What if the Church covered KC in Prayer?
What if there was someone praying for the people of Kansas City every hour of the day, every day of the year? That’s the vision behind Kansas City Prays.
24/7/365
What if? What if churches across the metro banded together? What if people committed – really committed – to praying for the time slot they signed up for each month? What could happen?
To help engage area churches and foster a city-wide culture of prayer, ONE KC partnered with Kansas City Prays. Ultimately, ONE KC leaders hope prayer as a way of life extends beyond the Easter celebration of ONE KC next year and builds new bridges across cultural, denominational and regional divides.
We recently sat down with Gary Kendall, Chairman of Kansas City Prays, to learn more about the vision and story behind the movement. The following are excerpts taken from that conversation with.
Editor’s note: Some responses have been edited to condense the responses.
WITC: Where did the idea and vision for Kansas City Prays come from?
KENDALL: The idea originally was floated by Randy Frazee, lead teaching pastor at Westside Family Church and the leader of the ONE KC initiative. He shared with me that he envisioned a city-wide engagement in God’s Word in the spring of 2021, but really believed that if we were going to have a city engagement in God’s word that we needed to have it supported by 24/7/365 prayer.
WITC: Why Prayer?
KENDALL: One of the beautiful things about prayer is that it, on the one hand, prayer is its own reward because prayer is connection and communication with God. So, if nothing else happened, that would be enough. Prayer may be the supreme gift that God gives to His children. But out of prayer, many other possibilities happen. Probably the greatest thing that happens for us it that we seem to be able to know God better and capture His heart when we pray. So that informs everything else that we do. And then God--and this is amazing to me that He does this--but God listens to us and He cares about the things for which we pray! And so, the things we’re praying for and encouraging people to pray for are for Bible engagement, that crime would go down, for families to be strong, and we pray for revival in our country… there are nine things that we pray for that are listed on the Kansas City Prays website that we encourage people to pray for when they pray.
WITC: How have you seen people respond to prayer?
KENDALL: Seventeen churches [in Kansas City] have taken a day of prayer and many of them are doing that monthly. And seven other churches are participating at some level. But our primary goal is to build a culture of prayer and not just get every hour covered; because, if we build a culture of prayer, then churches and people will want to pray, and they’ll often probably fill every hour. So that’s our highest goal, really, to support churches in building a culture of prayer. The churches that have participated, have come back and said, “that was great, we loved it and we want to do it again.” So, they’re finding that the ability to focus on a day a month is a regular incentive in their church to promote prayer. Sometimes prayer can fall off the radar because we get so busy, but the fact that we have a day of prayer coming up highlights it and motivates people to make [prayer] a priority. If people were to look at the sign-up calendar at americaprays.org they would see that there are people praying every single day already, so there’s a lot of good momentum but there is also room for more.
WITC: With that “room for more,” what does it look like for churches to be involved? Is there room for individuals as well?
KENDALL: Our goal would be to have at least two churches committed to every day of the month. That way, we could be pretty sure that if someone from one church missed an hour, someone else would be covering it. Kansas City Prays and is in 17 states and over 40 cities. America Prays has recently given birth to World Prays. So now it’s in, I’m going to guess between 15- 20 countries. The founder Brian Alarid has a crazy big goal of seeing everyone in the world prayed for o every day, two churches pray, and every hour is adopted by a church member. But we’re also happy if individuals whose churches aren’t involved sign up. Another thing I should say is that some people wonder if they can take more than an hour. They’ll ask the question, “I know my church is praying on the first of the month, but is it okay if I go in and take other hours?” Our answer is always yes. There’s room for as many people who want to pray to pray.
WITC: Can you tell me the story behind Kansas City Prays?
KENDALL: America Prays is the sponsoring network of Kansas by name.
[America Prays began in New Mexico. When New Mexico Prays was launched] crime went down for two years in a row, and then there were literally hundreds of pastors and churches that took part in their gatherings and they were from all different denominations and that had never happened before. When they first started, Brian had contacted someone in city government to use a park for praying and was told “no we can’t let churches use parks.” But two years later, the same city government gave them a donation and became one of their biggest donors. The Chief of Police gave Albuquerque Prays credit for helping the crime to go down. He called them out specifically and said, “we believe it’s in part because of this.” They got pastors riding along as chaplains in patrol cars and other things like that. So, it went beyond just filling the days and hours with prayer and then it spread to other cities.
WITC: Anything else you’d like to add?
KENDALL: We know that there are several good prayer ministries here in Kansas City that do an excellent job with prayer and in no way would we ever want to compete with that. We look at this prayer ministry as complementary to the others because each one has a unique focus. Our desire, really, is to complement everything they’re teaching and see their ministries grow and thrive in as well. So, I always think of it as complimentary.
