Zimbabweans continue to face many hardships. This family resorted to eating a cow hide to fend off starvation. Photo: Marcus Perkins/Tearfund
17 May 2011
Thousands of Christians will gather in Zimbabwe next week to unite in prayer for their troubled country.
Peace, reconciliation, healing and revival will be the focuses of the National Day of Prayer on Wednesday 25 May.
The day is also a public holiday to mark Africa Day, the day in May 1963 when the Organisation of African Unity, now the African Union, was formed.
The prayer event will involve the country’s three major umbrella church bodies: the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference.
Tearfund is also supporting the venture, which desires to see reconciliation between people of various ethnic, religious, political and social outlooks.
Denouncing violence
The day seeks the restoration of social justice, physical health, spiritual wellbeing and economic recovery of Zimbabwe’s people.
There’ll also be prayers for the revival of the church and transformation of the nation through a commitment to God, to each other and to the nation for economic, agricultural and industrial revival.
Church leaders will use the prayer gathering to make a public declaration denouncing any form of violence, victimisation, hate speeches, or polarisation of any kind.
A spokesman for the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe, said, ‘Zimbabwe is going through a period of trials and tribulations.
‘We are convinced that Zimbabwe shall never be the same again but this can only be so when people join hands and pray for their nation.’