Organizers of seventh annual Global Day of Prayer say hundreds of millions of Christians in over 200 nations participated this past weekend in the collective prayer event on Pentecost Sunday.
From the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to a broadcasted arena in downtown Dallas to packed churches in South Korea, Christians worldwide united to pray for global revival of the faith and intervention from God in global problems such as war, terrorism, poverty, natural disasters among other pressing issues.
"Prayer is that phenomenon that's hard to explain," said the Rev. Michael Jones of Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis, Mo., ahead of the GDOP gathering.
"It's out of our hands. God intervenes, and things happen," Jones told St. Louis' North Side Journal. The Baptist pastor served as one of the coordinating board members of the St. Louis event.
GDOP began as a small gathering in a stadium in Cape Town, South Africa in 2000. It blossomed into 45,000 Christians meeting in a rugby stadium in Cape Town a year later.
Now more than 200 million people participate in over 200 countries, GDOP organizers report.
One of the featured events this year was the team that climbed to the top of Africa's highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, reaching the summit on Pentecost Sunday. GDOP founder Graham Power and 47 others made the trip where they planted a cross and prayed for repentance and revival on the summit, according to Charisma News.
Detailed statistics for this year's Global Day of Prayer are still being assembled. But while GDOP organizers told The Christian Post that it currently is "absolutely impossible" to report how many people participated since only a tenth of the feedback from registered events have been received, they said they can safely say that hundreds of millions joined the annual prayer event.