It seems that all the time that Tony Perkins has spent hanging out with Lou Engle, founder of "The Call," has given him a brilliant new idea: he should do the exact same thing!
I mentioned Perkins' new Call 2 Fall effort yesterday, but didn't really know much about what it was supposed to do. But today he and his partners - including Richard Land, Wellington Boone, and Harry Jackson - held a conference call to explain it:
Churches and individuals are invited to answer the Call 2 Fall on Sunday, July 5. The initiative is aimed at praying for the healing of America and declaring dependence on God immediately after celebrating the nation's independence from Great Britain.
"It's incumbent upon the church to assume the responsibility for where the nation is and leading us forward, not from a political standpoint but from a spiritual standpoint," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said. "If the spiritual things are in order, the political things seem to be a lot easier to solve."
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Family Research Council has set a goal of seeing 8 million Christians in 40,000 churches participate in Call 2 Fall, and church leaders are encouraged to offer their buildings as host sites July 5. FRC will publish an online directory of those churches so that people will know where they can participate.
Observances can take several forms, Perkins said, from a three- to five-minute period during a worship service when people would get on their knees and pray to a full day of praying and expressing dependence on God. Those who commit to participate will receive periodic e-mails linking to resources such as free devotionals, inspirational videos, sermon outlines, bulletin inserts and prayer suggestions.
"From homosexual 'marriage' to proposed curbs on religious speech, there are serious matters for the church to address humbly and with great earnestness before God," Perkins said.
While Perkins insisted that this was not a political effort, Harry Jackson saw it a bit differently, suggesting that it might be the beginning of a new "civil rights movement" aimed at fighting the oppression of Christians:
"What we need is something like the civil rights movement of the last century that brought liberty and freedom to African Americans as a discriminated people in the nation," Jackson said. "We need to recognize that if we do not ... aggressively seek God in these spiritual things, the Christian community is going to be an oppressed people, discriminated against and put down by this culture that God has ordained that we turn around."
Land, Boone, and Perkins all explained that this was an effort to get the nation to humble itself before God and create a nationwide spiritual awakening ... which is pretty much what Engle's own "The Call" has been trying to do for years.
But apparently Engle's efforts just weren't cutting it and so Perkins and company decided to start doing their own.
