Call to prayer

The coping mechanisms come out like shiny packages from Santa’s sleigh. In times of holiday distress and family dysfunction, some people stuff their faces with honey ham, some drown their sorrows in grocery-store merlot. Others turn to God.

It’s no secret that church attendance increases this time of year, but not all stray sheep are comfortable returning to the flock. For these folks, one option is dial-a-prayer, 24-hour telephone hotlines that provide recorded or live devotions to those in need. “Think of it as a religious 911,” says Teresa Frank, who answers calls for healing, prosperity and relationship guidance on the prayer line of the Followers of Christ International Outreach (773-785-5592), headquartered in Roseland. “Prayer is an emergency—someone needs help right then and there,” Frank says. “Luckily, there’s always someone available.”

Frank and other Chicagoans connected with dial-a-prayer services tell us they see call volume spike during the holidays. “There’s such a sort of social inertia about being happy and joyous on Christmas that for people who might be blue, there aren’t a lot of places to express that,” explains the Rev. Kurt Condra of Evanston’s Unity Church on the North Shore, which pushes New Age–y takes on Christianity. At the end of Unity’s weekly recorded-prayer message (847-328-6123), devotees can leave their number requesting a “prayer chaplain” call back for a live, one-on-one phone session.

Pastor Richard Heinz, whose calming baritone can be heard on the dial-a-prayer ministry of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Portage Park (773-736-1166), theorizes that the telephone for some people is more appealing than attending church because a call is noncommittal. “For some people, it’s a first step in getting back in the habit of coming back to church,” Heinz says. “It may just be that they’re not at a point to be a regular participant in coming to worship, yet they feel someone needs to be praying for them.” Callers leave their pleas—recently they ranged from a cancer-stricken woman requesting prayer for health to a mother’s concern about her sons serving in the Middle East—which get published in the weekly bulletin. Then 30 parishioners in the church’s “prayer chain” pray separately on the caller’s behalf.

“There’s a couple families that always leave us messages, so we get to know them. Not personally, but by their prayers,” says St. John’s office manager and prayer-chain member Debbie Wheeler. “Sometimes, it’s pretty heavy stuff. There’s drug abuse, sexual abuse—and it goes down to ‘Pray that I get the job.’ Recently, a woman asked we pray for her daughter and son-in-law who are living on the street.”

The origin of dial-a-prayers can be traced back to 1907, when the Unity Church’s parent organization, the Kansas City, Missouri–based Silent Unity, opened a telephone line to supplement its by-mail prayer ministry. Today, Silent Unity fields about 2.5 million calls a year. As part of his training to become a Unity minister, Condra spent 18 months in Silent Unity’s Kansas City call center “giving emergency first-aid to the spirit,” answering 1-800-PRAY-NOW requests for eight hours a day alongside 50 associates.

The claim for the longest-running independent dial-a-prayer is held by Pastor R.R. Schwambach of the nondenominational Bethel Temple Community Church in Evansville, Indiana, 300 miles south of Chicago. Since Thanksgiving 1955, Schwambach, now 84, has been recording a daily message on Dial-A-Prayer (812-473-PRAY). R.R.’s son Steve Schwambach, Bethel Temple’s current pastor, estimates the line gets 1,000 calls a week. “We’ve heard of several suicides that have been averted because of Dad’s prayers,” Steve says. “God’s even big enough to work through our technology, which must seem pretty limited from his perspective.”

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