Your prayers are urgently requested please after many increasingly hard and testing years for Christians in Iraq. Basically most parts of the country are not safe for them to live in. Almost all Christians in Baghdad moved away a while ago. Now even places like Mosul are no longer safe for them.

The following links provide further information for your prayers.

• The Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East - Canon Andrew White 
• Anguish in Mosul - The Barnabas Fund
• Polls and Poverty: Iraqi Elections - Christian Aid

Iraqi Christian Zia Toma (age 21) gunned down at a bus stop on his way to university

(picture copyright (c) Barnabas Fund and used with permission)

I don't know about you but I sometimes listen to one set of politicians say the [Iraq] war was all about oil, and another set of politicians say it was nothing at all about oil. I don't know who to believe. But it struck me after a power cut last night (pretty much unheard of in this part of the world by the way) that our brothers and sisters in the Middle East have the hardest of hard paths to follow and we have many comforts.

The intention of the war may or may not have been to make the world a safer place. Future oil supply shocks may or may not be easier to manage as a result. But none of this seems to have made any difference to Zia Toma - except  that  perhaps he and many like him have already the truer peace.

"I pray that Christ Jesus and the church will forever bring praise to God. His power at work in us can do far more than we dare ask or imagine. Amen." (Ephesians 3;20-21)