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"We don't have much time, but we can set aside one hour per week to pray for our kids."

It's a sultry mid-August afternoon, and Ruth Hilden, like millions of moms across America, is running around town, trying to get her kids ready for another school year.

A trip to the mall to buy some new clothes for daughter Carrie, a high-school sophomore? Nope. A stop at Wal-Mart to pick up notebooks and Nikes for son Peter, an eighth-grader? Well, not yet.

First things first. Hilden will get to the shopping list soon enough. But on this particular day, she has a higher priority: She's going to pray for her kids.

So Hilden, a 50-year-old homemaker from Rockford, Illinois, hops into her old station wagon and drives a few miles to a friend's house, where she joins six other women for a noon prayer session. They gather around Stacy Wells's dining-room table and spend much of the next hour praying for something unique: a high school.

"Welcome," Hilden tells a friend, "to Moms in Touch."

These women--who pray for nearby Jefferson High, where they all have children--make up one of approximately 30,000 groups that Moms in Touch International (MITI) boasts worldwide. In addition to having prayer groups in every state in the U.S., the organization has members in such places as China, Egypt, Germany, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Romania, and Russia.

Whatever the language, they all share the same focus: All are moms committed to praying their kids through school.

It all started in 1984 when Fern Nichols, then a Canadian, grew concerned about her sons, who were about to enter junior high school. Nichols found another mother to join her in weekly prayer sessions for their kids and their kids' schools. And so Moms in Touch was born.

Nichols, who moved to California a year later, soon had a grand vision: She wanted to see a group of mothers praying for every school in America. At first, the movement grew slowly. But in May of 1988, when Nichols described Moms in Touch on a Focus on the Family nationwide radio broadcast, more than 20,000 women responded.

Ruth Hilden was one of those women. So in the fall of 1989, Hilden, a mother of four, started her own Moms in Touch group, meeting with several other women she says "were hand-picked by the Lord." Indeed, all of the group's original members, who had started out praying for their kids in elementary school, are still together.

"They're all very committed to prayer for their children," says Hilden. "That's why we've stuck together. We've just kind of moved up through the years. We started in elementary school, then moved on to junior high, and now we're still together as our kids are in senior high."

The Jefferson moms stay in touch with their target school in practical ways--like attending PTO meetings, volunteering as teacher's aides, working in the lunch room, and running concession booths at ballgames.

Hilden, now the coordinator for all MITI groups in the Rockford area, says she's committed to the concept of Moms in Touch "because prayer works. And because we're all scared enough of the public schools to get down on our knees."

Scared? Of what? "You name it," she says. "Curriculum. Racial issues. Peer pressure. Sex. Gangs. We're talking reality here."

Hilden says that through the years, her group has seen "fantastic answers" to prayer. She gives one example:

"We pray for safety, but sometimes the Lord lifts that protection and allows things to happen. Like last year, when one of the gal's sons broke his leg big-time in a football game. As his mom and dad were coming down the bleachers, a school administrator prayed with them before they went down on the field. On the field, one of the assistant coaches prayed with them while they waited for the ambulance--with the kid's teammates and the opponents standing right there.

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January 8 1996, Vol. 40, No. 1