c. 2000 Religion News Service

PORTLAND, Ore. _ First, the red-and-white revival tent just landed in their laps. A day later, a terrorist bomb ripped open the USS Cole, and a Bible verse began to reverberate in the Rev. Charlie Bent’s mind.

It was a line from Psalm 122, attributed to the shepherd-king, David, an ode to the city that tradition says he founded: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”

Suddenly, The Church Alive, a small Pentecostal congregation on the slopes of Mount Hood, had a reason for a revival.

Every night at 7 p.m. for more than a month, anywhere from 20 to 60 Christians have gathered in that tent pitched 12 miles east the end of town along U.S. 26. For anywhere from one hour to three, they have prayed for Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians, Jews, Muslims and Christians, people of all faiths and those of no particular faith, who are living, working, negotiating, protesting, fighting and dying in and over David’s city.

“The last great order that Jesus gave the church was to go out into the world and make disciples,” says Bent, pastor of the 5-year-old Brightwood church. “Discipleship is an intimacy thing,” he adds. “It involves spending time with someone.”

The someones that Bent and his 100-member congregation have been spending time with this past month are 7,000 miles away, but their fear, anger, pain and suffering are much on the minds of The Church Alive, which had pretty much decided not to sponsor a revival this year.

But when a traveling evangelist offered to lend the church a 40-by-80-foot tent free of charge, and violence erupted again in the Middle East, a revival seemed to be the right response.

The Church Alive, which is affiliated with the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, has sponsored revivals in the past, spending between $5,000 and $7,000 on each, renting a tent and lining up evangelists and inspirational speakers months in advance to ensure a varied and vibrant program. But this time, the revival has unfolded on its own, with first the tent, then the theme and finally the guest speakers just appearing as they are needed.

“Some people would call it coincidence,” Bent says, “but I don’t believe in a God of coincidence. I believe it’s the Lord.”

Evangelists from as far away as Hawaii have called the church, asking if they could speak. But it is prayer that is at the heart of the nightly meetings, Bent says. Some of it focuses on the personal concerns of those present, but most of it centers on the Middle East.

“We just begin by inviting God to lead us, to help us pray for the Middle East. We know so little about what is really going on. We just begin to pray, for the government officials _ by name if we know their names _ the military, those on all sides of all the questions.”

Sometimes the prayer is inspired by headlines and news stories, focusing on specific events, on individual people. Other times, it is more general. Over time, the prayers have changed.

Debi Stanley, who with her husband, Rob, has attended every night of the revival except one, when they were visiting a friend in the hospital, has seen the prayers grow deeper as the weeks have passed.“We still literally quote the Scripture and `pray for the peace of Jerusalem,”’ she says.

But as the congregation has learned more about the Middle East and searched Scripture for insights, their prayers have become more specific and more inclusive as they named Christians, Jews, Arabs and Palestinians. Then someone remembered the line from 2 Peter 3:9, that the Lord does not wish any to perish, and the prayers began to include terrorists, too.

“I have a number of different acquaintances and friends,” Stanley says, “both Christians and non-Christians, all over the gamut, and each one I’ve talked to about this has said, `So, you’re praying for everybody?’ `Well, yeah,’ I say. It takes them a moment and then they say, `Yeah, I guess that’s right.”’

For DeAnn McKague, the weeks of focusing on the Middle East have heightened her awareness of what’s happening half a world away and deepened her commitment to her neighbors on Mount Hood. The nightly revival meetings, which have run beyond a scheduled Nov. 26 finale, have been an “all-day process,” she says, as church members reflect and pray as individuals throughout the day and come together as a body in the evenings.

“For me, personally, it just shows me how much God loves everybody,” she says, “that you come as you are and he accepts us all.”

For McKague, her husband, Jess, and their children, Katie, 12, and Mitchell, 9, attending the revival every night is something of a sacrifice but one they are more than willing to make.

“It’s easy in a sense because it is for the Lord,” she says. “The Lord says my burden is slight, my yoke is easy, and it is _ once you’ve seen that prayer works.”

KRE END HAUGHT