Hillsong Church’s co-senior pastor Bobbie Houston has appealed to Christian women across the world to pray at the same time each day against the “theology of rape” that has resulted in thousands of women and children being brutally assaulted by ISIS.
Houston, in a blog to hundreds of thousands of followers, referred to a recent New York Times article that outlined the atrocities committed against the Yazidi religious minority in northern Iraq.
It described the systematic rape of women and young girls by men who often knelt in prayer before and after the violent acts, believing that their religion not only gave them the right to rape but also encouraged it.
Houston said the lives of innocent people are in the balance, and that she believes “a handful of women with compassion in their hearts, empathy in their spirit and prayer in their mouth could change the world. I believe that the Bible clearly teaches that prayer makes a way where there often seems to be no way.”
She said that the brutality and sex slavery under ISIS can no longer be ignored.
“I’m doing this because we cannot turn away from a harsh reality that is literally happening under our noses and on our watch,” she wrote.
It was no longer enough to be “shocked or abhorred” according to the Hillsong pastor who oversees Hillsong’s ‘Colour’ women’s conferences in Australia, Europe, South Africa and North America.
“We had to respond,” and that response is to call on “the sisterhood to pray fervently for this heinous reality happening,” specifically at noon daily, to signify the 12-year-old girl referred to in the New York Times article.
“Pray for the victims. Pray for the perpetrator. Yes. Pray for the enemy. All I know is that prayer makes a way.”
Houston said she recently received a phone call from a pastor who works with the victims. “They just want to know they are not alone.”
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