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The following story by Melanie Johnson of Wellington Boone Ministries gives additional details on the Wall Street prayer meetings that are the subject of the CBN broadcast.

In New York City, Pastor Bruce Berliner of the Fellowship of International Churches has taken the bold step of facilitating a weekly prayer meeting of about 120 individuals on Wall Street at noon every Wednesday. The prayer meetings last as long as three hours each time.

Significantly, those meetings are located at 90 Williams Street, only three blocks away from the Fulton Street location where Jeremiah Lanphier, a New York City businessman seeking the will of God for his generation, cried out from a small room in an obscure NYC church, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?” The prayer meeting is also just three blocks from Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center, and directly across the street from the Federal Reserve.

On September 23, 1857, Lanphier began noonday prayer meetings with a handful of businessmen. Within months more than 20 noonday prayer meetings were being held daily throughout the city. The timing of Lanphiere's revival of prayer was strategic to the welfare of the nation during one of its darkest hours. Less than three weeks after the first meeting, a great financial panic swept Wall Street on October 12, 1857, as banks failed, railroads went bankrupt, and businesses closed their doors.

Was the financial devastation a sign of the judgment needed to finally turn America back to God again? One thing is certain. The prayer meetings began to spread like wildfire across the country and the globe. And what has been referred to by many as “The Last American Awakening” continued through the Civil War and ended in 1865.

Pastor Bruce said that his noonday prayer meetings near the site of the first Lanphier meeting are taking place in the basement of Faith Evangelistic Mission, pastored by the Rev. Leighton Smith. The meetings are strongly reminiscent of that small prayer band of 1857, he said.

“Psalm 127 admonishes us,” said Pastor Bruce, ‘unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that build it.' I believe that God has us strategically positioned in the basement just blocks away from where the foundation will be laid for the new World Trade Center. What is happening now is that a spiritual foundation is being laid before the new structure is erected so that it can stand.”

Pastor Bruce described the front of the church where the new Wall Street prayer meetings are being held. “On the awning is an image of a cobblestone wall that represents what Wall Street looked like in 1857. Adjacent to that is the image of a modern brick wall. Running down the middle of that wall is a crack that indicates the breaking of the wall. It is a visual image of the statement that Jesus is breaking down the walls of partition.

“The noonday prayer meetings at Faith Evangelistic Mission that are going on right now are the foundation for the sort of building program that was led by Nehemiah. A placard on the front of the church reads, ‘So we built the wall . . . for the people had a mind to work' (Nehemiah 4:6).”

When God prepares a nation for repentance and revival through judgment, and bold men and women of God are willing to declare His judgment, God already has a people in place who are ready to rebuild—not by might nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord' (Zechariah 4:6).