Can Prayer Make a Difference in California? (prayer based crime fighting, New Apostolic Reformation)

ewark's Prayer-Based Crime Fighting Effort Isn't Working
Bruce Wilson

A radical notion: who needs cops? Just pray down crime. But in Newark, where the murder rate has risen over 70% from 2010 to 2011, the approach doesn't seem to be working very well. Privatizing government services has long been a key goal of the American religious right, and as a 2-part new Talk To Action report details (1 http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/4/20/232844/831/ , 2 http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/4/24/22559/1547/ ), the push for education vouchers has been orchestrated by right wing funders dedicated to eradicating public schools altogether. But voucher initiatives are presented as secular. Then, there's prayer-based crime fighting, an even more radical privatization scheme. {video, below, touts Pray For Newark's alleged crime fighting prowess as a model for all of California}


Pray For Newark claims amazing results as its Christian volunteers "prayer walk" the Newark city streets, seeking to pray down crime. As shown in the slickly-produced video (featured in this story) from Harvest Evangelism, the ministry credited with launching the Newark effort, by 2010 the effort had 100% coverage in the city, at least one prayer-walker per city street (Newark has over 1,000 streets) and exults that consequently, by March 2010, Newark had its first murder-free month since 1966.

Then, in late 2010, after a cost-cutting proposal led to a showdown with the local police union, Newark Mayor Corey Booker fired 167 city police officers. The results are unsurprising. By mid 2011, reports CBS, murders were up 71%, shootings up 29%, and auto theft up 39%. The magical results of Pray For Newark's prayer-based crime fighting effort seemed to suddenly evaporate.

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As I've described in previous articles (see 1, 2, 3), the Pray For Newark bills itself as being inspired by the writing of evangelist Ed Silvoso who, at his 2008 yearly conference, repeatedly likened enemies of his movement to rats that would be, when the time was right, exterminated (see conference video footage from Silvoso's 2008 International Transformation Network conference, held in Mar Del Plato, Argentina: 1, 2, 3.) Ed Silvoso's ministry is also tied to a key co-author of Uganda's so-called "kill the gays" bill.