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The line starts forming before six o'clock. Parents holding the hands of young children and some children alone are huddled on the sidewalk between a squarish, plain-faced brick faÇade and noisy Flatbush Avenue. By 6:30 everybody who is likely to get inside is in line, still waiting for the doors to open. But New Yorkers are used to that, even at church. And especially at the Brooklyn Tabernacle.

It's Tuesday night, and time for prayer meeting—the children's prayer meeting.

At 6:35, the doors open. Climbing the stairs to the vinyl-tiled upper room, the older children sign in and gravitate to the walls to draw and paint on large sheets of poster board. The theme is "harvest time." After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in nearby Manhattan, pastor Jim Cymbala told his congregation that while people are asking questions, the time is ripe for sharing the gospel. In a few minutes, the children will begin singing, then get down to the serious business of praying for the next two hours.

The younger children go downstairs to a basement room bright with fluorescent lights. They start singing immediately. Prayer for them will be interspersed with songs and stories, but this is not game time or babysitting. At first it seems like Sunday school, but it's not.

"Prayer is the hub of everything we do," says Nancy Martinez, director of Christian education. "It's not tacked on to other programs. Prayer is what we're here for."

The fisherman's prayer
This neighborhood was better known for pimps and winos than for prayer meetings when Jim Cymbala was called to pastor the Brooklyn Tabernacle more than 30 years ago. Today, the church's Grammy-winning gospel choir and its Tuesday night prayer meetings are known around the world. Cymbala has told the story in a series of books beginning with Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire (Zondervan, 1997)—how he told God, while sitting in a fishing boat on a brief respite, that he was ready to give up on the dying church he and his wife, Carol, had just taken on. There were only 20 regular attendees, most of them troubled and broke, and the church was just like them—troubled and broke. Cymbala wanted to quit.

The young pastor sensed God speaking in his heart: "If you will lead the people to pray and call on my name, you will never have a building large enough to hold the crowds I will send you."

So they prayed.

Every Tuesday night, the congregation gathered to pray for the church and the city, and especially for the salvation of their friends and loved ones. Fifteen people attended the first week Cymbala called for the meeting. Tuesday night became the heartbeat of congregational life, and the church soon understood that nothing would happen in Brooklyn apart from persistent, faith-filled prayer.

Today, attendance tops 10,000 in five weekend services, and the church is poised to relocate to a refurbished art deco theater a few blocks from their present location. And the lines are always long. For the adult prayer meeting, ushers bring out chairs and tell those in the row to scoot over and make room.

But what about the children?

Young warriors
Gina Boccabella is a cheerful, outgoing woman, but she is a little frustrated when her key doesn't work. "We changed the locks today, and I don't have the new key yet." She apologizes and rings the buzzer. Though the neighborhood around the church is much improved, security is still an issue. She rings again, looks up at a small camera, and waves. "If they're singing, they'll never hear us," she says.

In a few minutes, we're buzzed in. Gina was right. We find 40 preteens upstairs singing loudly. Attendance is limited to 40 in the 8- to 12-year-old group and 30 in the 5- to 7-year-olds. "We would like to have more children than that, but we just don't have room," Gina says. "We often had more than 100, but it was too crowded." If parents don't get their kids to the prayer rooms before they are filled, then the children stay with the parents at the adult prayer service.

Florencia is leading the singing, a mixture of kid's songs and choruses popularized by the famous adult choir. Her accent reflects her Caribbean heritage, and we almost expect her to punctuate the lyrics with an occasional mon! "This little light of mine, mon!" At the keyboard, a young pianist, Joseph, is following Florencia. The tempo is slow, but deep, with extra beats in some measures. Joseph keeps up with the meandering melody line.

Worship begins with prayer and between songs Florencia calls for volunteers to pray. One child raises a hand, then another. Their prayers are specific, and some are long.

"The younger kids are freer to worship," Michelle Manga whispers in the back of the room. "By this age (pre-teen), they're getting worried about peer pressure. 'Somebody's looking at me'—that kind of thing. Sometimes it take a little time to get them focused."

