Student's Rebel And Pray In Public Schools
Thousand of students take part in a daily 30 second prayer in front of their lockers.
by Jim Brown

(AgapePress)...There's a new strategy to move prayer from the flagpole to the hallways of public schools across the nation.

When Pennsylvania youth pastor Tom Sipling encouraged 50 teenagers at a youth retreat to take 30 seconds each morning to kneel down and pray at their school lockers, he had no idea what the impact of his challenge would be. Now public school students in nearly every state are taking part in the "30-second kneel down."

Sipling alludes to Daniel, Chapter 6, when the prophet opened his windows toward Jerusalem and knelt down to pray three times a day in the midst of a culture that told him he couldn't.

"So much of this generation marks themselves with tattooing and piercing that I believe it's really time for a generation to rise up and mark themselves with Christ, and righteously so," Sipling says. "We're excited about these 'Daniels' that seem to be rising up, taking the commitment and the challenge, and kneeling in their [school] hallways."

The youth pastor says thousands of public school students are taking part daily in the 30-second kneel-down in front of their lockers.

"Our vision is to see hallways lined with young people kneeling and praying," he says.

"Our goal right now is a million, fifty-one thousand, two-hundred youth who would kneel and pray every day. That's equivalent to one year's worth of prayer going up for the campuses in America every day. I believe that will bring us the breakthrough we're looking for."

Sipling says the kneel-down exercise is not intended to be pharisaical, but rather to increase the passion of Christian students for their unsaved peers on campus. "We tell them ... it's about the posture of the heart, and not so much the posture of the body."

Sipling says his heart's desire is to see an entire high school campus transformed by the presence of God.

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