Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
November-December 1997 – “The locusts in the book of the prophet Joel, chapter two, are, in my opinion, an analogy for the progressive deterioration that results from unrepented sin,” said Willis Lucroy, 42, as 17 men sitting in an otherwise empty church listened intently.
It was 11 p.m., and this group from Morton, Mississippi, was about to embark on its 18-hour bus ride to Washington, D.C. There, they would meet with hundreds of thousands of other men on the Washington Mall on Saturday, October 4, to take part in a sacred assembly to repent of their sins and pray for revival. Appropriately called Stand in the Gap, the gathering had been called by Promise Keepers (PK), the Christian men’s movement that has seen its attendance at events skyrocket from just 72 men in its first meeting in 1990 to over one million last year.
Like so many men who have taken part in Promise Keepers events since its inception, Lucroy is not a preacher. He is director of finance and risk management at BC Rogers Poultry, Inc., in Morton. Lucroy taught the men about the terrible destructiveness of locusts that have plagued the Middle East for thousands of years, and how wave after wave would strip fields of every last vestige of produce. When sin is left in our lives, he said, it does the same thing: it strips Christians of their fruitfulness for Christ. The men responded by praying for one another to overcome whatever “locusts” plagued their personal lives. An hour later, their long trek to the nation’s capitol began.
They were joined by men from every state in the U.S. and almost 60 nations, traveling in cars, on buses, and on more than 175 charter planes. As the innumerable journeys across varied terrain were underway, many of the men who arrived in Washington had already begun their spiritual journeys. Whether it had started months ago or hours before, they had been asking God to search their hearts, that they might repent of the sins that had kept them from being the men of God they were called to be.
Glen Crotwell, 43, a pastor from Morton, had attended numerous PK events in the past. He had begun his spiritual journey more than a decade before. “Ever since about 1984 when I heard a series of sermons saying there’s a new wave of revival coming,I’ve been really praying, ‘Lord,I don’t want to miss what you’re doing. I want to be right in the middle of it.’ And that’s been a constant theme in my heart,” he said. And Crotwell believes Stand in the Gap is part of that wave.
Once in Washington, the ocean of Godly men generated tremendous excitement, as attendees felt that the gathering was a sovereign act of God. Paul Konstanski, 41, who works with Campus Crusade for Christ in Bloomington, Indiana, was at the Promise Keepers event and held high hopes for what Stand in the Gap might portend for the nation as a whole.
“I’d love to just see it be the start of revival. I mean, I’ve been a part of small, little things that have happened where I’ve seen God’s Spirit move in a special way, and you just can’t describe it,” Konstanski said. “And I’d love to be able to see that happen on a nationwide basis, that it would just start a spark here that would go on, to take it back to different churches and different communities.”
Promise Keepers certainly has its detractors, and in the days prior to October 4 many were stridently warning that PK was downright dangerous. The Humanist magazine, for example, called the men who attend Promise Keepers gatherings “storm troopers in the culture war,” as if the PK leadership was intent on raising an army of holy warriors for a Christian jihad. And the National Organization for Women (NOW) screeched about the “chilling” agenda of Promise Keepers, which was nothing less than an “ultra-conservative social and political” blueprint to hurl America back into the Dark Ages of patriarchal dominance.
But for Bobby Jenkins, 40, who owns a car repair business in Morton, politics was not why he was in Washington. “I’m not here to make a political statement, I’m here to make a personal commitment, to humble myself before a living God,” he said. “We realize we cannot change this country in our own strength, but we have to depend on God to change it.”
For Jim White, 39, a state trooper from Wakefield, New Hampshire, if there was any statement being made, it was a spiritual one. “My prayer is that this is a turning point, that this is a day where America sits up and takes notice of men who are concerned with families and men who love the Lord,” White said.
As Lucroy had said, the prophet Joel warned Israel of a coming plague of locusts that would strip her lands of their sustenance if God’s people did not repent: “‘Yet even now,’ declares the Lord, ‘Return to Me with all your heart, and with fasting, weeping and mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments....’”
In the capitol of a nation that has left God, Christian men of different races, tongues and denominations stood before the Lord on the grassy mall stretching from the building where legislators pass our laws; past the Smithsonian Institute, the National Gallery of Art, and the Air and Space Museum; past the Washington Monument; to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
For more than six hours, these men who had traveled so far, both geographically and spiritually, worshipped God, listened to the preaching of His Word, and prayed. Many had been and were fasting. When the Promise Keepers leadership called for repentance, thousands and thousands of men literally fell on their faces asking for God’s forgiveness. On the grass and underneath the trees, with hands spread out before them or tightly clasped in quiet desperation, men cried out to God in their own way: some wept openly, others whispered their prayers, still others petitioned their Sovereign in silence.
There, in our nation’s capitol, was the sound of men rending their hearts before God, a sound that could be heard throughout the nation, around the world, and before the very throne of God. 
