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The ministry of prayer belongs to all of us. In a recent Washington Post article, Bill Broadway reported the concerted prayer efforts of Ted Haggard's World Prayer Team, which had sent "an e-mail around the world urging Christians to pray that Hussein would choose to go into exile, that the United States would allow his departure, and that the United Nations would facilitate it." Several weeks later, the Bush administration said it would welcome such a plan and Arab leaders began urging Saddam to accept the offer. Broadway asked Haggard if there was a direct correlation with the prayer effort. "No doubt about it," Haggard said. "When people pray for benevolent ideas, good things happen." Haggard stands in a fine tradition.

In 1936, before the outbreak of World War II, the great intercessor Rees Thomas saw that Hitler was a major threat to world evangelization. He urged the Bible College of Wales family to pray against Hitler's success. After England joined the war, prayer at the Bible College of Wales and all over England increased dramatically. At the end of May 1940, with the British Expeditionary Force stranded in France, believers at the Bible College of Wales locked themselves in the chapel and vowed to stay and intercede for their countrymen until God answered their prayer. The story of the "Miracle of Dunkirk" is now well known: how a strangely calm sea and a mysterious fog allowed the safe evacuation of 338,000 British troops by fishing boats and other craft hardly suited to the purpose.

The believers in Wales claimed a spiritual victory. Christians all over Britain joined them in a National Day of Prayer that same weekend. Curiously, when church leaders first proposed a National Day of Prayer, the Archbishop of Canterbury opposed it—on the grounds that people might misinterpret it! Street-level Christians now know what the Archbishop missed: In peace and in war, Christians pray their way through.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Christianity Today's previous editorial, "Bully Culprit," is posted online.

Previous Christianity Today articles and commentary on the possible war with Iraq include:

Just War in Iraq | Sometimes going to war is the charitable thing to do.

Bully Culprit | Can a pre-emptive strike against the tyrant of Baghdad be justified? (Sept. 30, 2001)

Christian Leaders Respond to Bush's National Security Strategy | The White House outlines foreign policy in a changing world. (September 25, 2002)

Is Attacking Iraq Moral? | Christian leaders disagree, too. (September 4, 2002)

Recently, Christianity Today Associate News Editor Stan Guthrie reported on the plight of Iraqi Christians.

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March 2003, Vol. 47, No. 3