A countywide call to united, expectant prayer.
“On your walls I have appointed watchmen; all day and all night they will never keep silent… and give Him no rest until He makes it a praise in the earth.” Isaiah 62:6–7
I'm writing to you as one of you — a fellow believer in this county who can no longer shake a burden the Lord has laid on my heart.
It is simply this: that we would gather, across our churches and our differences, to seek God together for a genuine outpouring of His Spirit over this whole region — for thousands who do not yet know Him to be saved and discipled, and for His church here to become one.
Let me say plainly what this is not. It is not a new ministry, and it will carry no one's name. I want no platform in it and no credit from it. I am not asking you to join something of mine. I am asking you to pray with me — and to help me build a place where the whole county can pray.
We both know this cannot be manufactured. Revival is not produced; it is poured out. From first to last it is the work of the Holy Spirit and the mercy of God, who chooses in grace to use ordinary people who make themselves available. We don't light the fire. We gather the wood, keep our hands clean, stand on His promises, and give Him no rest until He sends it.
Unless the LORD builds the house, they who build it labor in vain.Psalm 127:1
The heart of all this has far less to do with what happens in a room than with what happens in you — in your own secret walk with the Father. Build that first. The gathering is only the overflow of it.
It begins in secret. The two sisters at Barvas prayed in a cottage. Jeremiah Lanphier prayed alone for a full half hour before the first man climbed the stairs. Daniel Nash slipped into a town ahead of the preaching to travail unseen. The public fruit always grew from a hidden root — and the root is where you begin, where only the Father sees.
When you pray, go into your inner room, close your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret.Matthew 6:6
The vessel must be clean. God does not entrust His power to unclean hands. At Barvas the men prayed without result until one of them read Psalm 24 and asked whether their own hands were clean before God. In Wales the fire fell along four plain conditions: confess every known sin, put away anything doubtful, obey the Spirit at once, confess Christ openly. For the intercessor, repentance is not the preliminary to prayer — it is the first work of prayer.
Who may ascend the mountain of the LORD? And who may stand in His holy place? One who has clean hands and a pure heart.Psalm 24:3–4
The heart must mirror the Father's. The intercessor is not merely someone who says prayers, but someone who has begun to feel what God feels — for a neighbor, a wayward child, a whole county of people who do not yet know they are loved. Ask God for His heart before you ask Him for anything else. The burden itself is a gift.
And it will cost you something. In Rees Howells: Intercessor, Norman Grubb names three marks of true intercession — identification, agony, and authority. The intercessor does not petition from a safe distance; he steps into the burden until he can plead as though the need were his own, pays a real price in it, and out of that price is given a place of prevailing, commanding faith he did not have before.
The Spirit also helps our weakness… the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.Romans 8:26
So you are the hidden root. The Lord is not asking you to engineer a revival, but to take a place — clean, burdened, hidden, holding fast to His promise. Take that place with a few others, and you have already begun the very thing this whole invitation is about. Everything else is overflow.
We begin, as the great prayer awakening of 1857 began, with a single faithful hour at midday — a noon watch anyone can come to, stay five minutes or the whole hour, and return to their day having lifted their heart to God. The hour is small on purpose. The day of small things is not to be despised; it is to be guarded and kept faithful while the Spirit does the spreading.
And we begin on neutral ground. There is a barrier we all know is real: congregations that will not cross the street to pray in another church's building. A place that belongs to no single church therefore belongs to all of them. That is why an open, county-wide space — a room with no congregation's name over the door — may be the truer home for this watch than any one sanctuary.
This is not merely practical. Jonathan Edwards once wrote a whole charter for exactly this — a call for the visible union of God's people in extraordinary prayer across their divisions. Fulton Street became precisely that: a union meeting where a Baptist, a Congregationalist, a Dutch Reformed, and a Presbyterian knelt in one room and forgot whose name was on the building. Prayer that unites the churches of a county is itself an answer to the prayer of Jesus.
that they may all be one… so that the world may believe that You sent Me.John 17:21
We start small and unhurried, and we hold the vision loosely: a noon watch first, and — should the Lord send the laborers — a morning and an evening watch, until the wall is covered. We will not build shifts we have no one to stand in. The wall grows longer only as He sends watchmen to it.
Lay the great awakenings side by side and the same movements of God rise up every time. This is the closest thing to an instruction manual we will ever have — and notice how few of these are about technique. He is not looking for a method. He is looking for a people.
