Jon De Bruyn believed in the power of prayer. Now, the Jon De Bruyn Memorial Prayer Fund will help shape the prayer lives of countless others and ignite prayer for God’s mission throughout the world.

A powerful legacy of prayer and faith.

Prayer guided Jon De Bruyn’s life. In 1983, Jon and his wife, Mae De Bruyn, answered a call from Resonate Global Mission (then Christian Reformed Home Missions) to plant Fellowship Church of Traverse City in Michigan. Before the first church service, Jon and Mae prayed for at least 60 people to attend.

“At our first church service, we had 60 people there,” said Mae. “That’s pretty amazing and humbling. Why didn’t we ask for more?”

Jon believed in the power of prayer to transform his church, community, country, and the entire world. He was devoted to studying prayer and what it means to be a praying church. He formed prayer clusters among pastors from different denominations in Traverse City that still meet today, organized prayer conferences, and traveled around the world to study how people and their churches prayed.

When Jon retired from pastoral ministry in 2008, he felt called to found Prayer Missions International (PMI) in partnership with Resonate (then Christian Reformed World Missions). He organized short-term mission trips to visit missionaries and partner with them in prayer.

Jon passed away in 2013 after being diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, but Resonate has continued to gather believers together to pray for mission work throughout the world by hosting conferences such as the Global Prayer Safari (GPS) and Prayer Summit.

“People never think of prayer as mission, yet it is the very foundation of every mission activity,” said Resonate’s Regional Mission Leader for East and South Africa “The tagline [of GPS] is ‘praying on site with insight.’ When you are on site, you can feel, hear, and see the need. This gives you more insight. You know what you’re praying for.”

Shaping prayer lives and praying for the world.

And now, the Jon De Bruyn Memorial Prayer Fund will continue Jon’s legacy of shaping individuals’ prayer lives and praying for the world. The fund will provide scholarships for people participating in these activities who might not otherwise be able to afford them.

Mae established the fund in Jon’s name because his passion for prayer shaped her life and relationship with God, too.

She prayed alongside Jon throughout his ministry; traveled to many countries with him through PMI; and developed prayer habits because of his influence. For the past 29 years, Mae has woken up at 5 o’clock nearly every morning to journal her prayers to God.

“It has made God so much bigger than I thought,” she said. “It reinforced for me that God loves us. That my main vocation is to know myself as loved and accepted by God ... and it makes me able to love others and accept others.”

She is confident that the prayer experiences like GPS and the Prayer Summit will help participants know God better.

“And knowing God is important for knowing who you are, and that is a reflection of God,” she said. “God chooses to bind himself with us … that’s how God chooses to work.”

Please join us in helping God’s people join together in prayer! Click here to learn more about and give to the Jon De Bruyn Memorial Prayer Fund.