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On May 7, 1999, the prayer room opened with a schedule that covered 90 hours a week. Not many months later, we stretched ourselves to cover 168 hours a week. September 19, 1999 marked the beginning of 24-hour prayer and worship, with 12 two-hour sets a day. In reality, the prayer meeting we started that evening still continues today.

We remain committed to prayer, worship, the Scriptures, healing, prophecy, fasting and the Great Commission. It is through night and day prayer that we believe evangelism will be most effective as we believe God to fulfi ll the Great Commission. We want to train up a generation to stand in the midst of persecution and boldly proclaim the Word of God. With God’s grace, we will continue this until Christ returns.

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While 24/7 prayer is a new idea to many, our effort is not the fi rst time there has been perpetual prayer, nor is it the longest. Roughly a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, King David set the Ark of the Covenant in a tent that became known as the Tabernacle of David, a place of continual prayer and worship for 30 years. David appointed 288 skilled prophetic singers and 4,000 skilled musicians to minister before the Lord. Periodically over the next several hundred years of Israel’s history, leaders re-established this davidic order of worship in the temple.

Fifteen hundred years later, another house of prayer was founded. In 522 A.D., The St. Maurice Abbey, located in present-day Switzerland, instituted Laus Perennis or perpetual prayer. Choirs of monks sang continually day and night, with one choir relieving the previous one. This practice went on until approximately 900 A.D., impacting monasteries all over France and Switzerland.

Forty years after the St. Maurice Abbey began its effort, a monk by the name of Comgall instituted a rigid monastic rule of continual prayer and worship in Bangor, Ireland. The Bangor Abbey attracted thousands of monks who either joined there or joined other abbeys associated with Bangor. At the time of Comgall’s death in 602 A.D., it is said that 3,000 monks looked to him for guidance. The continual prayer and worship lasted at Bangor for two and a half centuries.

In 1722, a perpetual prayer meeting began in Germany. Count Nicholas Ludwig Von Zinzendorf allowed a group of persecuted Protestants – Moravians – to find shelter on his estate. They named their settlement Herrnhut, which means “The Watch of the Lord.” It soon became a thriving community, growing to more than 300 residents. In 1727, they experienced a massive outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Soon afterward they established 24-hour-a-day prayer. Many of the community left to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth, some even selling themselves into slavery in order to fulfill the Great Commission. By 1776, some 226 missionaries had been sent out from the community at Herrnhut. This prayer meeting went non-stop for the next 100 years and is seen by many as the spiritual power behind the impact that the Moravians had on the world.

It is from this example that IHOP-KC received much of its initial inspiration. Those at Herrnhut looked to Leviticus 6:13 for their inspiration – “The fire must be kept burning on the altar continuously; it must not go out.” It is our goal also to keep the fire burning. May it never go out.