Praying for Classmates at 5:20 in the Morning

By: Tracey Bridcutt, Adventist Record, and Adventist Review

A Seventh-day Adventist school in the Solomon Islands has been starting the day in a powerful way through a dawn prayer initiative that, according to leaders, is producing encouraging results.

Each morning for 40 days, Kopiu Adventist High School on the island of Guadalcanal holds a 40 Minutes in Prayer program from 5:20 to 6:00 a.m. Along with prayer, the participants hold Bible readings together, read from books by the Adventist Church co-founder Ellen G. White, and go on prayer walks. Sometimes they gather in small groups beside the homes of school staff and students and pray for them while they are still asleep.

“We also have the outreach aspect of it by taking the students out of campus at dawn to visit families in nearby communities to conduct morning devotions for them and share basic need items,” said school chaplain Jason Gulea, who came up with the prayer initiative.

He said God’s answers to their prayers have been evident.

“Needs were met, and people who were sick regained health,” Gulea said. “Challenges encountered this year come and go, but we are not down and out.”

Gulea said he believes that outreach initiatives were successful as a result of prayer. This includes the students who said they experienced a spiritual awakening. “We also thank God that two of our students from other faiths who regularly attended the prayer program and also joined the Bible study class eventually made the decision to be baptized,” Gulea said.

A recent baptism ceremony for 28 people included 10 students from the prayer program. Ten of the other candidates were baptized as a result of the school’s Saturday (Sabbath) outreach initiatives and Bible studies conducted by Rexley Aloysio, the husband of a Kopiu teacher.

“With the school intake affected by the pandemic, with only about 80-plus students currently on campus, and with a little over 30 non-baptized students, it is encouraging to see 10 of them giving their lives to Jesus,” Gulea said.

The original version of this story was posted by Adventist Record.