Carole Ward.

Carole was born into four generations of missionaries. Her mother was born in China, where Carole’s grandparents served for thirty years before the family was imprisoned in Shanghai and released as exchange prisoners of war. In 1960 her parents took the family into the Philippine jungle, where they served as missionaries for 48 years and Bible translators for 60.

Her grandmother, a New York intercessor, took young Carole street-witnessing and handed her the calling that would shape everything: prayer first.

Back in the United States, Carole married, earned a nursing degree, raised three daughters, spent twenty years as a therapeutic foster parent, opened a nursing center for Alzheimer’s patients, and served on her church staff.

In 2002, a three-week mission trip to Kampala, Uganda changed the direction of her life. By the end of 2003 she was principal of a Bible training center overseeing portable Bible schools across East Africa, praying the same prayer every night.

When Carole set her heart on the war zone of northern Uganda, the US Embassy warned her: “There is no chance for you to return to this country except in a body bag.” Ten organizations refused to send her. Her pastor answered differently: “What would Paul have done? Go. We will lay hands on you and send you in the Name of the Lord.”

Two widows pledged her monthly support. At the airport, her oldest daughter slipped a verse into her hand that she carries in her Bible to this day: “I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven” (Acts 26:19).

She moved to Gulu in 2004, in the middle of Joseph Kony’s war, the only Westerner in the region.

In Gulu she opened a House of Prayer, 7am and 7pm, seven days a week, and trained teams that carried the Gospel into the displacement camps of the North, where some fifteen thousand children walked into town each night to sleep under army protection.

She took the first four orphaned sisters into her own house. The children’s home that followed grew to thirty-three, with hundreds more helped outside it. Many of the children rescued from that war, now grown and healed, serve on Favor’s ministry staff today.

In December 2005, after forty days of mobilized prayer chains, more than a thousand people gathered in Gulu’s War Memorial Stadium for days of united, repentant prayer. Government officials later credited that gathering with paving the way to the end of the war. A former commander testified: “That is the exact time Kony came to me and told me the power had left him.”

From the beginning, the vision was never one missionary. It was an indigenous army. Favor’s work spread through trained national leaders: into Sudan from 2007, with national prayer gatherings in Juba in 2015 and 2019, and on into Chad and the surrounding nations.

The indigenous missionaries Carole trained now pray the prayer that titled her second book: “Lord, send us where no one else wants to go. Despite tribal wars, terrorism, bloodshed, and hazardous journeys, lead us to touch unreached people groups wherever they may be. Send us! We will go!”