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A Prayer for Our Nation piece has in recent years come to be attributed to venerable evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham, and before that it was circulated as Paul Harvey's Prayer (or Paul Harvey's On Air Prayer). However, it was neither written nor first presented by either of those men: This prayer burst into the public consciousness back in January of 1996, when the Rev. Joe Wright, senior pastor of the 2,500-member Central Christian Church in Wichita, was invited to deliver the opening prayer at a session of the Kansas House of Representatives. On that occasion he offered the following Prayer of Repentance (which was not entirely of his own crafting but rather was a version of a prayer written in 1995 by Bob Russell, who had offered it at the Kentucky Governor's Prayer Breakfast in Frankfort): Rev. Wright had been invited to serve as the Kansas House's guest chaplain by Rep. Anthony Powell, a Wichita Republican who was also a member of Wright's church. Accordingly, Rev. Wright read the prayer at the opening of the legislature on 23 January 1996 and then departed, unaware of the ruckus he had created until his church secretary called him on his car phone to ask him what he had done. Reportedly, one Democrat walked out of the House in protest, three others gave speeches critical of Wright's prayer, and another blasted Wright's message of intolerance. House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer (also a Democrat) asserted that the prayer reflects the extreme, radical views that continue to dominate the House Republican agenda since right-wing extremists seized control of the House Republican caucus last year. Rep. Jim Long, a Democrat from Kansas City, said that Wright made everyone mad. But Rep. Powell, who had invited Wright in the first place, claimed that House Democrats were only trying to make political points with their criticism and affirmed that he supported the theme of the prayer. Rev. Wright said afterwards: I certainly did not mean to be offensive to individuals, but I don't apologize for the truth. His staff stopped counting the telephone calls about the prayer that came in from every state and many foreign countries after the first 6,500 or so. Wright appeared on dozens of radio shows and was the subject of numerous television and print news reports in the aftermath of his appearance at the Kansas House of Representatives, and his prayer stirred up controversy all over again when it was read by the chaplain coordinator in the Nebraska legislature the following month. Wright later explained: I thought I might get a call from an angry congressman or two, but I was talking to God, not them. The whole point was to say that we all have sins that we need to repent — all of us ... The problem, I guess, is that you're not supposed to get too specific when you're talking about sin. What to make of all the fuss? Syndicated religion columnist Terry Mattingly probably explained it best when he wrote: The easy answer is that he read a prayer about sin. The complicated answer is that Wright jumped into America's tense debate about whether some things are always right and some things are always wrong.
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