Vicar of Baghdad inspires Farnham Churches:

 

 

 

“It's nice to be here as I only live down the road when in the UK -this is where my wife and (two) boys come to do our shopping” commented Canon Andrew White, vicar of Baghdad, and newly elected 'vicar of the year', to a packed interdenominational gathering, hosted at the Farnham Vineyard Centre recently.

 

Canon White spends around three days per month with his family at their home near Petersfield. The British office of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East (FRRME) is also based in Hampshire.

 

He joked “when I shout the name of my assistant Jihad -simply meaning 'holy struggle', in Sainsburys, it doesn't go down too well.” Jihad previously worked with the Iraqi airforce. While in Iraq, to illustrate the level of contrast, Canon White is accompanied every day, by a security detail of 35 soldiers.

 

Further responsibilities include religious sectarian work with the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East (FRRME), of which he is President, serving as Director of The High Council of Religious Leaders (which includes the Sunnis and Shiahs), and as chaplain to the British and American Embassies.

 

He travels with Smith Wigglesworth's personal Bible in hand, and a vile of the anointing oil found in the revivalist's pocket, when he died in 1947. Canon White's grandfather served as an assistant to Wigglesworth, -acting as his “his bag carrier.”

 

Canon White took on the extraordinary mantle of becoming vicar to Baghdad, -a city where there are notably fewer dictats, after doctors acting for the Anglican Church in 2005, informed him he was no longer well enough, to continue as a minister in England due to his Multiple Sclerosis.

 

Canon White's church -St George's, the only active Anglican Church in Iraq, is situated a mile outside Baghdad's Green Zone. It was founded in 1864, and rebuilt in 1936 as a memorial to the Empire soldiers who lost their lives in Mesopotamia during The First World War. The vicar describes the art deco styling as the “ugliest in the world”, yet today a venue that previously catered for the diplomatic set, helps address the practical as well as spiritual needs of a 4,000 strong congregation, who affectionately call Canon White “abouna” -father.

 

Medical services are provided by a team of 2 dentists and 4 doctors, a pharmacy, and a haematology laboratory. Canon White himself, is kept fit by a pioneering treatment using his own stem cells, thereby circumventing ethical concerns he has about some stem cell treatment. The revolutionary cure was discovered by a professor of haematology in the vicar's own congregation, who surfed for a solution on Google, and proscribed that treatment was to begin within 24 hours. “From the next day my life was transformed, and now we have the most modern stem cell therapy unit in the world” commented Canon White.

 

The stem cell process has proved so effective, a treatment facility has been established in Kurdistan, and patients fly into the Iraqi capital from as far away as England and the United States. 80% of the 3,700 cases treated to date, have shown improvement he declared, with conditions such as Parkinson's disease, Cerebral Palsy and Muscular Dystrophy seemingly responsive to the therapy as well.

 

Meanwhile, the weekly queue for groceries after the Sunday service has earned the church the name “St George's City” from local children, who attend the on site school.

 

“It used to be the cheapest church to run -costing just $600 per year; today it's $177,000 per month” explained Canon White. “We have no secret reserves under the bed, but God always supplies. I've tried to convey this to accountants, but they don't always understand.”

 

Virtually the whole of the congregation, and all Iraqi Christians -3% of the national population, are from Nineveh (Mosul) Province, a 250 mile drive beyond the north west boundary of the capital, and where it is no longer safe to gather and worship. Although, in more recent times, Nineveh has been merged with Mosul, Iraq's second largest city conurbation, centred just to the west, “to this day Nineveh is Christian; all the country is Islamic, but one city is Christian.”

 

Canon White remarked by way of encouragement “if the Gospel can become so real through two miserable evangelists like Jonah (coughed out of a whale into the Tigris some 2,700 years ago), and Doubting Thomas, then there's hope for all of us.”

 

However, “the Christian population has been decimated. Once there were 1.5 million; now it's 200,000. But our church is flourishing.” The Mothers' Union has over 2,700 members, though the church has only six men “as they are all killed.”

