What If Prayer Consumed Every College Campus in America?

Though most of the 2,600 colleges in the United States have some Christian ministry presence, few have entire groups of students dedicated to praying for their schools. IHOP’s Luke18 Project hopes to rectify that by the end of the 2012-2013 school year by establishing “prayer furnaces” on every campus in the nation. 

“Prayer is the simplest thing to do, but nobody does it because it’s so simple,” says Executive Director Brian Kim, who birthed the initiative after watching thousands of college students cry out to God on behalf of their campuses at TheCall in Nashville, Tenn., in 2007. “We’re looking for young Daniels, so to speak, who are not just surviving on their college campuses but dominating. We’re calling young adults to a culture of prayer and a life of mission.”

While prayer serves as the project’s foundation, the end goal is to equip and send out 10,000 students by 2020 from these campuses to the hardest and darkest places of the world. In only three years, the Luke18 Project has already established 400 prayer furnaces, mostly by word-of-mouth.

“Why sit on the sidelines in the greatest missionary enterprise of history? Let’s go finish the task,” Kim says. “The Luke 18 Project is our small part. We’re tiny—10,000 is a blip on the screen, but we’re just trying to be obedient to what God wants us to do.”