Crisis in Ivory Coast deepens

The former president of Ivory Coast
has until Sunday to concede defeat.

Yesterday, Mission Network News reported that the West African country of Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) continues to face a political standoff, concerning the results of a November presidential election.

The European Union has given Former President Laurent Gbagbo until December 26 to concede defeat or face sanctions. He has yet to yield power to the declared winner, former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara.

Gbagbo and Ouattara both claim to have won, but the African Union, the United Nations and other international observers have given Ouattara their endorsements and demanded the incumbent step down.

Already there are reports of protests, escalating violence, and the concern that the country is heading to full-scale civil war.

Earlier this month, Elizabeth Kendal, an international religious liberty analyst and advocate, wrote a prayer bulletin about the country for the Australian Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission. She writes that the stakes are extremely high.

“Decades of Muslim mass immigration has tipped the demographic balance so that Ivory Coast—officially around one-third Muslim—is now actually majority Muslim with immigrants from Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea comprising up to 40 percent of the population. Ivory Coast's non-Muslims are traumatised, fearing that their homeland—once a strategic Christian centre—is about to come under the political domination of Muslims. War threatens.”

Please pray specifically for God to:

• Give Ivory Coast's Christian leaders—pastors and politicians—great spiritual wisdom and authority.
• Bring revival to the Church in Ivory Coast so believers will be compelled to go out with the gospel in boldness, empowered by the Holy Spirit, so that Ivory Coast might be spiritually transformed.
• Intervene in the tense climate by interposing a spirit of restraint, compelling the people to seek a negotiated solution as a means of averting another destructive civil war—a war that would certainly attract international jihadists.

You can read the full prayer bulletin here.