United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates is one of the youngest nations on earth, yet it stands on ancient ground. The coastal communities of the Trucial States were long-established trading peoples when Britain made them a protectorate in the 19th century. Oil was discovered in Abu Dhabi in 1958, and the federation of seven emirates was born in 1971 under the visionary leadership of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. In barely two generations, the UAE transformed from a collection of fishing villages and desert towns into a global crossroads — home to the world's tallest building, one of its busiest airports, and a financial center rivaling London and New York. The pace and scale of that transformation are almost without precedent in human history.
11,346,000
People live in the UAE today in one of the most cosmopolitan societies in the Muslim world — and one of the most unusual. Roughly ninety percent of UAE residents are foreign workers: South Asians, Filipinos, Egyptians, Westerners, and others drawn by opportunity to a country of extraordinary wealth. The Emirati citizen population — the actual inheritors of this land and its resources — numbers fewer than a million. Churches exist openly for the expat community, and the UAE is relatively tolerant by Gulf standards, but conversion from Islam remains illegal and Emiratis themselves are almost entirely beyond the reach of open gospel witness. Every year, millions of people from every nation pass through Dubai International Airport, many of them from unreached peoples. This land is a crossroads — and God is not unaware of it.
Prayer points
A Crossroads of Every Nation
Pray for the UAE as a gathering point for the nations — where workers from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Arab world live side by side. Ask God to use the expat Christian community as a quiet, faithful witness in workplaces and neighborhoods, and to send people home from Dubai changed by an encounter with the living God. "From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth... so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him." (Acts 17:26–27)
The Emiratis
Pray for the Emirati people — citizens of one of the wealthiest nations on earth, surrounded by every comfort and yet largely untouched by the gospel. Pray that God would use their extraordinary exposure to people from all nations to create curiosity, and that He would raise up witnesses willing to speak to them with wisdom and love in a context that allows almost no open evangelism. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son." (John 3:16)
Wealth That Cannot Satisfy
Pray for a generation of Emiratis and Gulf expats growing up in the world's most concentrated zone of material abundance — and ask God to make clear to them what every civilization in history has eventually learned: that wealth is a foundation that does not hold. Ask Him to create hunger for something lasting in the hearts of those who have everything. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth... But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven." (Matthew 6:19–20)