NIEUW NICKERIE is the second largest city of Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), situated on the border with Guyana.

Officially a centre of Suriname's rice production, Nieuw Nickerie is also a centre for international drug traffic, smuggling and common urban maladies such as prostitution, substance abuse and violence. The city is approximately 94 per cent Hindu.

Christian efforts to evangelise the area over the past century and a half have been largely unsuccessful. Nieuw Nickerie has held the dubious reputation of being the Sin Capital of Suriname. It is commonly asserted that most of the country's demon-possessed people hail from there and, if they were not Nieuw Nickerie natives, they have been to the city and picked up their demons there!

In November, 1994, the majority of the city's pastors and church leaders gathered together for what was to have been a two day seminar in spiritual warfare presented by Cornerstone Ministries International. What happened no one except the Lord can claim credit for.

Responding to an invitation to pray for the city, the church leaders came forward to the altar that Saturday morning, and began to weep as they came. They fell into each other's arms, confessing sins of jealousy, backbiting and gossip, begging each other for forgiveness and freely forgiving those around them. They embraced, sobbed, and fell to the floor praying.

Before the hour was completed, several dozen lay people arrived at the building, expecting to participate in the second phase of the seminar: overcome by the sight of their pastors weeping and hugging on the floor, they, too, began to sob and soon there were almost a hundred people on the floor. Blacks and Javanese and a handful of Hindus, Roman Catholics, Pentecostals and Moravians all huddled together on the floor Praying.

After several hours, full of the Holy Spirit, scores of Christians left the building in teams of two or three, moved to simply walk the streets of a region of Nickerie called the Corantijn Polder (almost exclusively Hindu) - to pray for each house and family, to rebuke the power of any demonic forces they encountered and to talk to whoever would listen about Jesus. Three or four hours later, a sister burst back into the meeting area, crying, "Come, look at the fruit!" There, from both ends of the street, came a parade of several hundred Hindus.

One man, with a paralysed arm, complained that his prayers to Ram for healing, were worthless. Similarly, he complained, his prayers to Shiva were of no effect. "So what if I do pray to Jesus?" he said half-heartedly. As he pronounced that wonderful Name, his arm began to move. Now, not only a Christian, but an instant evangelist, he grabbed the microphone and began to demonstrate and shout the power of Jesus to the assembled crowd.

It was reported that more Hindus were won to Christ that night than in the previous 140 years of Christian missionary endeavour. Something was different about Nieuw Nickerie, thanks to the confession, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation that led to a unity in the body of Christ for the first time in the city's history.