War and Peace and the works of the Lord

 We met for our first anniversary Eco Prayer meeting on 20th May at Shipley Baptist church (our first meeting was in May 2025!).

Learn - Psalm 46

We read Psalm 46 together and asked:

1. What does the Psalm say about:
1. How God is an "ever-present help in trouble"?
2. How God "makes wars cease to the end of the earth"?
2. Why are these two things (God being an ever present help and his making wars cease) put together in this one Psalm?
3. HOW does God make wars cease?

You can see our notes above 😊. In summary:

1. God's people will not fear, even in terrible circumstances.
2. God's holy temple (WAS: Zion, NOW: his church) cannot be destroyed by the wars and chaos.
3. God makes wars cease through people and through our prayers (see later).

Share

Good news that we had heard about recently:

• One of us had been to a meeting of the Baptist Union Environment Network recently and was encouraged to see the environmental action being taken across the Baptist family.
• A long and arduous campaign to stop Harrogate Spring Water expanding its facility which would have resulted in the destruction of Rotary Woods was recently successful, when councillors rejected the planning application. The woods were planted by schoolchildren over twenty years ago and is a valuable and much loved site.
• There has been no more bombing of Iran in recent weeks (although there is still fighting in Lebanon, see prayer points).

Pray

We prayed for:

PEACE in Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, Lebanon and Iran.

Focus on war in the Democratic Republic of Congo 124m people, 10 times the size of UK In the east of the country there are more than 100 armed groups M23 is the largest armed group: Rwanda not-very-secretly supports M23 for protection from other armed groups and the Congolese army. USA is supporting peace talks between Rwanda and Congo. Quatar is supporting peace talks between M23 and Congo. There are lots of valuable minerals in the area. Many people have died or been forced to flee. There has been a lot of sexual violence.

In the UK, a new film from the National Emergency Briefing - a climate change information group - was released on 7th April

Pray that:

1. People in Bradford will go to showings on 
1. May 29th in Shipley (Global Justice Bradford) [book here]
2. June 13th in Clayton (St John’s Church) [book here] 
3. June 27th in Shipley (St Peter’s Church) [book here]
2. More screenings and more action! 

In Bradford, we have a very different looking Council after our recent local elections.

Reform have 29 of the 87 seats, Conservatives, 18, Labour 17, Green 9, others 14. Please pray for:

1. The Holy Spirit to work in all our councillors, particularly the new ones.
2. Stephen Place, the group leader of the Reform councillors.
3. Council work on local climate action and protection of nature to continue.

The United Nations 2026 Global Report on Food Crises

This report showed that 266 million people in 47 countries/territories around the world experienced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025, ⅔ of those in 10 countries:

• Afghanistan
• Bangladesh
• Democratic Republic of Congo
• Myanmar
• Nigeria
• Pakistan
• South Sudan
• Sudan
• Syria
• Yemen

Pray for more funding for humanitarian and development work.

Give thanks for the work that is being done, e.g.: 

• food and hygiene kits given to 30,000 in Tigray in Ethiopia.
• 65,000 trained in new farming methods in Mozambique

Please continue praying for all these things ❤️🙏💚

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday 17th June at 7:30pm, at Shipley Baptist Church (you can use this Facebook event to promote it)