VOICE OF PEACE: CANON ANDREW WHITE

Does your pastor travel with thirty-five armed guards and wear body armor?  In one year, has your church ever had over a thousand souls killed?  Has your church staff ever been killed or kidnapped?

This is life for God's servant priest, the Vicar of Baghdad.  Canon Andrew White's life work is to sit down with the Muslim, Jew, and Christian with a view toward reconciliation.

Chuck Colson's group awarded Canon White with this year's William Wilberforce award as someone who is a witness of Christ in society.

Wilberforce fought to end slavery in the UK, but he also had his finger in many other of society's injustice pies.  That is just like the Vicar's life.  This LINK is to an interview with Canon White to give you a flavor of his very unusual story.

BEGINNINGS
This reconciler was born and raised in England by an Indian father (Baptist) and a British mother (Pentecostal).  His skin color makes him look somewhat Middle-Eastern.  He carries a Bible that once belong to Smith Wigglesworth; it was given to him by his grandfather who was Wigglesworth's assistant.

ASPIRATIONS
When Andrew was a boy, he would walk past William Wilberforce's home in Clapper and ask the Lord to let him serve with just some of the fervor that Wilberforce had.  Considering his service in Baghdad, that prayer has been answered.

PEDIGREE
The Vicar graduated from Cambridge and went on to become an anesthesiologist.  He served his church in London as well as "in hospital" (as the Brits say) before later becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury's Envoy to the Middle East.

He is fluent in several languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and English...and is a Hebrew scholar who spent years in Jerusalem.  His great love for people allows him to move in and out of different cultures.

SERVICE
The Vicar reopened St. George's church in Baghdad in 1998.  Originally built in 1864, most of St. George's present structure was built in 1936 as a memorial to the British soldiers who died in Mesopotamia in WW1.  The church closed after the Gulf War, but at its reopening, it is the only Anglican church in Iraq.

The church first served diplomats/military who lived inside the Green Zone, but St. George's is outside that area and after the insurgency, travel became too dangerous.  Now the congregation is all Iraqi and the services are in Aramaic.  There are about 500 Muslims who attend services.

The other five days a week, St. George's is bustling.  They have a free clinic which has radiology, hematology, surgery, dental, etc. to serve around 150 Iraqi patients daily.  There is a program to feed the hungry and a school...all within the walls of the church.  And Canon White also writes books.

PHYSICAL
The Vicar is 6'3", a big man full of big love and a big sense of humor.  He speaks with difficulty due to a fight with Multiple Sclerosis which has been going on for seventeen years.  The hematologist in their clinic at St. George's has given him experimental treatment which is against the law in America or Great Britain.  These injections (of his own stem cells) have been given for five years and they've made a big difference in his ability to walk and speak.  Isn't it curious that if anyone wanted to try this course of treatment, they couldn't get it legally ANYWHERE in the world but Baghdad?  Canon White says that what God calls us to do, He equips us to do.

FAMILY
The White family includes a wife and two boys who live in England after life in Baghdad became impossibly dangerous.  The Vicar goes home about every six weeks.  There are many orphans in Iraq and Canon White has also adopted four Iraqi children.

THE FUTURE
Andrew White says that while he does not want to be blown up, he knows that as long as God's purpose for him remains, he will remain alive to do it.

Christians in Iraq are considered the oldest surviving continuous Christian communities in the world, dating to the first century.  Yet daily they are specifically targeted for bombs, kidnapping, torture and rape.  Many leave Iraq because of this daily martyrdom, but the remaining brothers and sisters in Christ have a strong advocate in the Vicar of Baghdad.  They call him "Aboona" (Arabic for "Father").

If you would like to know more about how you might pray for Canon Andrew White...or give to his ministry, this LINK is to his organization, The Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.

God, thank you for your promise to bless the peacemakers.