The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | New Monument Will Honor Jesus Christ's Power With Wall of Answered Prayer

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

On today's show, Tyler O'Neil sits down with Richard Gamble, founder of the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. Gamble speaks about his project to erect an immense monument to prayers that God has answered, both in history and recently, in England. The structure will consist of one million bricks, each tied to an answered prayer. Visitors can look up the prayers on their phones by scanning each brick. He has the land and 90% of the funding for the project.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Sineal podcast for Wednesday, June 14th. I'm Virginia Allen. And if you're having a little bit of a rough week, we are bringing you some hope and encouragement this morning, which I'm pretty excited about. In England, a man by the name of Richard Gamble is building a wall of answered prayers. Gamble is the founder of the eternal wall of answered prayers. It's a project to erect an immense monument to present. prayer that God has answered, both in history and recently. The structure, again, will be located in England and will consist of one million bricks, each tied to an answered prayer, and visitors can then look up each of the prayers on their phone by scanning a brick. Gamble already has land and 90% of the funding for the project. Tyler O'Neill sat down with Gamble at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention to hear more about this amazing project that honors the power of prayer. Stay tuned for that conversation after this. Feeling overwhelmed by the crisis at our southern border, then get up to speed with a new season of Heritage Explains.

Our first episode with Heritage Border expert Laura Rees is available now, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal, and I'm joined by Richard Gamble, founder of the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer. Really excited by this project. I love to hear you say more about it. Yeah, thank you for having me. So this is a plan to build a national landmark about Jesus in the United Kingdom. And the Eternal Wall is a giant infinity loop, which is about the size of a football. pitch. It's white. It arches 167 meters, 167 feet rather, into the skyline. But the thing about it is,

is every single brick represents a story of answered prayer. And people will be able to come. They'll be able to point their phones at any one of the bricks on this structure, and their phone will light up, and it will tell them a story of hope, a story of when somebody has prayed to Jesus and how he's answered. And our hope is that we are going to build a globally known landmark so that all over the world, people will be Googling it and finding these million stories of answered prayer. And it's a way for us to make hope visible.

And how big is this database that you're working with? I mean, are we talking prayers like the prayers of perpetua to the present, or are we talking like mostly modern prayers? No, we've got a team, a separate team that are gathering all the prayers. We're sort of, you know, from as early as we can go. We uncovered one the other day from 500 AD in Scotland where somebody prayed for a young boy to be raised from the dead and he came back to life.

And so we're trying to capture all these stories. We've got stories of martyrs praying for peace before, you know, before the day they were killed. and people recording how peaceful they look the following day, you know. So we're trying to get around 75,000 prayers from history, and then we're just asking people to share it with the current generation. But once we get to a million, that'll be great, but because it's all digital, we can then put two stories of answer prayer on a brick

and go for two million. And the idea is of this never being a dead monument. It needs to be a living monument that is continually telling people that Jesus is still alive and he's working in our modern day and he answers prayer. So how does the team corroborate the answers of prayer? I mean, I think this is an amazing idea, but people also want to know that these prayers really were answered. Yeah, and of course that is the great challenge, isn't it? I mean, a lot of stories of answer prayers are subjective.

You know, some people, we had one person who said he prayed for God to give him a singing voice. Well, I've watched enough of American Idol to know that not everybody who thinks they've got a singing voice has actually got one. But for me, then, it's a piece of art. And so we've built in some fail safes to make sure that nobody is abusing the system and making sure that it's clean in that respect. But of course, prayer is always, there's elements sometimes. Some of the answer prayers are, you know, undeniable. You know, somebody prayed. We've got one story of somebody who had cancer and a lot of people were praying for them.

And the surgeon was going to cut out the tumor and the tumor shrunk before his eyes. You know, and stuff like that, you know, that's undeniable. But of course, some of the answer prayers are around character. God gave me wisdom. God helped me love my wife more than ever, you know. And I think those are equally as important. So we can't go through all of them. We just want to need to make sure that the system is not abused.