Michelle is a marketing executive. She has led the children's prayer meeting for nine years, on one of three adult teams who rotate leadership.

Tonight it takes about 45 minutes to get the group focused. But there is still plenty of time to pray. The prayer meeting is two hours or more, depending on how long the adult gathering lasts.

"Since September 11, we sense kids having emotional fears," Michelle says. "In the weeks after the attacks, some were very stable; some were all up and down. One girl's mother works in Manhattan and she's scared every time her mother goes to work."

Michelle is interrupted by three boys holding a poster. "Great birds!" she tells them. "When I read that part of the Scripture, you hold up the birds. Those are the birds who will eat up the seed," she explains.

Michelle is teaching the parable of the four soils. "This is harvest time," she tells them later. "You have to focus: who is in your classroom, or a cousin at home, or maybe an unsaved mother or father. This is your time to labor. We've prayed for them. Now it's time to share the gospel. You're not too young."

"You're not too young" is a mantra in these rooms.

Keeping it real
"God uses children in prayer," asserts Stephanie McCree. She cites Psalm 8:2 as a key verse in their ministry: "Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger" (NRSV).

	"They're prayer warriors, strong soldiers for the Lord. Some people think children are too young to pray about serious things, but we need the children to pray," Stephanie says.

Nancy Martinez says that that understanding is foundational to their children's ministry. "People have to be retrained in how they think about children," Nancy says. "Their prayers will shake heaven and they will rearrange Satan's kingdom."

Nancy doesn't like it when people call the children's prayer meeting cute. "They're not cute. They're powerful and dynamic. It's the prayer of faith God is looking for, whether you're 8 or 80."

Her phone rings often as leaders in children's ministry ask the secret to the Brooklyn Tabernacle's children's prayer ministry. It's not format, she insists, but vision: "The workers need not just a heart for children but they need to know that God will work through children just as he does through adults."

Nancy saw the power of prayer in the first meeting with the children they held after the destruction of the World Trade Center. The adult leaders clustered with the children, four or five in a group, and prayed for the victims, their families, and the president. (Four members of the church family were lost in the attacks.)

"I was amazed by the purity of their prayers," Nancy says. The children expressed their own fears, but they were not angry or vengeful. "One young girl insisted that we pray for Osama bin Laden. She said, 'We have to pray for him to be saved.' And she led us in that prayer."

Michelle often encourages the children to pray about trials of city life. "I didn't have half the problems these kids have today—schools are rougher, neighborhoods have changed, people aren't as friendly now."

That sounds odd coming from a New Yorker, but her telling of their needs is borne out by the children's requests that night: A father is coming home from prison and the pre-teen boy doesn't feel good about it. A girl is living with her grandmother, and now the grandmother has cancer. One boy is in trouble at school, and he knows he caused the problem.

"They're very honest in their prayers—more honest than adults," Michelle says. "Adults aren't going to say some of these things out loud.

"We teach them there's no judging in what they're praying for. Just bring it to God."

One boy asked for prayer for his mother and another relative who shared their house. They were feuding again, and their battles were known to be months long, ugly, and dangerous.

"We prayed for these two women and for the boy," Stephanie recalls. "He came back the next week and reported that the women had forgiven each other and made up. We were amazed—well, the adults were. That had never happened before."

It's not magical
Michelle is careful not to make prayer a magical thing. "Sometimes a child will say, 'I don't feel God is listening to me.' They're praying about very big things, and their time frame is short— they're kids. But we explain that God has his time frame, and whatever happens, God is in control."

That lesson is a hard one at any age. Michelle addressed it recently when a boy with autism and his mother visited the older children's prayer meeting. The boy sat quietly for a while and the group paid him little attention. Later he had an emotional outburst. Some children giggled. Some demanded to know what his problem was. The boy's mother rushed him from the room, but he wanted to stay close enough to listen. They sat on the landing at the top of the stairs, just outside the door.

