Growing up in a small town in the Free State I know all about Praying for Rain.
The “Biddag vir Reën” was a regular – at least annual – occurrence in my town which depended a lot on the surrounding farms.
Not that Praying for Rain is new. It seems like across time people just didn’t have enough water. In 1 Kings 18:41-19:8 Elijah prays for rain; in four of the last eight years in Israel, the Chief Rabbinate has held prayer rallies for rain; and our own Queen Modjaji from Limpopo , the Rain Queen is believed to have special powers, including the ability to control the clouds and rainfall.
Blaming the Drought on the People of Cape Town
According to Groundup, “The causes of Cape Town’s water crisis are hotly contested. There is a drought, of course. But there are also other reasons brought up in the public discourse, particularly on social media, such as population and water demand growth, unreported agricultural use, invasive species sucking out water in catchments, poor planning and mismanagement of water supply system, and lack of foresight in development of new water sources.”
But blaming the drought on the residents of the Mother City for doing something to anger God, like charismatic Christian evangelist Angus Buchan suggested yesterday, smacks a bit of the utterings of Pat Robertson, ultra conservative USA Southern Baptist minister, media mogul and very rich guy who said about the tornadoes that ravaged the US Midwest in 2012 – “If enough people were praying, (God) would’ve intervened. You could pray. Jesus stilled the storm. You can still storms.”
Seems like this direct line to God includes a weather service aspect for both Robertson and Buchan.
God is not Happy with Cape Town
This pronouncement by Angus Buchan about the people of Cape Town came as he was announcing a national prayer meeting (or march) will be held in Mitchells Plain on March 24.
“God is not happy with Cape Town … It will rain when the people of the Western Province repent,” he said.
Mr Buchan has over half a million followers on Facebook and a vigorous Social Media presence.
Fake News
On 24 January a hoax message, ie Fake News appeared, purporting to be a call from him to Christians across South Africa to pray for rain. See Hoax Angus Buchan” message expected to spark mass prayer for rain.
The hoax message, claiming to be from Buchan, spread rapidly through Christian social media networks and the people took up the call for an hour of prayer from 1pm to 2pm on Wednesday,
Prayer of Faith
We do remember that at a prayer day in parliament on November 24 last year, Buchan prayed a prayer of faith, declaring that the Western Cape drought would be broken in March 2018.
