O, Say, Can You Pray?

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Blake Langhofer was the first to arrive. It was 6:40 a.m., and a sickle moon still hung in the dark sky over Maize High School near Wichita, Kans. In sandals and shorts, Blake, 16, approached his school's blue flagpole. He leaned forward, placed his hands on it and bowed his head. Soon he was joined by four friends, all jeans-clad and smelling sweetly of soap and shampoo. They formed a circle, and someone entreated the Lord aloud: "I pray you do wonders through the pole and let your wonders show through the pole." First a trickle, then dozens of students arrived; eventually more than 200 gathered in tight concentric circles around the pole. They prayed for Maize's students, for its principal, for Bill Clinton. Blake Langhofer prayed "that history is made here." That seemed a safe bet: for 45 min. before the start of classes, he and his friends turned their public high school's paramount symbol of the state into a church; and as dawn broke around the country, hundreds of thousands of other students were doing the same.

The event is called See You at the Pole. According to Doug Clark, field-ministries director at its San Diego-based coordinating collective, the National Network of Youth Ministries, last Wednesday the group mobilized "more than 3 million" Christian teens in 50 states to schoolyard prayer. Witnesses and local organizers confirm that 110 showed up at Ripon High School in Ripon, Calif.; 50 at Nashua High in Nashua, N.H.; and a total of 4,871 at 63 schools in San Antonio, Texas. Clark's figures seem a bit overoptimistic, but even at half strength, the national event, which has been building annually for nine years, may deserve his description as "a historic movement."

See You originated in the spring of 1990 in Burleson, Texas, when several public school students told youth minister Billy Beacham that they felt "burdened" by God to pray at their school flagpoles. Southern Baptist state youth evangelism coordinator Chuck Flowers decided to try a Texas-wide version that fall. Beacham remembers predicting 5,000 participants; 48,000 showed. The next year the event went countrywide, and the National Network, which acts as an information clearinghouse for some 100 youth evangelical groups, became involved. Says Clark: "It was like lighting dry brush with a match." The religion-tracking Barna Research Group tallied more than 1 million college, high school and junior high participants in 1993; guesstimates for 1997 more than doubled that (college involvement remained minimal).

Strictly speaking, See You is simply an annual invitation to schoolyard prayer before morning classes begin on the third Wednesday of every September. In fact, it now serves as the school-year kickoff for a rapidly swelling population of weekly campus Bible-study and prayer clubs. Clark compares it to events like the Million Man March and the Promise Keepers, but it has at least one advantage: while enjoying the thrill of a mass event, its participants remain in place and primed to act locally.

See You is also more overtly evangelistic than the atonement-oriented adult events. It overlaps another National Network project, Challenge 2000, the aim of which is "to help take the message of Christ to every school and every young person" within two years. Beacham has said that as See You spread, "we weren't even sure it was legal." It is. In 1990 the Supreme Court overwhelmingly sustained the constitutionality of a 1984 law permitting student prayer on school grounds if the prayer is not adult-led or during class hours. But the event still bothers some civil libertarians. Barry Lynn, head of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, says that "technically it is legal. But it is a fiction that this is a spontaneous outpouring of activity. It is part of a well-orchestrated campaign, a back-door effort by adults to create evangelism on public school campuses."

Perhaps, but few in Wichita are complaining right now. Reflecting on the "drugs, violence and sexual issues" that high schoolers contend with today, the Rev. Tyrone Gordon, who pastors an integrated, mainline Wichita Methodist congregation, says of the largely white, evangelical See You population, "I am pretty proud of them for expressing themselves in the way that they are doing." His observations lead him to believe that "these are children who have made their decision and come to [God] on their own." Certainly the throng at the post-See You rally at Wichita's Metropolitan Complex auditorium seems self-propelled, if adult-organized. A band plays Christian rock, and the teens let loose. An emcee asks how the See Yous went, and the answer is a prolonged roar. The kids bellow a tune with the unlikely lyrics of Romans 16: 20: "The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet." Someone asks Maize High sophomore Ashley Page, 16, how the day has gone. "Awesome," she says. Then she adds quickly, "But every day's an awesome day with God."

--Reported by Emily Mitchell/Maize

With reporting by Emily Mitchell/Maize