RED MOON RISING

Red Moon Rising: How 24-7 Prayer is Awakening a Generation is the darling of Relevant Media Group, Inc., publisher of Relevant magazine. Run entirely by a staff under thirty, Relevant has been attempting to make Christianity worthwhile to young people for whom God has become extraneous. They've also figured out something that many Christian adults, with their crusades against the culture industry, find hard to accept: Generations X and Y personify pop culture; take it away, and we become somewhat incomplete, and very bored. By publishing books like Red Moon Rising that have provocative spiritual subject matter, but also savvy graphic design, Relevant has managed to capture the attention of young people through a fusion of high and low culture. This is an impressive accomplishment, because that fusion is a delicate matter and most young people these days are equipped with bullshit detectors more sensitive than seismometers. But so far, their efforts appear to be working—since its birth one year ago, Relevant magazine's circulation has grown to 70,000.

Red Moon Rising is written by Dave Roberts, a leading UK journalist, and Pete Greig, the founder of a youth movement called 24-7 Prayer. It is the story of how the movement, since its creation five years ago by a bunch of hip Gen X'ers in Europe, has become a worldwide phenomenon, with tens of thousands of participants. It all started with Pete Greig standing on a jut of land in Portugal, surrounded by the ocean and the stars. He writes in the beginning of the book about a vision he had that night: “First my scalp began to tingle and an electric current pulsed down my spine, again and again, physically shaking my body . . . my eyes were open, but I could 'see' with absolute clarity before me the different countries laid out like an atlas. From each one a faceless army of young people rose from the page, crowds of them in every nation awaiting orders.”

Seven years later, in July 1999, Greig visited Hernnhut, Germany. During the eighteenth century, Hernnhut was the site of a nonstop prayer vigil held by Moravian refugees that lasted 125 years. Inspired, 272 years later, Greig planned a weeklong twenty-four-hour-a-day prayer meeting to be held that September in England, Greig's homeland. The meeting started off rocky, but after the first night of constant prayer, “word soon spread that the best slots were the ones in the middle of the night.” He writes, “In that timeless zone, between 2 and 4 AM, there was often an electric sense that you were keeping watch alone with God . . . the momentum grew as people became more immersed in the reality of what meeting God in that room could mean.” Hence, 24-7 Prayer was born. As the movement grew rapidly, Greig realized that this was the army he had envisioned in Portugal years before—an army of young people praying to God on the whole world's behalf.

Today, temporary prayer meetings are held for weeklong increments in up to forty-six different locations worldwide at any given time, from Kentucky to Sweden to South America. There's also an ongoing version, called “boiler rooms,” which serve as pseudo-churches whose doors are open all the time, without exception. On top of that, there is a strong emphasis within the 24-7 Prayer movement on spreading the word of God in the streets. Many of them evangelize in party towns like Ibiza, where there is an incredible concentration of what they call “immoral” behavior going on. And for every seven hours of prayer, a participant is asked to do one hour of community service. 24-7 Prayer's website organizes all of these events—boiler rooms, prayer rooms, evangelistic missions—and it is visited by over two million people every month, a number directly equivalent to those who go to Oprah.com. I find it hard to believe myself, but what this means is that there won't be a week, a day, an hour where someone won't be praying in a prayer room until . . . well, it's anybody's guess. The movement's growth shows no sign of slowing down.

As someone who has hardly ever prayed to God—and even then with little conviction—I had to wonder what it is about the act that ignites such excitement and spiritual passion in these young people. What I gathered from the testimonies of participants in 24-7 Prayer is that prayer leads to a direct communion with God—a communion that transcends denomination or personal history and is therefore capable of uniting everyone who takes part. The authors of Red Moon Rising believe that as more and more of today's youth discover the power of prayer, this collective ongoing communion will ultimately transform the world. “In the prayer room, we pick up God's mannerisms; we grow in His likeness. We actually become the answer to many of our prayers. And of course that's the greatest miracle of all.” Such passages inspired real amazement in me. Here was a movement that resulted in transformation, unabashedly claiming it could save the world by creating a collective force of positivity, and they said so without a trace of the cynicism, doubt, or irony so typically pervasive in the voices of young people.

