c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Before the Southern Baptists arrived in Salt Lake City for their annual convention earlier this summer, they had each Salt Lake Valley resident in their prayers.

Literally. Name by name.

Thanks to a blend of high technology, telephone listings and evangelistic fervor, thousands of Baptist churches were praying for neighborhoods of the mostly-Mormon Salt Lake City metropolitan area.

Meanwhile, in New York City, leaders of Concerts of Prayer Greater New York believe their efforts bringing people together for prayer have contributed to the sharp decline in the city’s crime rate.

And in Colorado this fall, the World Prayer Center will become the”nerve center”of prayer requests for crises across the globe.

A nationwide corporate prayer movement that has slowly developed among evangelical Christians within the last two decades is now taking on a new and broader dimension, changing in some ways not only how people pray but what they pray for. In many cases, the aim of the new-style prayer is traditional evangelism. But it also offers as a byproduct a sense of unity among people from a variety of denominations who come together to pray.

Organizers also say their focus on specific rather than general world concerns gets more answers from God and helps build the faith of the prayerful.”For the most part, Christians have been fairly … meek and passive about prayer,”said Chris Cooper, president of the Kansas-based Mapping Center for Evangelism and the designer of the CD-ROM that allowed Southern Baptists to pray for everyone in Salt Lake City.”I think that the Lord would want us to be proactive and aggressive in praying his word and … helping to establish his kingdom through cooperative effort,”Cooper added.

To describe Cooper’s”Kingdom Combine”CD-ROM project as specific is an understatement. Not only does it help churches learn the names of their neighbors, it gives demographic information by zip code. Income levels, racial and ethnic make-up, marital status and age groups are all available at the click of a button.”It helps you to have a sense for what are the needs of the people in this neighborhood,”said Cooper, whose Mapping Center was established last year by a consortium of evangelical ministries.”If you find out there’s a high percentage of divorced couples in this neighborhood, then that helps you know how to pray.” Close to 500 Christian ministries have paid $250 each for an annual membership with the center, whose officials hope their efforts will help achieve a long-declared goal of evangelicals to spread the gospel to every person by the end of the year 2000.

While this particular effort focuses on neighborhoods, the prayer movement also has regional dimensions.

For example, Concerts of Prayer Greater New York has sponsored an effort called”The Lord’s Watch,”a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year prayer vigil with more than 100 participating churches in the New York City metropolitan area.

The cross-denominational, interracial New York organization is an offshoot of Concerts of Prayer International, a New Jersey-based group that holds prayer gatherings uniting churches in cities across the country.

Leaders credit their corporate prayers with not only contributing to a drop in the area’s crime rates but with moving clergy to work together on efforts ranging from joint Communion services to job development programs.”The biblical nature of prayer is being rediscovered,”said the Rev. McKenzie”Mac”Pier, president of Concerts of Prayer Greater New York.”Eighty percent of prayer in the Bible is corporate not private.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

He cites passages from the prophetic book of Isaiah to Revelation and notes a particularly well-known section of the Gospels:”Even if you look at the Lord’s Prayer, the use of the pronouns there are plural. It’s `Our Father.'” Pier said there’s a lot of work _ and money _ involved in mass mobilization for prayer. His organization, sometimes struggles to get grassroots leaders to understand why it must raise $400,000 a year to coordinate events that attract about 10,000 people.”It doesn’t cost anything to pray, but it costs everything to bring people together,”he said.

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While celebrating the blossoming movement, Jonathan Graf, editor of Pray! magazine, wonders if people will tire of praying for certain things if they don’t get the expected answers.”If this whole movement isn’t of God, within another year or two, it will ebb,”predicted Graf, who started chronicling and encouraging the movement with his bimonthly publication in May 1997.”We can only sustain it on enthusiasm so far.” But, he added,”I really believe it’s of God because I don’t think this many people would be on the same page in prayer if it wasn’t. … This whole thing with prayer is bringing a real unity across denominational lines and I certainly don’t think that’s man-orchestrated.” Graf cites Pray USA!, an effort to get people to follow a 40-day calendar for synchronized prayer in the spring, and a three-day”Fasting and Prayer”event in the fall as examples of initiatives that have unified Christians in recent years.

University of Akron sociologist Margaret Poloma isn’t so sure the movement is here to stay.”I almost see this as a flash in the pan,”she said.”This, too, will pass.” Although it may be the latest fad among evangelicals, Poloma said people find a sense of camaraderie when they gather for joint prayer efforts.”What it tells me is how much people are hungering,”she said.”Somehow this hunger for the spiritual isn’t necessarily being met in … the churches they’re going to.” While some efforts in the prayer movement are well under way, another is about to be launched.

The World Prayer Center will open its doors Sept. 19-20 in Colorado Springs, Colo. The $7 million complex will receive and dispatch prayer requests from around the world. Monitors connected to the center’s computer and telecommunication system will allow”on-site intercessors”to get up-to-date information on specific groups and their prayer needs.”It will become the spiritual nerve center, we feel, of the Christian world for the immediate future because it will be tied into so many nations with so much information,”said Dwayne Black, general manager of the center.

As Black envisions it, people from around the globe will call in prayer requests for”unreached”groups who haven’t heard the gospel and for ministers arrested for trying to bring it to them. Center dispatchers, in turn, will pass along the information through phones, e-mail and faxes to millions of Christians who can pray for the particular petitions.

Specific prayers are key, Black and others believe.”There’s been a revolution in what prayer does and in the intercessory prayer movement,”said Black.”We have found by experience over the years if we pray … to God for a certain, specific thing, we get a specific answer. If we pray generally, sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.” Poloma, who has studied personal prayer with pollster George H. Gallup Jr., said evangelicals are more likely than non-evangelicals to use the petitionary form of prayer, where they pray for material things. But she’s not ready to reach Black’s conclusion specific prayer is more effective than general talks with God.”I think both are valid forms of prayer … and I wouldn’t even know that one is better than another,”she said.

But evangelical leaders like Toby Frost are convinced specificity is the way to pray. Frost, manager of event evangelism for the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board and a board member of the Mapping Center, thinks the center’s approach to prayer helped Baptists reach more Utahans during the evangelistic event Baptists call Crossover.”By the time we came to Crossover, there had been whole churches of people praying for each individual address,”he said.”Rather than random praying, shot-in-the dark praying, we have a strategic plan to saturate a city with prayer.”

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