NGU students make an impact through PRAY
Emily Gissendanner, Contributing Writer
Photo Credit Emily Gissendanner
Take my hand, we’ll make it I swear. One group of NGU students is living on a prayer.
Each Monday from 7-7:30 p.m., students gather in the Joyful Sound Conference Room to pray as one body. The new group is an outreach of the Baptist Student Union (BSU) ministry.
Eden Crain, a freshman Christian Studies major, attended the first meeting in March. “We gather together as Christ’s body to pray as one for our campus, for our nation, for refugees, for missions, for slave trafficking, and for this world,” she said.
Upon entering the room, students are given handouts with a specific framework for how to pray for the week’s topic; prayers for comfort, safety, revelation.
Christmas lights cast a soft glow over the scene: about 40 students clustered in intimate circles. Bodies are made prostrate on the colored rugs and heads are bowed in reverence.
A sea of voices fills the room. The cries to God flood out of the open doors and into the hall. The experience is overwhelming and filled with the spirit of God.
These meetings are the result of student initiative and leadership. Jon Kesey, an intercultural studies major, led a small prayer gathering after BSU last school year. He was inspired to expand the group after attending a conference with his church. “At the conference, David Platt was speaking and said something that really struck me, ‘Prayer is the currency of God’s economy,’” Kesey said, “All of a sudden I felt called to completely revamp the focus and the direction of the small group that was gathering after BSU.”
Kesey enlisted the help of BSU Director Jody Jennings and his classmate Laura Stephens to spark more prayer on campus. “We quickly decided to name it what it was, PRAY,” said Kesey, “More and more people are saying they love it and are grateful for the opportunity to come out and just pray as a body for the things of God’s kingdom.”
Sophomore Morgan Bryant is one of the students that has been impacted by this time of prayer. “At first I thought, ‘No, I have homework. I don’t have time for that,’” Bryant recalled, “But then I was reminded that the God who made the Heavens and the Earth died for me. And I’m so undeserving of that and I cannot offer Him anything that He deserves; but the least I can do is spend thirty minutes to pray for His people.”
In addition to weekly meetings, the group gives students outlets to serve in the community. Many are already working with refugees and other ministries and present opportunities for students to become involved.
Most Christians can recall a time when prayer made an observable difference in their lives. A CNN poll from 1996 found 82 percent of Americans believe prayer can cure serious illness. A 1995 survey by the Journal of American Medical Association found that 43 percent of American doctors prayed for their patients.
In one 1988 study published by Randolph C. Byrd in the Southern Medical Journal, a group of coronary heart disease patients were divided into two groups. One half was prayed for; the other was not. The patients did not know which group they were in. A significant number of those who received prayer needed less intubation, fewer drugs, and were less likely to develop pneumonia.
Another similar study in Paris sampled of 120 terminally ill patients and found that those who were prayed for lived 4 months longer on average than the other group. Five of the terminally ill patients in the prayer group survived.
The realness of the power of prayer has been measured both in these studies and in the personal testimonies of Christians. Stephens, an English major, says“Our hope is that PRAY will create a domino effect in which NGU students are fervently praying on their own time as well.”
God listens to His children, as stated in 1 John 5:14, “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.”
All students are welcome to attend PRAY. The group meets every Monday at 7 p.m. in the Joyful Sound Conference Room.
