today so this is part one