Check out the brand new Holy Ground App (available for both Apple and Android products). This easy-to-use, free application, cocreated by 24-7 Prayer USA and Civil Righteousness, allows you to record your prayer walks directly onto a map of your city. If you choose to, you can even share your route on the map, which allows other prayer walkers to see what territory has been covered in prayer!
Want to know what’s especially prophetic, redemptive and just plain cool about how it traces your route? It uses a red line!
Screen shot from a recent Pray for the Lou Prayer Walk
near Fairground Park, North City.
If you know anything about urban American history, you know that for decades, banks, politicians, and real estate companies would “redline” certain communities on their maps to designate which areas non-whites were allowed to live. (City maps literally outlined these neighborhoods by using red lines. See image below.) These redlined neighborhoods tended to become overpopulated and had lower quality housing and schooling options. Even when people of color had the finances to move to other areas, these redlines represented legal red tape that often prohibited their move to “nicer,” more spacious neighborhoods with higher quality, better-funded schools. Although redlining no longer legally exists, those formerly redlined neighborhoods still often bare the decaying fruit of present day neglect, crime, under-funded schools, and issues such as food deserts and predatory businesses.
Historic map of St. Louis with "redlined" neighborhoods.
How cool is it that the Holy Ground App is using redlines to trace people’s prayer walks across the world? Although I don't think the creators' choice of color was intended to be understood in the way I have described above, I really believe it's accidentally prophetic. And frankly, it makes me want to SHOUT! (Excuse me while I take a lap! Jesus!!)
Just take a moment to meditate on the prophetic significance of believers across the globe who are intentionally “redlining” their communities through prayer, applying the redemptive power of the blood of Jesus to the brokenness of their communities as their feet walk along the streets. An image that once represented systemic division between ethnicities, is now being redeemed to boldly declare that, “The blood of Jesus speaks a better word”* than racism, injustice, and division…..and depression, addiction, perversion, sickness, broken families, etc.
When you do go out to prayer walk, remember to use the free Holy Ground App and prophetically and redemptively “redline” (with the Blood Line of Jesus!) your neighborhood in prayer today!
Prayer Walking Ferguson's infamous Canfield Drive
during Pray for the Lou Day, March 2023.
*Hebrews 12:24
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