The book's title, Red Moon Rising, comes from the Old Testament Book of Joel, which prophesies, “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered” (Joel 2:31–32). The authors refer to this passage in their preface: “Such a moon rises over every generation awaiting the one that will finally fulfill the Great Commission, taking the good news of Jesus to every culture and ushering in the kingdom of heaven.” I would be lying if I said I didn't have a hard time relating to these kinds of ideas. Like most in my generation, I too have a built-in defense mechanism against what Zengotita called “the possibility of being duped,” and the idea that the “Great Commission” entails bringing Jesus to every culture in order to ensure their salvation so that they can be delivered at the time of the Apocalypse sounds off an alarm bell in me. But Red Moon Rising's concepts of salvation and intercession raise more important questions that go beyond my mere discomfort with them; weren't they partly the reason Christianity had become so, well, irrelevant to many young people in the first place? And at this stage, weren't they seen as out of touch with the contemporary culture most of us have grown up in?

When I finally had the opportunity to interview Greig and Roberts, I asked them. “How do you respond to young people who have grown up with a postmodern worldview, and who would see the 24-7 Prayer movement as regressive?” Greig replied, “I understand the cynicism towards institutional and oppressive religious structures. But I am forced to conclude that the gospel is as dangerous and dazzling in the twenty-first century as it was for a first-century leper, St. Francis of Assisi, or Martin Luther King. Surely the keys to our future lie buried in the rich soil of the past.” “But,” I had to ask, “do you really think Christianity is the only way to respond to the trials of the twenty-first century, despite the fact that it is a two-thousand-year-old tradition, and that such an attitude would be viewed as fundamentalist by many in our generation?” Responding rhetorically, Roberts said, “Where are we going to discover a philosophy for the twenty-first century? Will it be a brand-new insight from a new source? I am not convinced that there are new insights to be found, nor that any generation would have the perspective and intellectual depth to fully evaluate such claims.”

THE MORNING OF OUR LIVES

What does it take to create change, to shift a mood? Zengotita said to me, “You can't force a historical moment into existence. The talent is always there, and there are just some moments where things start to swim into focus. But if the moment's not right, you can strain and strain and you're not going to lay an egg. When it's ready to happen, then it will start happening.” If ever there was a right or ready moment, it's now. Tired of irony, hungry for the real, young people are poised on the brink of change, our quiescent potential beginning to stir restlessly. Can these two books help us to manifest it? Can they aid in this gargantuan task?

I think Noah Levine spoke for many of us when he honestly proclaimed during our interview, “When I look at the world, I don't see an easy solution. So I feel like I'm happy working one-on-one. Do I feel I can inspire a generation, or save the world? . . . I don't have those sorts of goals really.” Indeed, Dharma Punx will speak to those of us who are moved by his brand of compassionate realism. But as our future grows darker, it may be crucial that we make the effort to reevaluate what we're actually capable of.

Where Dharma Punx refuses to go, Red Moon Rising blazes forth. In many ways, it looks like the solution we may be waiting for: the 24-7 Prayer movement has indeed transcended young people's postmodern condition by awakening a positive force inspired by the Divine and creating a collective movement among the young mobilized under one goal. But is the goal of our generation as a whole really to usher in the return of Jesus? In the twenty-first century, it's not salvation we're concerned with, but how to respond to the world conditions we're facing. And these may indeed require new insights, and new solutions.

Shortly after I finished reading these books, a friend told me I should speak with the youth leader Ocean Robbins. I knew that Ocean had started the nonprofit Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!) when he was only sixteen years old, and had been an activist nearly all his thirty-two years. But as he wrote in Radical Spirit, he also puts enormous emphasis on the importance of having a spiritual foundation in life. When we spoke together I asked Ocean what this spiritual foundation could look like for young people in this day and age. He replied, “I think that the gap between the beauty of what's possible and the pain of what's taking place is where our challenge lies. It's our call to action. Living a spiritual life today means living by the awareness of both the world as it is and the infinite possibility of humanity.” In many ways, the question of how to respond to the future is a matter of how squarely our generation can stand in this “gap” that Ocean describes.

In the face of such a challenge, we could resort to our hyper-apathy, our habitually ironic defense mechanisms, no matter how unbearable they've become. But I can't help but think how ironic it is that the most rebellious thing we could do is believe that things can change, that new original possibilities are available to us if we aspire to manifest them. As the vanguard generation, faced with the potential for untold devastation, we have to.