by Dennis Gruending

The Ottawa-based National House of Prayer (NHOP) is organizing a National Prayer Sunday for our government and its leaders on June 29. You may not have heard of the NHOP or its prayer list so I will take a brief look at both. You may be surprised – but first a brief bit of history.

Rob and Fran Parker are a couple from British Columbia who say they felt God calling them to set up a house of prayer in the capital. Mr. Parker has a long association with an organization called Watchmen for the Nations, and after a gathering of the group in 1996 he organized a prayer-walk from Calgary to Ottawa. In 2004, the NHOP purchased a former convent not far from parliament hill for $900,000. They’ve added staff and volunteers and regularly host groups, including youth, from across the country to engage in formation as prayer leaders. NHOP personnel appear to have ready access to parliament hill. They attend question period, sit in at committees and lead prayer meetings. They were invited by the National Prayer Breakfast in 2007 to participate in a workshop following the meal, and the publicity for this year’s event invited people to an NHOP open house.

Each week on its website the NHOP asks people to offer prayers on a variety of issues and for individuals in public life, and the group also posts other prayer requests and observations on a blog. The most prayed for piece of legislation in 2008 has been MP Ken Epp’s Bill C-484 (The Unborn Victims of Crime Act), which would create a separate offence for killing or injuring a fetus during an attack on a pregnant woman. The bill has passed second reading in the House of Commons and has been sent off to a committee for examination. It is controversial because many believe that if passed the bill could be used as a wedge to re-criminalize abortion. The NHOP blog posting on April 30 talked about “practical things” that could be done to support Epp and his bill. These included praying, organizing a national fast, signing a petition of support on Epp’s website, and writing handwritten letters to MPs in support of the Bill C-484.

Earlier in 2008 another blog entry requested prayers for passage of Bill C-2, the federal government’s anti-crime bill. Yet another recommended prayers that a conservative jurist be appointed to replace Mr. Justice Michel Bastarache, who has announced his retirement from the Supreme Court of Canada. The same blog entry expressed approval that the court appears to be turning back a growing number of charter cases.

Another entry requested prayers for “a total overhaul or abolition of the current human rights councils in this country” and referred readers to conservative pundit Ezra Levant’s articles for further information. The case provoking the prayer request involves a human rights complaint into comments made about Muslims by writer Mark Steyn in Macleans magazine.

The NHOP website is also requesting prayers for the success of an event called The Cry, which is to be held on parliament hill on August 23rd.  The website says: “Let’s intercede that thousands of believers will attend this wonderful event.” Similar youth rallies were held in 2002 and 2006 to dramatize concern about what organizers described as the moral and social decline in Canada. Guest speakers at those rallies included the Parkers from NHOP and David Demian, head of Watchmen for the Nations. Demian and his organization are dedicated supporters of the Israeli government and its policies.

Where does NHOP fit into the wider picture? In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen in January 2006, the Parkers describe the prayer house as a registered charity that welcomes Christians of all denominations. They say it is not an advocacy group and does not endorse political parties. The Citizen article also says that the NHOP “has the financial backing of churches and religious organizations with links to the grassroots evangelical groups that helped Stockwell Day defeat Preston Manning in the 2000 Canadian Alliance leadership race.”

The NHOP exists within a charismatic and Pentecostal movement known for its emotional and enthusiastic forms of worship. NHOP also leans toward Christian reconstructionism – a belief that government and all of society must submit to the Bible’s moral principles. It may be this strong Biblical focus that explains an NHOP blog posting following a demonstration at the Chinese embassy this spring calling for a free Tibet. “Some of our prayers go in that direction,” the NHOP blog said. “However, on another level, our deeper cry in prayer is ‘Free Tibet!’ Free it from the centuries of spiritual darkness and oppression that the Tibetan Buddhist priests exerted over the people. Free them from the power of blinded obedience to the Dalai Lama.” This statement is particularly odd because the government named the Dalai Lama as honourary Canadian citizen in 2007, one of only four people ever to receive that distinction.

The NHOP is just one of a number of conservative Christian groups to locate in Ottawa within the past few years, a development that indicates the growing influence in Canada of the religious right.

