Thursday, May 2, 2024–1:26 p.m.
-Staff reports-
Thursday was the National Day of Prayer, and area residents gathered at the Forum River Center for the 2024 Rome Area Prayer Breakfast.
Drs. Paul and Cindy Shumpert, retired physicians and president and Vice-President (respectively) of the George Faile Foundation and Baptist Medical Center in Ghana, were awarded the 2024 Hugh Burnes Christian Service Award.
Since 1993, the Rome Area Prayer Breakfast has been a well-established part of our community.
This year’s gifted keynote speakers include international author Lee Strobel along with Roman Billy Neal Moore.
Atheist-turned-Christian Lee Strobel, the former award-winning legal editor of The Chicago Tribune, is a New York Times best-selling author of more than forty books and curricula that have sold over fourteen million copies in total. Currently, he serves as the Founding Director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University.
After probing the evidence for Jesus for nearly two years, Lee became a Christina in 1981. He subsequently became a teaching pastor at three of America’s largest churches and hosted the national network TV program Faith Under Fire. In addition, he taught First Amendment law at Roosevelt University and was a Professor of Christian Thought at Houston Baptist University.
The Christian Post named Lee among the top evangelicals who had made an impact in 2017. He was selected as one of the thirty most influential Christian thinkers of the past two millennia in the 2019 book Faith Thinkers, written by Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Jr.
In 2017, Lee’s spiritual Journey was depicted in an award-winning motion picture, The Case for Christ, which was shown in theaters around the world. Lee’s New York Times bestseller, The Case for Faith, features Rome native Billy Neal Moore.
Moore was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Georgia. Fortunately, his story doesn’t end there. After receiving Jesus as his personal savior, he spent the remaining sixteen years ministering to others on death row while awaiting execution. He came within mere hours of being executed. This is a powerful story of a man’s redemption through God’s grace and mercy. Today, Billy is an ordained minister who speaks to inmates about an act of forgiveness that saved his life.
The purpose of the Prayer Breakfast, which has been an annual event since 1993, is to unite area Christians to pray for the nation, the community, and families.