When Karen Braun was 10 years old and living in Regina, her family and church were caught up in the revival that swept across the Prairies in the early 1970s. It was during that tumultuous time, she recalls, that God gave her a vision of a map of Canada.

“I saw a flame that began in the centre of that map begin to engulf the map. I understood instinctively that what I was seeing God do [was] revival, transforming people’s lives [and] what I knew He wanted to do for our nation,” says Braun, who now directs Mothers Who Care, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.

“It is through our prayers, as we cry out to God, that He brings transformation to our world.”

Braun is by no means alone in that conviction. In August, 2005, she and more than 30 other leaders representing about two dozen Christian ministries met for three days in Mississauga, Ontario, out of a shared desire to unite respective groups in prayer.

What the Lord gave them, says David Macfarlane, national ministries leader of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), was a burden to pray specifically that Canada as a nation would be won to Christ.

“We pray for a lot of other things—they’re all valid and important and we support them—but this was a gap that was not being filled,” he says. “And so we thought if we could get everyone in every prayer movement praying for the lost, it’s going to have an effect…across the country.”

Women Alive president Margaret Gibb had planned to leave the gathering early to fulfil a prior commitment. “But the sense of God was so great…that I actually cancelled my [other] meeting,” she says. “I honestly couldn’t leave, it was so inspiring and so great.”

“Right out of the gate, as we were just germinating the idea,” says Lyndell Enns, director of communications for Alpha Ministries Canada. People responded with “a very favourable ‘Yes, we need this,’ ‘Yes, this is the time,’ ‘Yes, if Canada is going to be transformed, it will have to be God who does it.’”

And so the 40-Day Prayer Ramp was birthed, a joint initiative by national prayer groups calling Christians to pray for Canada. It begins on May 3 and runs until June 11.

Gibb remembers it was Alpha Canada president Sally Start who suggested the name, “because a ramp leads to something. And of course, we want this to lead to evangelism and outreach.”

Macfarlane adds, “The goal was not to create anything new. We simply want to get existing prayer movements to focus for 40 days on evangelism.”

In fact, the dates were chosen to mesh with several other prayer initiatives scheduled during the same six-week period—Women Alive’s Heal Our Land Prayer Wave across Canada on May 6, 10 days of 24/7 Prayer and Fasting beginning May 26, the EFC’s Celebration 2006 between May 27 and June 11 and the Global Day of Prayer on June 4.

Most of the effort since the August meeting has gone into planning, building a website and assembling resources.

For example, Alpha is offering a small book entitled The Church On Its Knees by Jeremy Jennings—“an excellent help for drawing people to prayer,” says Enns.

Mothers Who Care is donating various “prayer power tools,” including the ACTS prayer guides for two or more people. “For our ministry,” says Braun, “it’s been [used to pray] for the school system. But we have marketplace people using it…It could be used anywhere. We realize we can share this, so it’s available online and in hard copy.”

Certainly the greatest resource will be people praying. Apart from encouraging their own constituencies to participate, most of the partners will also host daily prayer conference calls.

“These will have up to 100 people from various corners of the country praying,” says Enns. “There’s one to two calls each day for the 40 days, and they’re scheduled on a weekly basis, so a call that Alpha might host, for example, will happen six or seven times throughout the 40 days.”

Among those committing to pray, Gibb suspects women will likely outnumber men. “Women naturally find prayer easier than men. And I think it’s because women are so relational and because they’re nurturers. It’s just part of their being,” she says.

Gibb is nonetheless challenging men’s ministries such as Promise Keepers Canada to also take part in the prayer ramp, “because I think that would make a major statement if Promise Keepers was involved.”

Still, there is a general sense among the 40-Day Prayer Ramp partners that they see evidence of what Macfarlane calls “a rising tide of prayer” across Canada.

“Like prayer movements out in B.C., which just started to happen and took on a life of their own, we have charismatic-type prayer movements, citywide interchurch prayer movements andthe more traditional churches with prayer movements starting up,” he says. “I’m very encouraged by that.”

“There was a very strong sense to pray way back in the early 1980s, and I believe that tide is coming back and it’s very strong,” says Gibb. “I really believe that there’s an awareness that…Canada’s in trouble and we need to pray.”

Braun also senses “an increasing hunger” for God. “There has been an increased urgency and fervency and travail that I have witnessed in the last probably four, five years that is significant,” she says.

To learn more, visit www.40dayprayerramp.com.