FAITH UNDER FIRE
What the Middle East conflict has taught me about God
By Andrew White. Monarch Books. 160 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 1 854 249 623
Andrew White is vicar of St. George’s, Baghdad, with an additional role in mediation and reconciliation, previously in Israel and Palestine, and now in Iraq.
This is his second book, following The Vicar of Baghdad, and he aims to tell believers across the world of the persecution and suffering endured by our brothers and sisters in Iraq. He shares personal testimony and anecdotes to challenge us to support and pray for them.
Scripture teaches us to expect persecution and suffering as we follow the way of our crucified Saviour, and, in Baghdad, Christians are experiencing this daily. Bombs are a feature of day-to-day life and have caused death and injury among the congregation.
Canon Andrew White has baptised several believers only for them to be killed as a direct consequence a matter of days later. Yet still more come seeking baptism and the congregation is characterised by joy and trust in their Lord and a deep, practical love for one another and the wider population of Baghdad.
Although the believers are encouraged by various signs, wonders and miracles which Canon White describes, the overwhelming message is of the congregation’s faithful, persevering hope in Jesus and God’s marvellous sufficiency in the face of trials that would seem beyond endurance. Despite everything, the light of Christ is still shining in St. George’s to the nation of Iraq.
The book has informed and inspired me to pray for these Christians in Baghdad and also those enduring persecution elsewhere in the world. And it has reminded me that our God is indeed ‘able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine’.
Helen Lamb,
member of St. Andrew the Great, Cambridge
