I opened my email this morning to discover an 'urgent prayer request'. A significant leader in world missions was passing on to me a request he had received from Japan to pray for the serior manager leading the team restoring electrical supply to the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. "As it turns out", so the message ran, "the project head is a Christian. His name is xxxx xxxx, believed to be a member of the First Baptist Church of Fukushima." I was then encouraged to "get this message out to all your networks so that they can pray for this man".If our Faith2Share website had been running I would probably have written this up as a short news story and posted it by 9.30am this morning, but as it happens the website is off line today for an upgrade. Instead I shared the prayer request with office staff, planning to upload the story tomorrow. Wow, that was a narrow escape! By 2.00pm. other "urgent messages" were arriving. "Please don't mention his name." "Please take down any web items." "Mentioning him could put him at risk." What a blessing a delay can be sometimes!
Having reflected on this during the rest of the day, however, the real issue for me is not the carelessness of someone in Japan not checking whether a story should be public, but rather ... why it suddenly became more important to pray for this guy when it was discovered that he "is a Christian". What if he had been a Buddhist, or an outright atheist, or simply didn't take religion very seriously? Does that excuse us from praying for him? Is praying urgently for Christians whenever they find themselves in a tough spot not rather discriminatory?
I'm beginning to think that it might be more urgent to pray for the guy with his thumb in the Japanese nuclear dyke if he has no faith at all - surely the Christian in that situation already has a head start. Or am I confused?
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