AUBREY, Texas (BP)–A Baptist pastor concerned about the disappearance of several children in recent weeks has issued an appeal for believers to activate an “Angel Alert.”
Preston Harrison, pastor of Antioch Baptist Church, Aubrey, Texas, noted Dallas/Fort Worth law enforcement agencies and broadcast outlets undertake an “Amber Alert” when a child is reported missing.
“So why not an Angel Alert?” said Harrison. “I am suggesting that all believers, when they hear a report of a missing or abducted child to consider the Scriptures and call for the protection of God’s angels upon these children.”
The Amber Alert is named in the memory of Amber Hagerman who was kidnapped from her home in Arlington, Texas, in January 1996. She later was found murdered. Her abductor has not been found. But after her abduction, police and broadcast media designed the Amber Alert to alert people to the name and description of a missing child, as well as any pertinent details.
In recent days, the distinctive-sounding Amber Alert has been sounded with the abduction of 6-year-old Opal Jo Jennings from her Saginaw, Texas, home March 26. It was activated April 17 when 3-year-old Christy Ryno was missing from her mother’s Irving apartment. Police found her body in the Trinity River near Irving April 21 and it was identified as Christy’s the next day.
Harrison said the Amber Alert has helped in the rescue of many kidnapped children, but added “the law really can’t protect these children. I wondered what kind of protection we can call on, and God led me to Psalm 34:7: ‘The angel of the Lord encamps all around them who hear him, and delivers them … .’
“Then I read Psalm 91:9-15 which says God shall give his angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways. In their hands, they shall bear you up.”
Harrison went on to 2 Kings 6:15-17 which mentions a ring of fire around the prophet Elisha, and then to Matthew 18, where it says that angels “see the face of God.”
“I thought at first to ask people to pray a ‘ring of fire’ around these children, but my wife, Bonnie, suggested that we call this effort an ‘Angel Alert,’ so we did.”
He said as he watched the news reports about the abduction of Opal Jennings, he “looked at the people’s faces, and as I looked at them I remembered that this could have been my own family.” He recalled an incident in which his middle son — now a student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth — had become lost while riding his bicycle.
“We looked for several hours, and when we finally found him, he had fallen off and his hands were bloody and there were tears down his face. He told me that he was lost and he thought we would never find him,” Harrison said, choking up at the memory.
The pastor, who served bivocational churches in Oklahoma and Kansas before coming to Texas two years ago, said he felt overwhelmed for the families and knew that “many of the families who have lost children are not in church. We [the believers] are not praying for them because it is not our children who are missing.
“But it could have been our own children, and the Lord just put it on my heart to pray for them.”
Harrison said he at first thought he might seek to start a prayer chain, maybe to work through the state’s Baptist Building, but decided that would take too long when an emergency occurs.
“So I decided I needed to try to educate people, to get the word out, to help them know that when they heard an Amber Alert that they would immediately active their own Angel Alert,” he said.
He encouraged people, when they hear a report of a missing child — whether it is an Amber Alert in the Dallas/Fort Worth area or another report somewhere else in the state or nation — they begin to pray, right then.
“You don’t even have to close your eyes. You can pray with your eyes open as you drive down the road,” he said. “I believe God is waiting for believers to begin to seriously pray for these children and their needs. He is waiting on us to get serious and to claim the power of Christ.”
Harrison encouraged believers to pray for seven specific things when they hear a report of a missing or abducted child:
1) for the physical health of the child.
2) for protection from all kinds of abuse — sexual, mental and physical.
3) for the angels to put a “ring of fire” around the child.
4) for the family.
5).for the law officers.
6) that the kidnapper — if kidnapping is involved — will have a “confused mind” and will not be able to think about abusing the child or what direction to travel.
7) for the child’s quick deliverance.
“Then,” Harrison said, “call from one to three other persons to notify them and to alert them to the need of prayer.”
