By Jackson Posey | Sports Writer, Kaitlin Sides | LTVN Executive Producer
Hand-painted tapestries and colorful banners line the inside of the largest prayer tent in FM72’s history.
LTVN’s Kaitlin Sides discusses how the idea for FM72’s prayer tent came about.
The 9,600-square-foot canopy is carpeted with turf and lit by lamps and string lights. Prayer request cards and pens dot the room. A minimal collection of instruments and speakers sit up front for a rotating cast of worship leaders. On Sunday night, the massive space was completely packed with students who spilled out into the dark night beyond.
“[The tent] has basically grown by a third every year,” Drew Humphrey, a prayer tent leader and college pastor at Highland Baptist Church, said. “I feel like every year, however big we make the tent is how many people come to the tent and stay in the tent.”
Organizers estimate that around 3,000 students showed up for the kickoff service, which featured extended worship, student testimonies and a message from Lisa Koons, the mission and justice director of the 24-7 Prayer Movement USA. Nearly a third of those in attendance for the service migrated across the field to the overflowing prayer tent.
Those numbers — and the expansive white structure that stands today — would’ve been nearly unfathomable seven years ago, when Baptist Student Ministries first set up a 10 by 10-foot tent for a prayer vigil, then-Baylor BSM director Charles Ramsey, who now works in the university’s spiritual life department, said.
“[Texas BSMs] have a once-a-year prayer focus, where they will set up a tent,” Ramsey said. “People will take turns and they’ll pray through the night. … And the hope is that in doing this, students will go deeper in prayer, but they’ll also bond in being out there all night. They’ll meet new people, and it’s kind of a public statement.”
Baylor had never participated in FM72 before, but in 2018, one year before FM72 began, a new team member named Will Bowden decided to change that. The only problem? Baylor didn’t have a tent.
“We borrowed the [tent] from Tyler, Texas,” Ramsey said. “A handful of us stayed all night and we had the best time ever. I can’t believe how quickly it went. It was like, ‘Where did the hours go?’ I didn’t know I had so much to talk about with God or that we could actually do that. … We came out of it at peace and filled with hope and filled with joy.”
Bowden later filled Ramsey’s old post as BSM director. As FM72 took off, that 10 by 10 prayer tent was never needed again.
“The first year, there were these three tiny tents that you probably wouldn’t even want to tailgate out of — they were so small,” Humphrey said. “So few people were really praying, in terms of daily or rhythmically with their churches, that very few people attended.”
Over the years, rather than a side attraction, the prayer tent has become FM72’s “central thing,” with dozens of students worshipping well beyond midnight, Humphrey said.
“That’s why it’s grown from being these three tiny little tailgating tents to now this nearly 10,000-square-foot tent that we’re sitting in now,” Humphrey said.
Baylor’s history with prayer tents began in the 1940s, when the student organizers of the Waco Youth Revivals used them extensively for revival services. Early planning meetings spawned a humorous interaction between student M.D. Oates and Bob Denny, director of the Baptist Student Union (now BSM).
“We’ll need some money from the administration to pay for the expenses,” Oates said, as recorded in an oral history interview from Denny. “For advertising and maybe a tent, and I don’t know what else.”
“Let’s see if I understand what you’re saying,” Denny said. “You want a revival, but you want someone else to pay for it?”
Today, the Baylor administration is much friendlier to the idea of paying for tents. According to Humphrey, the student government has paid as much as 40 to 50% of expenses some years. Local college ministries chip in, too — Highland’s college ministry gave 15% of its annual budget this year — and individual donations make up the rest.
But the focus of organizers isn’t on the turf, which it cobbles together from various sources, or the physical tent itself. It isn’t on the stage or the lights that illuminate it. It isn’t on decorations, though the design team had a 72-hour sprint of its own before Sunday’s grand opening. Even as logistics become more complex, the team’s year-round emphasis remains on prayer, Ramsey said.
“There’s something about learning how to pray that’s different,” Ramsey said. “There’s something about lingering in prayer. There’s something about having this consecrated space where I’m going there with the intention — I think that intentionality’s very important — this intention to go pray. That is different and it’s very special.”
