"The incantations, multiplied worldwide, may help usher in the long-awaited final days."(Image by Jonathan Baldwin.)
Strip mall turned faith center, the International House of Prayer in Kansas City is an evangelical and charismatic haven that was founded in 1999 by a self-styled reverend named Mike Bickle. At the heart of the growing perpetual prayer movement in America, IHOP has been criticized for its cultish end-of-days prognostications. An excerpt from an Erik Eckholm article in the New York Times:
“The International House of Prayer is ‘an important example’ of the proliferating nondenominational charismatic churches, said Catherine C. Bowler, a religious historian at the Duke University Divinity School. From megachurches with tens of thousands of members to more intense and unusual ministries like Mr. Bickle’s, these churches, which practice faith healing and speaking in tongues, make up one of the fastest-growing segments of American Christianity, attracting millions.
The staff and students here are required to spend at least 25 hours a week in the prayer room, and they also engage in weekly fasts of a day or more. The focused worship, Mr. Bickle says, affects real-world events by weakening the demons and strengthening the angels that swirl among us. Most important, he says, the incantations, multiplied worldwide, may help usher in the long-awaited final days: seven years of bloody battles and disasters that will end with the Second Coming, with true Christians spirited to eternal bliss and everyone else doomed to hellfire.
‘The Second Coming will probably happen within the lifetime of people living today,’ Mr. Bickle said in an interview — the sort of prediction that leads some pastors to say he is overstepping and using apocalyptic predictions to seduce eager young believers. Mr. Bickle adamantly rejects such charges, as do followers like Mai Fink, a woman in her early 20s who was helping to run the church summer camp. She and her husband moved to Kansas City, she said, because ‘the prayer makes our hearts come alive.'”
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IHOP, where the prayer never ends: