By NZCMS Communications
An interview with Roy and Rachael Hogan 

It is 2:00am in Fiji. Some­where across the city, a woman is awake at home. 

She is not awake because her child is sick, or because she cannot sleep, or because some worry has found her in the dark. She is awake because she signed up for this. She chose this hour. And she is praying. This is not unusual. 

Every Friday, the women of Rachael and Roy Hogan’s church in Fiji fast from six in the morning until six at night. Then, when the day is done, they do not rest. From home, each woman takes a slot on an overnight prayer roster, covering the hours from six in the evening until six the following morning. The church does not own a building. Many have no way to travel in the middle of the night. So each woman prays from her own home, in the dark, for her allotted hour. 

And when the sign-up goes around, the 2:00am slot fills without hesitation.

Rachel Hogan has been a mission partner with NZCMS and serving with MMM Fiji (Mobile Mission Main­ten­ance) for over three years. She is involved in a lot of work. She has run kids’ camps, coordin­ated build­ing teams, nav­ig­ated power outages and salty bore water and dealt with goats running into moving vehicles. But when we sat down to discuss her and her hus­band’s mis­sions service in Fiji, this is the thing that still stops her.

“I’ll take the 2:00 am slot.” Just like that.

Rachael is careful not to make it a simple com­par­ison; a neat cul­tural verdict that places one church above another. But she is honest about what she observes and what it asks of her. New Zeal­anders, she says, really value comfort. Fijians, in many cases, do not have comfort. And it turns out that when comfort is not your baseline, sac­ri­fice is not the moun­tain it can feel like it is from the other side of the world. 

In Fiji, a working person might be out the door before five in the morning to catch public trans­port to a job that starts at six. Getting up an hour earlier to pray is not an act of spir­itual heroism. It is simply what you do because God is worth it. The dis­tance between choos­ing to fast and choos­ing to eat is shorter when your meals are never guar­an­teed to be excep­tional in the first place. The dis­tance between mid­night and 2:00am is shorter when you already know how to endure. 

This is not to say the Fijian church has figured it all out, or that sac­ri­fice looks the same every­where, or that New Zeal­anders who struggle to fast are somehow spir­itu­ally inferior. Rachael is clear not to make that argu­ment. But she is making another one, quietly, from lived exper­i­ence: that the things we give up for God in New Zealand are often things we were living without anyway.  There is a verse in Matthew 6 where Jesus assumes his fol­low­ers will fast. Not “if you fast” but “when you fast.” He does not argue for it. He does not explain the theo­logy. He assumes it. And he says do it without making a show. Do it for God, not for the watch­ing. 

The women of this Fijian church seem to have taken that ser­i­ously in a way that is hard to man­u­fac­ture. They are not per­form­ing their sac­ri­fice. They are just showing up at 2:00am because that was the slot avail­able, and God is worth the hour.  As we chat with Rachael, she talks about it with some­thing close to wonder. Because she has sat in churches her whole life in New Zealand. She has loved those churches, been shaped by them, and served in them. But she is not sure she has seen many people sign up for the 2:00am prayer slot, every week, after fasting all day.

She asks:

What would it mean to want that? 

What would it mean to have so little holding you back from God in the middle of the night that midnight becomes just another time to show up? 

What would New Zealand churches look like if comfort were less of a variable? 

These are not con­dem­na­tions. They are honest ques­tions from a woman stand­ing in the gap between two worlds, watch­ing both and learn­ing from both, and trying to bring the gift of exhorta­tion from the Fijian Church to the New Zealand Church. 

Peter wrote to the early church in 1 Peter 4:7 that the end of all things was near, and there­fore they should be clear-minded and self-con­trolled so that they could pray. He was writing to people under pres­sure, people who did not have much to lose because much had already been taken. And in their depriva­tion, their prayers became some­thing fierce. Some­thing constant.

There is some­thing in the Fijian church that carries that quality. Not because Fiji is under all the same pres­sures as the early church, but because a life without guar­an­teed comfort has a way of pro­du­cing people who do not need to be talked into depend­ence on God. They already know what depend­ence feels like. They are already in the room.

Roy and Rachael Hogan are still learn­ing from that. Still being shaped by it. They went to Fiji to build things, to coordin­ate teams, to run camps, to fix roofs. And all of that is real, and all of it matters. But the thing Rachel comes back to, the thing she cannot quite get past, is the woman in the church build­ing at prayer at 2:00 am on a Friday night.

Wide awake. Exactly where she said she would be. 

Perhaps the invit­a­tion for us is simple. When you think of Rachael and Roy this week, pray for them as they con­tinue their work in Fiji — build­ing, serving, learn­ing, and being shaped by the church around them. Pray for the women who fast and pray through the night, and for the quiet faith­ful­ness at 2:00 am. Pray that God would use the Fijian Church to chal­lenge your faith and service to Him.

Rachael and Roy are Mission Part­ners with NZCMS in part­ner­ship with MMM Fiji. If you would like to stand along­side Rachael and Roy in their min­istry — through prayer, encour­age­ment, or prac­tical support — you can visit their dona­tion page and be part of the work God is doing in Fiji. To support their work and be part of what God is doing in Fiji, visit their dona­tions page here: https://​www​.nzcms​.org​.nz/​o​u​r​-​p​e​o​p​l​e​/​m​i​s​s​i​o​n​-​p​a​r​t​n​e​r​s​/​r​o​y​-​a​n​d​-​r​a​c​h​a​el/