By Dennis Gruending

 Citizens for Public Justice is an Ottawa-based church group with a difference. At a time when the word religion has come to be associated mainly with social conservatism, CPJ provides a Christian perspective regarding public policy debates on poverty, housing, aboriginal rights, immigration and the environment. At its annual meeting in Ottawa on June 9, CPJ invited John Hiemstra, a professor of political studies at The King’s University College in Edmonton, to highlight issues surrounding development of the Alberta tar sands. Hiemstra has spent a sabbatical year studying the boom from what he calls a public justice perspective, which he described as being “rooted in the Christian narrative of God’s good creation.”

The Prime Minister is a proponent of rapid tar sands development and Hiemstra quoted Stephen Harper as describing the project as “an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.” Harper has described Canada as an emerging “energy superpower.” Hiemstra also quoted Alberta premier Ed Stelmach as saying, “There’s no touching the brake. The economy, growth – that will sort itself out. We just want to make sure we’re globally competitive.”

The size of the project is astonishing, something that Hiemstra believes few Canadians understand in detail. He showed aerial photos of giant earthmovers working in open pit mines carved out of the boreal forest. Bitumen is scooped up and later hot water (heated by natural gas) is used to separate oil from the sand. Indeed, Hiemstra said that Alberta will have the world’s second largest dam, after Three Gorges in China, to provide the water needed for tar sands development. Northern Alberta contains the second largest petroleum reserves in the world (after those in Saudi Arabia) and the area to be mined is twice the size of New Brunswick. There was a gasp from Hiemstra’s audience when he showed aerial photos of toxic tailings ponds located immediately adjacent to the Athabasca River.

Hiemstra said that the existing model, which promotes development at all costs and relies solely on the market to dictate the speed and scope, is deeply flawed. That model submerges a host of important issues about climate change, air and water pollution, and the health, particularly aboriginal people in the area. Those issues, in turn, raise basic questions about the consumption and often-wasteful lifestyles that the project supports. Almost all of the refined product will be used for transportation purposes such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuels, and the major market is in the United States.

Hiemstra said that most often a “modernist” approach is taken toward problems associated with the development. The problems (everything from toxic tailings to high home prices and housing rental rates) are divided into small component parts to be studied.  All of those problems are assumed to be amenable to technological solutions. “ Most people don’t ask if the boom is a good thing to start with,” Hiemstra said. “Governments support it and hope for a technological silver bullet.” He said that what is needed is a “more integral and sensitive” analysis, one that he said Citizens for Public Justice has been using for many years. “We need alternative ways to focus debates about policy and action. We must question the deeper reality when dealing with concrete problems. We assume that God’s good creation should work and if it doesn’t we must dig deeper in examining the paradox.”

Hiemstra was once a Calgary-based staffer for CPJ, which arose from the merger of two organizations — the Alberta-based Christian Action Foundation and the Committee for Justice and Liberty based in Ontario. Both groups had Calvinist roots in the Dutch Reformed Church (now the Christian Reformed Church). Gerald Vandezande served as CPJ’s first staff person and until his retirement in 1999 he was a familiar figure representing the organization in public and the media and on many visits to Parliament Hill. A writer once described Vandezande as occupying the “soft liberal left” of the Calvinist tradition. Vandezande attended the June annual meeting in Ottawa along with about 50 others.

CPJ has developed a reputation over the years for providing excellent research and analysis and for being non-partisan in its approach. The organization is scrupulous in its relationships with MPs from all political parties but it can occasionally be daring as well. CPJ appeared before the National Energy Board (NEB) in 1975 to call for a moratorium on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, and in 1976 it went to court with other groups to disqualify the NEB chair from ruling on the issue on grounds of his perceived conflict of interest. The call for a moratorium became a major recommendation of the Berger Inquiry into the proposed pipeline. CPJ’s work on this and other public justice issues brought it into contact and alliance with other groups, broadening its experience and its base.

CPJ is membership-based and comprised of both individuals and organizations. Those members are now distributed among Christian Reformed, mainline Protestant, Catholic, and evangelical churches. Late in April CPJ’s board announced that Joe Gunn, an experienced Catholic and ecumenical activist, had been hired as its new executive director. Gunn’s hiring followed CPJ’s relocation last fall from Toronto to Ottawa so that CPJ could be closer to the federal political actors that it hopes to influence. One of CPJ’s major recent efforts is a campaign calling on Canada to create a poverty reduction strategy that includes an action plan along with measurable targets and timelines.