Lausanne World Pulse – Urban Articles – Greater New York and the Five Boroughs: Prayer, Part 2

By Mac Pier
July 2009

The Church of New York City at Prayer
Three distinct centuries of prayer have had an impact on New York City. In the eighteenth century Theodorus Frelinghuysen led the Reformed Church into seasons of revival through his preaching in 1727 in New Jersey. Across the Atlantic, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, of the Moravians in Germany, launched Hernnhut in 1727 (the Lord’s Watch), a 100-year prayer meeting that thrust three hundred missionaries out around the world—many to America. You cannot understand American Protestantism apart from Count Zinzendorf’s leadership. In his book, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal,¹ Richard Lovelace said that the Moravian movement was the closest approximation of New Testament Christianity in two thousand years.

In 1747, Jonathan Edwards wrote An Humble Attempt, his call to visible unity and explicit agreement. This was the birthing of concerts of prayer. Concerts of prayer became the methodology of gathering quarterly to pray with other congregations for revival. This movement spread throughout New England and had an impact on the New York City region.

A century later, layman Jeremiah Lanphier launched the Fulton Street Prayer Revival on 23 September 1857. During a climate of slavery and economic devastation, six people gathered for prayer near Wall Street. Within weeks, the simple prayer meeting grew to fifty thousand daily participants and sparked a national revival that swept one million converts into the churches (nearly four percent of the national population) in eighteen months.

The revival planted the seed of the evangelical social awakening that lasted from 1865 to 1920. This awakening saw the beginning of the homeless ministry movement, which included the Salvation Army, Bowery Mission, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

On 1 January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Baptist and Methodist missionaries teaching literacy to freed slaves saw the largest response to the gospel of any ethnic group in church history among African Americans. The first African American church in New York was started in 1790 by Peter Williams as described in Signs of Hope in the City.²

In 1888, the Student Volunteer Movement came alive in New York City and subsequently, twenty-five thousand young people became missionaries in forty years. The early nineteenth century revival movement in Korea and resulting explosion of church growth can be traced to Horace Underwood and the 1857–1958 revival (as described by Rev. Jimmy Lim, executive director of the New York City Council of Churches in the 2007 video “It Started with One”).

The 1906 Asuza Street revival in California had a profound impact on New York City. The revival that spread to the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa boomeranged back to New York in the form of incoming immigrants of Pentecostal persuasion. The fastest-growing churches in the twentieth century in New York City were Pentecostal.

The modern concerts of prayer movement began with a meeting in June 1987 between two Here’s Life Inner City staff and an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship staff member. The plan was to invite sixteen churches to participate in a concert of prayer on 5 February 1988 at First Baptist Church of Flushing, led by David Bryant. Bryant helped to reignite the global prayer movement by traveling to 350 cities worldwide and gathering churches in united prayer. When the evening arrived, more than seventy churches had gathered! By the fall of 1989, seven regions of Greater New York were participating in annual rhythms of united, congregational prayer. More than 150,000 people have participated to date.

Dr. Mac Pier is president of the New York City Leadership Center and Concerts of Prayer Greater New York. After working on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, he eventually served as founder and mobilizer of the united prayer movement of 6,200 churches throughout New York City, Long Island, northern New Jersey, and Fairfield County, Connecticut. His leadership has led to Concerts of Prayer being described as one of the most developed urban prayer and pastoral networks in the world. Pier’s latest book, Spiritual Leadership in the Global City (New Hope Publishers) was released in 2008.