Praying for the nation

Liberty’s Center4ME holds a month of prayer asking for healing of racial tension

For Liberty University’s Center for Multicultural Enrichment (Center4ME), the month of September has become a month of unity and awareness as the group sets out to collect 5,000 prayers by the end of the month to heal the racially tense and divisional climate of the U.S.

The initiative — named formally as “Praying Because It Matters” — was created to help students look at the recent Black Lives Matter movement through a biblical lens.

Jose Hernandez, associate director of the Center4ME and driver of the initiative, said the hope of the initiative is to bring issues that minority students deal with to the forefront of conversations while also praying to God that he would unite students despite
their differences.

“We want to show students that there is a way that we can bridge differences because this is simply beyond just a race issue,” Hernandez said.

“This is bias. This is stereotypes, and we want to make sure that in Christ, we are breaking all of these things down.”

“Praying because it matters” began in the beginning of September and ever since has struggled to stay on pace to reach its goal of 5,000 prayers by the end of the month.

To collect the prayers, students and staff of the Center4ME have handed out colorful fliers with a space for students to write down their prayers to God concerning ongoing racial disparities, the upcoming presidential election, or anything else that they feel the nation is at unrest with.

Currently, the Center4ME has only collected approximately 500 prayers with 16 days left until the end of the month.

In an effort to pick up the pace and collect more prayers in a short amount of time, Hernandez said the Center4ME has set tables in front of the library, student center and Vines Center before the start of Convocation to attract more students and raise awareness for their cause.

Hernandez hopes that once some students become aware of the initiative, they will urge their friends to fill out their own prayer fliers.

“We’re hoping that we can step it up a little bit more in the final days of the month,” Hernandez said.

“We want to make sure that we push this initiative, and we hope that other students and other departments will catch on to this vision.”

So far, students who have heard the pitch of the initiative have largely given positive responses, according to Hernandez.

Most students, he said, have been willing to fill out a flier with their prayer after hearing what the initiative aims to do, and some have asked for extra fliers to hand out to their friends.

Because the student body of Liberty is mostly Caucasian (68 percent, according to collegeboard.com), many minority students, such as Liberty senior Rakeem Robinson, said it is important that students share this initiative as much as possible.

“(Being a minority has) its own struggles and troubles, but this initiative has given me a way to communicate with my peers these are problems that they can help solve,” Robinson said.

“The one way we thought to do it is to pray about it because that is the way that we can impact the community the most.”

Throughout the U.S. in the past two years, accusations of police bias and racial hatred among politicians has sparked numerous Black Lives Matter protests throughout towns such as Ferguson, Baltimore and Dallas.

The protests have in some cases grown to be violent, with some protesters reducing to shooting at police officers, burning down buildings, and beating up bystanders.

The fear, Robinson said, is that some people may look at the violent actions of protesters as an excuse to not listen to the message of the movement.

Hernandez echoed this fear, but said he has hope that the Praying Because It Matters initiative will help both educate and inspire Liberty students to reflect upon the current racial division through the lens of a Christian worldview.

“There is all lives matter, black lives matter, blue lives matter, the presidential election, and we have the persecuted Church and world affairs,” Hernandez said.

“To these problems, we want people to seek justice, to love kindly, to walk humbly with our God, and to start bridging dialogue with full of kindness and compassion.”

At the end of the month, the Center4ME hopes to pin up all of the prayer cards they receive on the walls of their new office building on the second floor of the Montview Student Union.

According to Hernandez, it is another way that the Center4ME can advertise themselves on a larger scale and bring about awareness of their dedication to the minority student long after the month of September has ended.

Once the Pray Because It Matters initiative is over, Hernandez said the Center4ME is planning on rolling out more events to fully immerse students in the mission of their program.

“We want to teach people how to be more compassionate and place Christ before (their) views,” Hernandez said.

“Jerry Falwell used to say that if it’s Christian, it ought to be better. And for us, if we’re Christian, it should be better.”

Young is the news editor.