I always love when fall comes. The air gets a little cooler, the leaves change colors, and we’re heading into the holiday season. 

For the past month, I’ve been trying to pray more outside of myself. It’s easy to focus on myself and what I want, what I feel like I need. But then I forget the many needs outside of my own personal world. There’s a whole church of believers being persecuted around the world.

There’s an organization that I donate to whenever I can called Open Doors. They’re an organization I’ve talked about here before. They send out pamphlets to give you specific prayer requests for persecuted Christians all over the world, normally grouped by country or region of the world. For September they’ve focused on women and men in Sub-Saharan Africa, giving specific needs for the widows, mothers, and men in this area of the world. For October, they’ll shift their focus to Christians in Asia and the Middle East. Each day has another real, specific prayer request. 

Praying through these this month has been really helpful to me to expand my focus from just myself to the wider church around the world and showing me specific things to pray for. From praising God for the release of specific women from capture, to praying for peace and strengthened faith in the face of the everyday persecution faced by widows, wives, husbands, and children. Pray for the persecutors as well, that they would understand the evil that they’re committing and that they would see God for who He is. That they would turn to Him instead and be saved themselves. 

I realized that a lot of the prayers I’ve been praying over the last month end up being variations on different verses from the Bible. I wanted to share some with you this month to give you an idea as well on how to pray for our fellow Christians around the world, oftentimes facing much harsher situations than we are. 

Many of the prayer requests from Open Doors involve men and women in capture by their persecutors. Pray for their release, for any healing that’s needed, both physical and mental, and for understanding from their families as they work through the trauma of capture. This often comes with nightmares of the events as well, so pray for their peace in this too.

There is a prompt to “pray for all imprisoned Christians in Iran [to] feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, be strengthened in hope, and remain steadfast in truth.” 

There is a man in Bangladesh who is receiving questions and scrutiny from family and friends regarding his faith. He has recently gained training in reading the Bible and now has the ability to confidently respond to these questions. “Pray for courage to continue to serve the Lord faithfully without fear.”  

Many believers in dangerous and hostile areas are still hosting churches and Bible studies in secret, hiding away Bibles, and evangelizing so that the kingdom of God can grow. Pray for protection for them and praise God for their unflinching faith and confidence in Him to care for His people.

There is a man in Central Asia who was interrogated, along with his daughter, by secret police about distributing Christian literature. They were fined $625 and need prayer for provision. 

Some of these prompts come with specific verses to pray for people. For a group of Christians in the Arabian Peninsula, they ask “for our brothers and sisters to abide in Christ, praying daily and leaning into His word. Pray they will not succumb to fear and worries.” They cite Philippians 4:6 as a good verse to pray for these believers to help them remember not to be anxious, but to give every request to God because He is a God who listens. A God who cares for us individually and so deeply.  

Pray for peace and strengthened faith for those who are feeling defeated and hopeless in the face of constant strife. Pray that they would remember who their God is. We serve a God of healing, a God of provision, a God of salvation. 

Take the opportunity this month to research the needs of the church around the world. Choose a country or region and just take some time to pray for them. This is part of our job as Christians, to partner in whatever way we can with our fellow believers. I’m hoping to keep this up myself once the prayer calendar ends at the end of October. Let’s partner together to keep our church family covered in prayer. 

*All specific prayer requests and quoted portions outside of the Bible verses come from Open Doors’ Prayer Calendar for September and October 2025. More information can be found on Open Doors’ website.