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The National Prayer Breakfast Is Cutting Ties With “The Family”

The National Prayer Breakfast Is Cutting Ties With “The Family”

The National Prayer Breakfast is undergoing a major change in management.

The International Foundation, a Christian group commonly known as “The Family,” which had been responsible for organizing the event, will no longer be involved.

The announcement comes after scandals involving The Family have come to light in recent years, detailed in a 2019 Netflix documentary called The Family. The organization has been accused of meddling in foreign affairs and using the National Prayer Breakfast as a way to network with lawmakers and policy changers to push their own agenda. In fact, the gathering grew so big that guests were caught bringing in Russian spies, leading the government to address the situation at hand.

In its place, the 2023 breakfast will be coordinated by the newly created National Prayer Breakfast Foundation.

According to former Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, who serves as the board president of the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, the decision to create a new organization was made following numerous meetings in 2022 surrounding the controversy of The Family’s involvement.

“As with many other things in our country, the COVID years allowed the Members to hit the reset button and organize a working group to fulfill this longtime vision,” Pryor stated.

Unlike past versions of the breakfast, which were traditionally held in a large hotel ballroom with hundreds of attendees from all over the world, the new version of the gathering will only include members of Congress and their invited guests.

Pryor said the breakfast will be the new organization’s only event and he anticipates that around 200 to 300 participants will attend, bringing along a spouse, significant other or religious leader. The breakfast will also be different in format: instead of a full, sit-down affair, attendees will be offered bagels, coffee and tea before they take their seats in an auditorium at the Visitor Center in the U.S. Capitol.

Pryor shared that he expects President Joe Biden to attend and called the plans “a little bit of a back-to-basics movement.”

“That’s what Congress wants, they want to take it back to its origins and in the early days it really was just the Congress and the president,” said Pryor.

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