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With millions of Christian believers holding mass prayer rallies worldwide, scholars and prayer-movement leaders are asking whether this development foreshadows church renewal on a global scale.

Many prayer-movement activists fervently assert their commitment to prayer will usher in a modern-day Great Awakening like the eighteenth-century event that revived the church in America. However, other Christian leaders and scholars are wary of such bold expectations.

Whether or not 1994's prayer movements are a warm-up for revival, few people dispute the tremendous growth in organized corporate prayer during the past ten years.

The June 25 March for Jesus, involving 12 million Christians in 179 countries, and the September 21 See You at the Pole campaign, with nearly 2 million high-school students, are two of the most visible recent manifestations of this expanding phenomenon, as millions of believers are expressing their Christian devotion through public prayer and witness.

According to David Barrett, a leading demographer of global Christianity, 160 million Christians worldwide are committed to daily prayer for revival and world evangelization. He estimates there are 1,300 global prayer networks and 10 million prayer groups that have revival on their agenda.

Prayer activists are using every conceivable vehicle to gather and pray together, such as all-night prayer vigils, round-the-clock prayer chains, and even electronic mail. David Bryant, executive director of Concerts of Prayer International, says that prayer gatherings can involve anywhere from a handful of people in a park to millions in dozens of nations linked up via satellite television.

"A prayer movement that greatly surpasses anything, perhaps in all of Christian history, is rapidly gaining momentum," says C. Peter Wagner, a church-growth expert at the Fuller Church Growth Institute, Pasadena, California.

PRECURSOR TO REVIVAL?

By one definition, a prayer movement is a large-scale, grassroots commitment to corporate prayer, crossing denominational, racial, and geographic lines, and that spills over into evangelistic activity. What has been striking about the current prayer movement is an unusual amount of cooperation and unity of purpose across different Christian faith traditions. Pentecostals and charismatics are joining mainline Protestants and Catholics in public prayer gatherings and agreeing to pray for conversions to Christ rather than conversions to Protestantism or Catholicism.

Some scholars, including church historian Richard Lovelace, argue that the prayer movement today could be a precursor to church renewal. Others are not so certain. "As a much-burned historian, I get nervous with modern cause-and-effect explanations of revivals," says Mark Noll, professor of history at Wheaton College (Ill.) and author of A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. "I don't want to dampen enthusiasm, but we can't predict what can happen."

Darryl Hart, librarian and associate professor of church history at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, believes a connection between prayer and revival is too simplistic. That kind of analysis, he says, "neglects the sociological issues that could influence revivals." Among these issues are changing economic circumstances, the ebb and flow of cultural trends, and evangelical Christianity's distinctive appeal to individualism. Hart explains that evangelicalism's call to a personal decision for Christ is tailor-made for a society caught in the whirl of social and economic change.

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November 14 1994, Vol. 38, No. 13