 

Yet while “the church is being persecuted, I have the happiest church” he continued. “I thought the pull out of American troops would make no difference, but it's been a disaster for us.” He reflected that the situation in Egypt with Coptic Christians since the Arab Spring, “shows Iraqi Christians have no hope in the natural realm, no hope politically. The future for believers is looking pretty awful and bleak.”

 

A bomb outside his church last year killed 233 people. The Times quoted Canon White in February of 2010 as stating “300 or 400 of my congregation have been killed and 11 of my church council abducted.” On one occasion a suicide bomber managed to enter the building, but was fortunately removed by security before detonating their explosives.

 

5 weeks after the church medical clinic was opened, it was destroyed. Yet 3 weeks later it was restored. “We have nothing, but when you have lost everything, you realise that Jesus is all that you have left, and when Jesus is there, you can do everything.”

 

“If you are a Christian in Iraq, you love Jesus; it's not like being a Christian here” in the UK, as there's no room for spiritual nominalism. Christians in the region believe Jesus came first to Iraq, and quote Daniel 3:25, where (King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon) said, “Look! I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods.”

 

“We see the miraculous all the time; we see angels all the time. At our healing meeting on Thursday evenings, most people get healed. At our healing meetings on Sunday in the UK, sometimes people get healed.” In Iraq, when doctors can't deal with conditions, they are sent to Canon White.

 

He recounted how members of St George's Mothers' Union prayed over the body of a baby, removed from a mortuary fridge, -a scenario only possible to envisage happening somewhere such as Iraq, and the infant was brought back with them crying. Canon White claimed his church members had witnessed 27 resurrections. “They are really good as demonstrators of Christ's power in all of us” he observed.

When the Grand Ayatollah said he needed meat, there were only 12 dollars in Canon White's pocket. The vicar prayed on the balcony of the Palestine Hotel and noticed a cloud over the Tigris river “-which looked like the Glory of God.” Canon White was prompted to read Ezekiel -all 48 chapters... The following day a man offered him in excess of 120 tonnes of meat, in refrigerated trucks. “I realised this was the start of God answering prayer big-time; -we all need prayer.” He shared how on another occasion, his car broke down just before a massive bomb in the road, intended for a convoy of oil tankers, following behind.

 

Two years after a calling to leave a successful career as an anaesthetist's assistant at St Thomas's, and to enter the Church of England, Andrew White was studying theology at Ridley Hall in Cambridge. He attended the Hebrew University in Israel and learned Aramaic from Syrian Monks. The vicar joked how he “can gas with drugs or sermons; he can put people to sleep both ways.”

 

Canon White believes that just as God used circumstances to place the prophet Daniel where he wanted him, in the court of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, so too the Lord had planned out the vicar's own unique calling, before Andrew was born. Daniel had to become a refugee and an exile in Babylon. But God equipped Daniel with a love for his place of exile, and with the gift of interpreting dreams. “When God calls you, he equips you”, Canon White stated emphatically. In Andrew's own case, while his brother and sister were born white, he was born brown, causing him “to look more like an Iraqi, than most Iraqis.” He does not believe his subsequent training as an anaesthetist, priest, and in Middle East Relations was any accident.

 

Andrew White was ordained in 1990, ministered in Battersea and Clapham, spotted his wife from the pulpit, and then moved to Coventry to serve as Director of Coventry Cathedral's International Centre for Reconciliation. Canon White became The Church of England's youngest canon at 32, and Archbishop George Carey's Middle East envoy.

 

In 1998, the centre director asked his Coventry team to pray for a path into Iraq for him, and a fax arrived the next day from the office of the then Iraqi Deputy PM from 1979-2003 -Tariq Aziz, requesting him to attend a meeting “at 5pm the following Thursday in Aziz's office.” Canon White was prompted to quote former Archbishop William Temple, “When you pray, coincidences happen; when you don't, they don't.”

 

In a later example of answered prayer, Tariq Aziz asked Canon White to arrange for Iraqi religious leaders to be taken to England and America. At Aziz's suggestion, The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was contacted and they agreed to help, with Billy Graham personally ringing President Clinton, who consented to the request.

 

Canon White was cleared to re-commence services at St George's from 1998.

 

Further information about the work of St George's and FRRME, together with how you can show support through prayer and giving, can be accessed at: http://www.frrme.org/