c. 1997 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Tens of thousands of men, some who had spent the camped out, others who rose early to jam subways and trek through the streets of downtown Washington, gathered Saturday for the Promise Keepers”Stand in the Gap”assembly, creating a sea of Christian men bent on repentance and seeking a religious revival.

And as they gathered on the National Mall hours before the scheduled opening of the six-hour”sacred assembly,”many of the thousands stopped to pray _ sometimes singly, sometimes in small groups, in public or the relative privacy of a string of Native American teepee prayer tents lining the Mall.

They want to be broken so they can be turned to God, said D.J. Jantz, a plastics salesman from Dallas, Texas of a group in one prayer teepee.”They want to be broken-hearted … to confess before the Lord so they be a witness here today,”he said.

With a perfect Washington autumn day _ mostly sunny skies and temperatures climbing into the 70s _ the gathering of casually clad, mostly white, church-going men took on an air somewhat between festive and solemn, between rejoicing and repentance.”We have so much in common, but we have not stood together,”Bill McCartney, the former University of Colorado football coach and founder of Promise Keepers said at a news conference before the rally began.”The church has been divided and a house divided cannot stand.””Many of us have never met,”he added,”but we’re going to spend all eternity together. That’s what brings us together.” McCartney also distinguished the group from the 1995 Nation of Islam-sponsored Million Man March, which also met on the Mall.”This is not a march,”he said. This is a solemn assembly … We’re coming before a holy righteous God and asking for forgiveness.” Underscoring McCartney’s comments, many of the tens of thousands carried Bibles or one of the estimated 1 million New Testaments being distributed at the event by the American Bible Society while others wore T-shirts, identifying churches or ministries the men belong to.

Political causes were virtually absent.

Paul Edwards, a vice president of the seven-year-old Promise Keepers, told an early morning television show that the group was aimed only at men because”men are the problem and they need to fix it”and the $9 million Stand in the Gap assembly was aimed at the church not the government, despite the rally’s proximity to the corridors of power in the White House and the U.S. Capitol.”This is a revival movement, not a reform movement,”Edwards said.”The issue is the heart.””We’re speaking primarily to the church,”he said.”It is the church that has lost its moral authority.” The assembly took its name”Stand in the Gap”from the biblical book of Ezekial, the visionary and apocaplyptic prophet whose message was directed at the Israelite exiles in Babylon:”I looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found none”(Ezekial 22:30, New International Version).

The men _ with a smattering of women _ arrived by chartered bus, trains and planes. One group on the Mall early Saturday morning said it had walked from Santa Monica, Calif., with a 12-foot wooden cross.

As the men gathered to wait for the approximately noon start of the six-hour prayer session, hymns such as”Amazing Grace”and”The Church’s One Foundation,”boomed along the Mall from a high-tech sound system. Huge video monitors, also stretched along the Mall, urged the men to”Please don’t engage in any debate with protesters,”citing the injunction in the New Testament book of James (1:19) to be”slow to speak, slow to anger.” Many of those gathered said they were also representing other men from their home churches who could not attend.”I represent 80 men who couldn’t be here today,”said a sign carried by Bryan Smith, 34, who owns a window cleaning business in Conroe, Texas and belongs to an independent evangelical church.”It’s an issue of forced multiplication for God,”said Carlos Huante, a Houston police officer with Smith.

McCartney, in his briefing with reporters, said his late afternoon speech (approximately 5 p.m. EDT) would challenge the men in the audience to meet on the steps of state capitols on Jan. 1, 2000 to show evidence of having created”vibrant mens’ ministries”and to demonstrate their commitment to denominational and racial reconciliation.”I look to the year 2000 … to mark the end of racism inside the church of Jesus Christ and then it will a dynamic impact on society,”he said.

DEA END BANKS