Awaken the Dawn Draws Thousands

Tens of thousands of Christians from every state in the U.S. assembled on the National Mall the first weekend in October to sing and worship in dozens of tents and pray for a “spiritual shift” in America.

“America’s Tent of Meeting” was sponsored by Awaken the Dawn and several other partner organizations for the purpose of focusing on Jesus and to pray for a nation in crisis. The event began Friday night with a call to repentance from the main stage where park police estimated 30,000 people were in attendance, according to an event organizer.

“I see Awaken the Dawn as part of a bigger story that God is telling,” said Michael Beardslee of Phoenix, AZ, in an interview with The Christian Post outside the New Mexico prayer tent. “There is a story that the enemy is telling in our nation, and he likes a lot of attention and he gets the attention a lot of the time,” he said. But it’s God’s story that will prevail, he added.

Beardslee has been praying and fasting for revival to sweep the nation for the past 20 years. He was inspired by the vision of Awaken the Dawn, calling people from all 50 states to come and worship on America’s front yard in front of the Capitol, and he took time off work to make the journey with his parents.

Tens of thousands more attended over the course of the weekend, with various evangelistic equipping sessions and round-the-clock prayer in the tents until the event concluded Monday morning. Fifty prayer tents (one for each state) and eight regional tents were stationed all along the National Mall grounds. Speakers included Mike Bickle of the International House of Prayer, Francis Chan of We Are Church, Heidi Baker of Iris Global, Shawn Bolz of Expressions 58, Nick Hall of PULSE, and several others.

The vision for all 50 states to gather around the worth of Jesus and exalt Him, as articulated by The Prayer Furnace’s David Bradshaw, was what inspired Christy Holt to make the trip to Washington from Pensacola, FL, to participate. “I came because there is unity when all gather together. . . . With our country and the mess that it’s in and the disunity, I thought ‘Lord Jesus, thank You that somebody got a vision of unity and of what that would look like.’”

Lewis Hogan, founder of United Cry, calls Awaken the Dawn an historic gathering. “Something was released over the nation that we are going to see the fruit of going forward,” he says.

–Adapted from The Christian Post .