Crazy White Lady - Carole Ward
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Carole Ward’s life was marked from the beginning by a legacy of missions, courage, and unwavering faith. Her grandparents served as missionaries in China for three decades, befriending Christian leader Watchman Nee and enduring imprisonment during the communist invasion of Shanghai. Her parents continued that legacy, spending 48 years as missionaries in the jungles of the Philippines with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Carole grew up among remote villages and even the children of Islamic terrorists, witnessing firsthand both danger and the transforming power of the Gospel. When terrorists placed a price on her father’s head in 1975, her family refused to retreat, modeling the fearless obedience that would later define Carole’s own calling.
As a young girl, Carole devoured missionary biographies and longed to pour out her life for others. After returning to the United States for college, she became a nurse, married, raised children, and fostered many more. Yet the call to missions continued to burn within her. In 2002, a short trip to Kampala, Uganda stirred something deeper—three weeks were not enough to make the impact she longed for. Her prayer became bold and simple: “Lord, send me where no one else wants to go.”
Soon after, a missionary she barely knew asked her to run his Bible school in Uganda for a year. She accepted after months of prayer, only to be dropped at the campus with the words, “There’s the school. There are the students. Goodbye.” While she served faithfully, her heart was drawn northward to the war‑torn Gulu district, where stories of terror from Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) reached her daily. When her year ended, she returned to the U.S. only long enough to prepare to go back—this time to Northern Uganda. The American Embassy warned her not to go, telling her she would likely return “in a body bag.” Carole went anyway.
Arriving in Gulu, she was dismissed by the military as “the crazy white lady,” but she refused to leave. She lived in a bullet‑riddled house and hung a sign reading “House of Prayer.” People soon filled it, seeking comfort, healing, and hope. As she listened to their stories—children abducted, families butchered, women forced to watch their children beheaded—Carole wept with them, prayed with them, and loved them. Her compassion earned trust in a region devastated by decades of violence.
Carole and her growing team waged both spiritual and practical warfare: prayer chains, trauma counseling, discipleship programs, Bible schools, and an orphanage. Miracles multiplied, and so did opposition. One young man, Okelo, eventually confessed he had been sent to kill her—he was Joseph Kony’s nephew—but said God would not allow his finger to pull the trigger. He gave his life to Christ and became a loyal supporter.
Out of this movement, Favor International was born. Today, the ministry operates in eight nations, training over 100,000 people annually, seeing more than 10,000 new believers each month, distributing over 100,000 Bibles a year, and sending more than a thousand indigenous missionaries into some of the hardest places on earth.
Carole Ward’s life stands as a testimony to what God can do through one person who refuses to fear and simply says yes.
