| Team
Members and Local Coordinators | Bennett
Place Declaration | OR
Daily Team Journal | David
Kim's
Journal | Gene
Brooks' Journal | Pre-Expedition
Scouting Report | The
Pickets'
Charge |
Letter
from SC Governor David M. Beasley | North/South
USA Reconciliation Issues | The
Last
American Awakening: Revivals in the Confederate Armies
|
The Mark of a
Champion
|
They
marched to the sea, then turned north through the Carolinas, ending
November
16 at the Bennett Place surrender site near Durham, NC. "This was the
first
full-scale prayer expedition in US history which focused on national
issues,"
coordinator Gene Brooks told Charlotte Christian News. Issues
involved
Northern war atrocities, Southern bitterness, racism, freemasonry, the
Korean War, and Native American issues.
As the Union soldiers at the end of the Civil War advanced, they burned farms, businesses, and entire cities, but these prayer walkers prayed for healing in the land, repenting for Southern bitterness and Northern atrocities at the sites of burned towns and homes, battlefields, cemeteries, and monuments. Several on the team were descendants of Union soldiers that marched with Sherman. Along the way the team also repented at slave markets, burned churches, and Masonic lodges. Native American team members joined in prayer at broken treaty, ceremonial, and massacre sites--events that had happened more than a century before Sherman passed through. Team pastor Fern Noble (Cree Native American) of Ventura, California, was stunned at the layers of sin in the land: "I have never seen such deep grief anywhere in North America. I would not have believed it if I had been told. The war is still being fought here in people's hearts."
Along
the way, people from different races and denominations joined the team
to repent for recent wrongs and long-ago atrocities so that God's power
could be released in their communities. In Orangeburg, SC, where in
1968
national guardsmen gunned down three black demonstrators, corporate
repentance
ended in two white and two black pastors making a covenant with God to
minister together in The Hill, their city's worst drug and crime-ridden
community. "We're not just trying to make people feel better," Brooks
said
in a Charisma interview, "We believe that there has been
corporate
sin that has not been repented for. The enemy has used that against
God's
Kingdom."
"We have walked this trail," he told CBN News, "with a goal of beginning the removal of an obstacle to national awakening. We believe that the Southern bitterness toward the North and the rabid racism that came out of the fear engendered between the races during Reconstruction has caused us to have so much unforgiveness and bitterness in our nation down deep that it has held back revival in a nation that desperately needs it."
Along
the trail churches and local Christians housed and provided for the
team,
and daily an estimated three thousand joined in prayer across the
nation.
Mary Lance Sisk of Women's Aglow told Christian World News: "I
believe
that this is an important step in God releasing His Spirit over this
nation
and that this had to take place before He could do this." When the
walkers
arrived at the Bennett Place in Durham, NC, a crowd of 500-600 joined
them
in celebration, but the best Amen seemed to come from above. On a
perfectly
rainless day, a rainbow appeared in the sky overhead to the
amazement
of the crowd.
Prayer
walker Linda Graham in
a 700 Club interview reflected on the final day: "We've prayed and felt
the power of the Lord, and today is an awesome celebration of the
victories
that God has done." Christian Bass, co-coordinator, told Christian
World
News, "Every person on the team said they would definitely leave
this
trip with a much closer walk with the Lord, understanding how to follow
His lead, but more than that, God's getting ready to do something in
this
end-time. He's getting ready to move."