Prayer and worship filled Stauffer Chapel for 50-straight hours last week. Beginning last Thursday, Feb. 9, at 10 p.m., Pepperdine students joined together in a 50-hour Prayer Furnace starting Thursday evening and ending at midnight on Saturday, Feb. 11.
“The 50-hour Prayer Furnace at Pepperdine actually ties in to a bigger picture,” said junior Sarah Hutchinson, who helped lead the event. “In Southern California, universities are coming together in non-stop prayer and worship through the entire month of February. Each campus has a different block of time dedicated to continuous praise. There are even 24/7 houses of prayer springing up across the country, including one in Hollywood.”
The SoCal prayer month is led by an organization called Movement 133. They feel that God is going to begin a revival in the U.S. starting on the West Coast that will move eastward, according to junior Brandon Davie, who also helped lead the event. Other schools that have joined Pepperdine in the event are Biola, Azusa Pacific and USC.
“The focus of the 50 hours of prayer was to love God by giving of our time,” Hutchinson said. “We wanted this event to be about our campus seeking God above all else.”
The organizers of the Prayer Furnace asked anyone who wanted to lead prayer or worship to sign up for a 90-minute slot to make sure the entire 50 hours were covered in prayer and worship. With the initial setup in place, the 50 hours went smoothly. People came to pray and worship throughout the whole day and night, whether they had signed up to lead or not, according to Hutchinson.
“Even at Four in the morning, we were still going strong,” Hutchinson said. “I felt strangely energized by those early-morning shifts.”
“The 50-Hour Prayer Furnace was incredible,” Davie said. “I was only able to go for a few 90 minute time slots during the 50 hours, but people were playing guitar and praying in the wee hours of the morning, through the day and all the way through the night. About 40 people attended the kickoff on Thursday night, and there were numbers varying between two and 20 people for the rest of the 50 hours.”
Hutchinson was a prayer leader for some of the time slots throughout the event. As a prayer leader, she spent a fair amount of time praying for written requests from a prayer bowl.
“There were many prayers for hurting loved ones and for healing, but also people wanting more out of their relationship with God, wanting to trust more, to have more faith, to know how to love and have stronger relationships, prayers for unity on our campus, prayers for God to touch the depressed. It was like getting a glimpse at the soul of Pepperdine. The prayers were raw and real,” Hutchinson said.
Davie said that it is not really for him to say whether or not the event went well, but he does know that God pulled together a lot of things at the last minute to help the Prayer Furnace along. The Celebration Chapel group decided to leave their sound system up on Thursday night for use in worship, and people decided to sign up at the last minute for worship and prayer slots early in the morning that were not filled, allowing the praise to keep going for the full 50 hours, he said.
If it is God’s will, the event will happen again, Davie said. If the event were to happen again, he would like to focus more on advertising to increase student awareness, and also to try to get more staff and faculty involved to make it more of a campus-wide event.
“God was definitely moving through the event and I am excited to see the revival that He will bring to our campus through the time that we spent seeking Him,” Davie said.