Inside, teacher Michelle explained that the boy was autistic, but it was one of their own who chided the gigglers.

"My cousin is autistic," a ten-year-old girl said. "We've been praying for him for a long time. God hasn't changed him, but we still pray for him and for his family."

Michelle seized the opportunity. "We can pray for the person who has a disease, and we can also pray for those who take care of them," she explained.

In a few minutes, they asked the boy's mother to come back into the room. "The children gathered around her and laid hands on her," Michelle says. "There were tears that night."

If a child has a need they don't want to verbalize, a leader will step outside the room and discuss it with the child. Then the child chooses another child to pray for them. Michelle says some of the same boys and girls are chosen regularly. "Kids know who can pray."

Patrick was frequently called on by his peers. Now 13, he graduated from the children's prayer meeting, but sometimes Patrick comes back to help.

"We gave him an award in recognition of his growth as a prayer warrior," says Stephanie, who taught Patrick for six years. Each adult leader tells of a particular child or two whose prayer life is remarkable. All are on a first-name basis with Jesus.

This night an older girl takes the microphone and prays for some of the requests, then a younger boy. There is a little shuffling at first and some peeking at the strangers in the room. Ray, one of two adult men present, takes a cue from Florencia and sits beside a squirmy boy. Soon the only sound heard is the youngster praying.

Why it works so well
"I still hear from two girls who were in the very first group we had," Nancy says. "Both are active in their churches. One is married to a pastor."

That first group was in 1981. The children's prayer meeting started after a week of Vacation Bible school. Pastor Cymbala had asked Nancy to schedule the parents' night ceremony on Sunday night. Former gang leader, now evangelist, Nicky Cruz was the guest speaker. While the adults listened to Cruz's testimony, Nancy took the children, more than 100 of them, next door to watch a Christian movie.

"I felt very strongly during the movie that God wanted the children to pray. After the movie, I said, 'Some of you who want to pray can come with me. Not everyone will want to, and that's okay, but if you do, come with me.' "

A dozen children joined Nancy in another room. They knelt and began praying. "The prayers from those children were amazing. Many were praying for their parents who were in the sanctuary, praying for their salvation and their homes. For half an hour we all prayed. I knew then the children should be praying as the adults were."

Their prayers touched the young woman deeply. A Christian only a few years at the time, Nancy knew prayer's power had broken the occult bondage in her own home. Her mother had been a spiritist until Nancy and her sister began praying for her.

Nancy searched for leaders for a children's prayer meeting for two months. No one had her burden. Exasperated, she complained to the Lord. He said, "Didn't I tell you the children should be praying?" She laughs when she retells it.

The children's prayer meeting grew rapidly over the next year under Nancy's direction. She found and developed leaders who embraced her calling to children and to prayer. That commitment changed the children's ministry of the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Every prayer time is a teaching opportunity, and every teaching time is also time for prayer.

"We don't just teach about prayer. We pray. And that's how we encourage the children to take the next step in their walk with the Lord," Nancy says.

For some children, prayer becomes a pre-evangelistic tool. "If they pray, they will get closer to the Lord, and for many that leads to their own salvation."

A lima bean grows in Brooklyn
The adults' prayer meeting is ending. Parents eager to start their bus and subway trips home wave at the security camera and the buzzer sounds insistently.

The younger children each receive a teddy bear this night, some of the thousands collected for children affected by the terrorist attacks. These, the surplus, have been labeled "prayer bears." A list of requests related to the attacks is pinned to each one, and the children are urged to pray every night for families of victims and for New York.

The older children are hurriedly completing their planting project to remind them of the story of the soils. Prayer time ate up craft time. The result is a three-minute melee that produces for each child a Dixie cup of rocks, dirt, and seeds, and the promise of a green shoot in a month or two.

Week after week, the real planting, nurturing, and reaping of young committed prayers will continue. After 20 years, Nancy Martinez's original vision has not wavered: "It's awesome to hear the children pray."

A Christian Reader original article.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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