A great company has run this race before us. Each of their awakenings grew from the same hidden root: a few burdened people who would not quit.
Two elderly sisters, one blind, one bent with arthritis, covenanted to pray for their parish, standing on a single promise — and revival swept the islands before the visiting preacher ever arrived.
The unseen intercessor who went ahead of Finney's meetings to travail in a rented room, often for the lost by name. When Nash died, the power visibly waned. The public work rested on a hidden one.
Schooled by the Spirit in the costly life of intercession — identification, agony, authority. Not informing God of a need, but being joined to Him in meeting it.
After a season of repentance and reconciliation, a prayer watch began that ran in unbroken relay for more than a hundred years — and out of that hidden fire came the greatest missionary sending the church had yet seen. Prayer was the root; a discipled harvest the fruit.
A lay missionary printed handbills for a noon prayer meeting. Six came, late. Within months, tens of thousands prayed at midday across the nation — a prayer revival, lay-led, crossing every denomination, with no celebrity at its center.
A young miner's eleven-year prayer became two words — “Bend me.” A hundred thousand converted in months; taverns emptied and courts sat idle. Its glory, and its warning to us: fire needs a hearth to hold it.
Therefore, since we have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us… let's run with endurance the race that is set before us.Hebrews 12:1
What rises from the room is meant to rise straight up, like incense — not one voice, but many small fires of prayer burning together. Some come and gather with two or three others to pray; some come to be alone with God in a quiet corner. Both are welcome — come as the Spirit leads you that day. A few simple rails keep the hour sacred — the same ones that guarded Fulton Street in 1857.
Let my prayer be counted as incense before You; the raising of my hands as the evening offering.Psalm 141:2
Two are better than one… and a cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.Ecclesiastes 4:9,12
Expectation is faith with its eyes open. On Mount Carmel, Elijah prayed and then sent his servant back to scan an empty sky seven times — expecting rain when there was nothing to see — until a cloud the size of a man's hand rose from the sea, and then the deluge came. Our task is not to make it rain. It is to get low, claim the promise, and keep watching the horizon in confident expectation.
“Go back” seven times… “Behold, a cloud as small as a man's hand is coming up from the sea.”1 Kings 18:43–44
Pisgah is the name of our place and the name of our posture: the height from which Moses saw the land of promise God had sworn to give. We climb to that height in prayer, we see by faith what God has promised for this county, and we do not come down until He gives it.
Here is a promise worth making plain. This watch will never gather converts to itself. Because it stands on neutral, county-wide ground, it holds a rare gift: a soul who meets God at the noon hour is not “ours.” They belong to Christ and to His church — and we will help them find a Bible-believing local body near them where they will be known, baptized, taught, and loved. The watch is a wellspring; the churches of this county are the fields where the water runs.
And this is not a project separate from the prayer — it is prayer work. To ask God for thousands while making no preparation to gather and disciple them is to pray for rain with no barns to store the grain. So we build the barns now, before the wine comes:
The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore, plead with the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.Matthew 9:37–38
There are three ways to say yes. Any one of them is a beginning.
Come to the noon watch yourself, and bring someone — a friend, your family, your small group, your church. Nothing knits a county together like praying side by side.
Join a small core of intercessors who will covenant to hold this county before God — to keep clean hands, stand on the promise, and give Him no rest whether few come or many.
Serve as a counselor to pray with the seeking, or a disciple-maker to walk new believers into their first steps and home to a church. Lead a little more.
I searched for a man among them who would… stand in the gap before Me for the land… but I found no one.Ezekiel 22:30
If the Lord is drawing you to the wall, this is the covenant — made before God, not before men.
Here I am. Send me.Isaiah 6:8
This call belongs to no one and to everyone — it is for any believer, in any church, whose heart burns for the same thing. If that is you, carry it to the people around you: your church, your small group, your family, your friends. Share what you've read here, or simply pass along the short guide below — the same one we pray from at the watch, and the easiest thing to hand a friend who has never really prayed before.
Open the prayer guide to share →This is also the page the QR code links to at the gathering.
The Watch
When: 12:00–1:00, [day] — add your day here
Where: [add your location here]
To pray with us: [add a contact or reply link here]
“Lord, do it again — in our county, in our years. Bend us. Send the rain. And find us clean, awake, and expecting on the wall.”
In Christ, and asking only that you pray,
A fellow watchman
Transylvania County