Yeah, of course. And this is a monument in England. Are you a member of the Church of England? Or is it affiliated with any specific Christian denomination? Yeah. Well, it's interesting. So God told me about this 19 years. years ago and I'm part of an independent church and I think that's been a good move by God to be

honest because you know in a in two weeks time we've got 130 leaders of UK churches all gathering together to pray a blessing on the land and I think if I was in one denomination then you know people like oh we don't want to get involved because that denomination so I think that was part of his, part of his strategy really and involving me. And so that's in two weeks, you have, are there any notable names that you would mention that are going to be there? Yeah, I mean, I mean, so, you know, people like Mike Royal who took part in the coronation, you know, different bishops and archdeacons, and, you know, we've got the whole range of churches

because we should be able to unite on this fact. We believe in prayer. but it's not just a UK thing. So we've got out of these 100,000, sorry, out of these million prayers, we've got 100,000, which are for the United States. So we're trying to get people from the States

to give us five minutes of their time, come onto our website, EternalWall.org. And just share a story of answer prayer because the exciting thing of this project is the power in the testimony and the fact that people who read this are going to be inspired and they're going to read this

in 10 years time, in 50 years time, in 100 years time. This monument is not going to go away. Yeah, that's inspiring. When it comes to choosing to have a digital, you know, I think it's funny because when you say having it a concrete monument, well, not built out of concrete, but a physical monument and then you use a phone to illuminate it.

You know, we like to think current technology is always going to be here, but it may not. I mean, I think of Pokemon Go, for instance, which used a somewhat similar geolocation thing and it has had a falling off. How do you anticipate, and of course this is a hard question to answer,

but how do you anticipate changing with the technology? So the first thing is we're not building any technology into the monument because the moment you do it's out of date. And so the idea is initially we'll start with an app. And obviously technology is going to keep moving forward. The business model for this pays for itself and some. So we can always be making sure that we've got some money in the background to take the next technological push. so who knows what we'll be doing maybe we've got Google glasses

who knows maybe there'll be implants in 50 years but we'll make sure that we've got the funding to make sure that we're keeping in step with technology and that's really important because we want to use this monument to communicate to the younger generation that Jesus is alive so from Monday to Friday

I would imagine this is going to be filled with schools and colleges coming to look and my hope and prayer is that, you know, a 13-year-old girl in Peru, she can go and she can look at these stories, you know, in her own home, and she'll be able to Google, okay, well, has God answered any prayers in Peru? And then she'll be able to see all the Peru stories, or has God answered any prayer for a 13-year-old girl in the issues that she's challenged with, and she'll be able to see all those stories.

And it's a real way for us to say to the younger generation, hey, God is still in your space and Jesus is still answering. I've heard that the project is about 90% funded. Are you accepting private donations? You are saying that it would pay for itself? What do you mean by that? Yeah. So the answer is yes, we're 90% funded and yes, please, we still need more donations, you know.

And I think it's also part important. We're collecting donations from the public and wealthy individuals of putting some chunks to get us where we are. But I think it's really powerful to tell the world that when we get up and when we open, to be able to say, hey, we've got 100,000 people have backed this.

That's a story in itself. And in terms of how we're funding going on, you know, the business model, most landmarks, you know, people are visiting all the time. We'll charge for car park and stuff like that. We'd develop this so the maintenance costs are low in terms of the structure. And so we believe by year five, we reckon we're going to be making about 700K a year. And some of that will be for legacy funding moving forward,

and the rest of it is going to go into other Christian charities and good works. So which charities would you be looking to partner with? in that case. I mean, naturally, it's further down the line, but are there any you have in mind? Well, one of one element is social housing. So we want to fund over a million bricks into social housing around the world. So it'd be really cool that not only we've got a million bricks here, but bricks all over the world, sort of helping the poor. But then I also want to make sure that we, that we, uh, we help people who've also got crazy God ideas. and help them get things off the ground.

This has been 19 years. It's been a hard journey. And my real hope is that for the young generation, they'll go, gosh, if God can get that bloke and these rag-tagged bunch of people to build a landmark, he can definitely help me with my dream, and we hope it's going to inspire them too. Wow.

Well, that's very inspiring. Would you, so where can people go again to submit prayers, to see, to help. So if you can help us, you're going to help us change the world, and your testimony is going to last for a long time. So please give us five minutes. Go to eternal wall.us and share as many stories as you've got of the times that you've prayed and Jesus has answered.

Amen. Well, thank you so much, Richard Gamble, for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Hopefully you all are walking away from the conversation today, a little bit encouraged on this Wednesday. Thanks for joining us here at the Daily Signal Podcast. And if you haven't had the chance, be sure to check out our evening show.

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