Cherokee Prayer Initiative marks half-way point
November 2, 1999

CLINTON, SC – The Cherokee Prayer Initiative completed its second of four segments October 24, 1999. Its small intercession team prayed at fifty-seven atrocity sites in Western North Carolina in ten days.

"We are asking God to forgive iniquitous corporate sin against the Cherokees which occurred two hundred years ago," said Gene Brooks, who is coordinating the project.  "These things have never been brought to the Lord to ask His forgiveness for the way we whites committed genocide and ethnic cleansing against them.  For the first time I know of, a generation of believers is bringing these sins under the blood of Jesus."

The multi-cultural prayer team with a first-ever majority of Native Americans stood before the Lord at massacre sites, battlefields, and Trail of Tears concentration camps to forgive and repent on behalf of their peoples.  "We can't change the past," Brooks said, "but we can ask God to heal it."

White team member Amanda Trovinger of South Carolina was shaken.  "I have seen the barbaric cruelty my ancestors (and therefore myself) have inflicted on a race of people that are God's own."  Trovinger, however, was hopeful that this prayer journey would heal the Cherokee Nation to be"free to move forward and advance for the Kingdom's sake."

Randy Woodley of the United Ketoowah Band of Cherokees was encouraged.  "Time will tell, but my hope is that this prayer journey has broken curses and watered the land for future revival.  I dredged up my own sins of racism I would not have admitted otherwise," he said.  "The intercession allowed me to be freed up."

"From the first time my feet touched the land I realized how deep the pool of grief was," said Cree Native American intercessor Fern Noble of Ventura, CA.  "I feel like our prayer at the different sites dipped into this pool of grief and brought the tears cup by cup to God our Father."

The Cherokee Prayer Initiative is a prayer project of Mission Carolina in association with the International Reconciliation Coalition.