Many of our major cities are dying. According to an article in The Hill, more than 2 million people have fled our biggest cities due to skyrocketing rents, rampant crime, migrant invasions, and fentanyl-fueled homelessness.
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Minneapolis, once a thriving, safe city I’d called home, is turning into a ghost town. Homeless camps there are overrunning parks where we used to take our kids to walk and play. When we visited last year and drove through our old stomping grounds, there was a somber pall hanging over the city. More and more businesses are moving out, and stores are being boarded up and abandoned.
New York City faces similar problems, with masses of migrants overwhelming the Manhattan sidewalks. Homelessness has exploded in Portland as well, with drug abuse being as common as the tents, trash, drug paraphernalia, and human waste that now line streets once thriving with commerce. In San Francisco, formerly popular tourist areas are no longer safe, because of drug-addicted homeless people looking for their next fix.
Similar fates have befallen Chicago, Denver (which has become overwhelmed by migrants after declaring itself a sanctuary city), Los Angeles, San Diego, and Seattle. Most of these cities are run by liberal politicians whose shortsightedness has created rapidly ballooning crises that would take decades to undo. Most of them also suffer from a critical shortage of police officers, who have fled either a not-so-subtle anti-police sentiment among elected officials, or liberal handling of the law that makes it impossible for them to do their job, or both. This has led to rising crime and a growing demand for fentanyl that has intensified the illegal opioid trade across our porous southern border, where drug cartels are becoming ever more violent in protecting their turf.
Why is this significant? Connect the dots between our stubbornly porous border, the thriving fentanyl trade, the rising crime rates, and the crowds of homeless people and migrants, kept in place by liberal city governments and dying cities, and you see a multifaceted approach to bringing America to her knees as a superpower. The death of our major cities is a key part of that plan, because, historically, big-city trade, commerce, industry, and finance are the backbone of a nation’s economy. The synergy of large amounts of highly skilled and educated people drives innovation, creativity, and development. Many of our dying cities are also state capitals in which policies are formed and decisions made that affect entire states.
This is not to disparage our rural areas. They, too, play vital roles in the nation’s economic stability. However, the destruction of our major cities can more rapidly bring the destruction of our national economy — and strip away our status as a superpower.
You’d think that no one in the world would want a weak America, since we fund and protect so much. Think again. China wants that, so it can have free rein in establishing itself as the only military and economic superpower and retake Taiwan. Radical Islamic countries want that because they consider the U.S. to be “the Great Satan” for embracing and exporting indulgence and for aligning itself with Israel. Russia wants a weak America because Putin’s nationalistic and imperialistic regime aims to restore Russia to its former glory, when all of Eastern Europe was under Soviet rule.
How We Can Pray
How do we pray with faith and wisdom when we see such vital parts of our nation crumbling around us? It boils down to praying for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence (1 Timothy 2:2). That carries God’s reward: For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 3–4). After all, He is the one who has instituted government authority in the first place: For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God (Romans 13:1).
This means that He appoints authorities but ordains us to pray for them so they will act in accordance with His will, which is, with regards to public life, threefold: peaceful and quiet lives; salvation; and knowledge of the truth for all men.
I can point to two cities where prayer has made a considerable difference in the past: Portland and Minneapolis. The churches in Portland united in prayer in the early 1990s to the point that they put signs up along the perimeter that read: “The Church in Portland welcomes you and invites you to worship at these locations” — followed by a list of churches underneath. Inspired by their example, Minneapolis united in prayer as well. Throughout the 1990s, the city saw annual concerts of prayer with turnouts numbering between 10,000 and 12,000, from some 400 churches, March for Jesus events, pastoral prayer gatherings, a seven-day Jericho Prayer ride along the perimeter of the metro area, and a burgeoning church prayer coordinators’ network. I was in the middle of much of that until the Lord moved me elsewhere in 1998. I don’t know what happened in these cities, but the collaboration stopped sometime after 2000, and the movements ebbed away. As united prayer ceased, evil moved in. Conservative governments were replaced by woke ones. Law and order eroded, and social ills abounded.
Putting all this together, I see two concurrent topics for prayer:
- Pray for God to touch and change or replace the city councils, administrations, and DAs currently in office. Changed hearts and opened eyes lead to shifts in policies. Pray that they return to God as the problems overwhelm them and they realize their need for divine wisdom. If pride persists, pray that the Lord will replace them with godly and wise leaders.
- Pray that God would stir His Church in our major cities to unite in prayer again and not stop until evil is driven out and God’s manifest presence touches and transforms their city.
God has ordained to win great victories through the prayers of His people. No crime rate, economic downturn, mass exodus, or influx of crime and drugs is too great for Him to overcome. Through it all, He aims to make people desperate enough to return to Him and find new life.
Our King of Kings, please institute councils and governments in our cities that will seek You for wisdom and transformation to turn life around — to rid the streets of crime and drugs, to end the cycles of addiction and the poverty of the homeless, and to cause businesses and residents to return and rebuild. Unite Your Church in desperate, hungry, victorious, and single-minded prayer to seek Your hand upon our cities so that many will come to salvation and to a knowledge of the truth, and so that peace will return. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Share your own prayers below for God to restore our cities through revival and reformation.
Remco Brommet is a pastor, spiritual-growth teacher, and prayer leader with over 40 years of experience in Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the U.S. He was born and raised in the Netherlands and pastored his first church in Amsterdam. He moved to the U.S. in 1986. He and his wife, Jennifer, live north of Atlanta. When not writing books, he blogs at www.deeperlifeblog.com and assists his wife as a content developer and prayer coordinator for True Identity Ministries. Jennifer and Remco are passionate about bringing people into a deeper relationship with Christ. Photo Credit: Ev on Unsplash.