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After six Mid-South ministers finished praying for Memphis yesterday alongside the Mississippi River, they didn’t ask the 100 or so people who attended for a monetary offering.

They asked them for a spiritual one.

They asked the crowd to pray for the city; a place which continues to be the nation’s second poorest and according to 24/7 Wall Street, now has the nation’s second-highest murder rate.

And they announced that, through an initiative called, “Memphis Prayer 365,” members of 40 churches would be praying one day each month, with members scheduled to pray every minute of that day – to ensure that the city is covered in prayer every minute of 2022.

“You need to be praying for Memphis,” said the Rev. Steve Gaines, senior pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church.

Gaines called on people to light up the prayer line along with Ricky Floyd, pastor of the Pursuit of God Transformation Church, Linwood Dillard, founding pastor of the Citadel of Deliverance Church of God in Christ, Mario Maldonado, director of Hispanic ministries at Bellevue, Bartholomew Orr, senior pastor of Brown Missionary Baptist Church in Southaven, and Ellen Olford, director of Women’s’ Ministries at Central Church.

“You need to be crying out to God for God to open the windows of heaven above, and to pour out his spirit upon us…the devil fights prayer more than anything else, and you know why? Because it’s effective,” Gaines said.

“Things happen when we pray that don’t happen when we don’t pray.”

No doubt in Memphis, a whole lot of things must happen.

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During that gathering, I waited for one of the pastors to unveil a practical way to make those things happen; things like, say, a united strategy to tackle public transportation service that struggles for lack of funding.

Or a plan to persuade youths to join their churches instead of gangs. Or to partner with the city to help steer youths to Southwest Tennessee Community College and away from the streets.

But, no.

The strategy, they said, was prayer. And even for spiritual people like me, it seems like a simplistic approach, almost like a dodge, to fixing the complex problems which dog Memphis.

It has a "thoughts and prayers," kind of feel.

That’s largely because it’s tough to evaluate whether something like praying, which can’t be measured, is a real strategy compared to actions that can be measured.

It can also inspire more skepticism than hope.

If Memphis’ crime rate has worsened a year from now, if youths are still attending slain classmates’ funerals and not their graduations and if the dismal poverty rate doesn’t budge, does that mean the prayers failed?

Does it mean people didn’t pray hard enough?

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Floyd, however, said he has seen it work.

“My wife and I rented an airplane and literally prayed over the Frayser community,” said Floyd, whose church is in that community, one which has been struggling to comeback after years of jobs fleeing the area.

“We got in an airplane for 45 minutes and we prayed for businesses, we prayed about crime and the educational system. We did that about seven or eight years ago, and within six months Nike announced it was coming to Frayser, and then later, Amazon announced it was coming…

“We believe the practical happened because the prayer laid the foundation for it.”

Floyd has a point.

Memphis’ woes won’t be solved solely through the act of praying for it 24 hours, seven days a week. But prayers do provide the spiritual armor needed to confront those woes.

If Memphis Prayer 365 gives participants the courage to confront Memphis’ challenges and the faith to believe that God has their back in doing that, then it can be a force in turning the city around.

Prayer isn’t a strategy as much as it is a spiritual preparation. Hopefully, those who engage in it will use that preparation to take on concrete actions, or to build on whatever concrete actions their churches are already taking, to help fix the city’s problems.

“Time spent in prayer is never wasted,” Gaines said. “We can waste our time in many ways, but when you pray, you’re not wasting time. You’re investing in the future of whoever you’re praying for.”

Hopefully, all those prayers will lead to more people having a real future here in Memphis. A future that won’t be stunted by poverty.

Or cut short by bullets.

Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com and you can follow her on Twitter: @tonyaajw

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This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Some want to fight Memphis' problems by praying 24/7. Will it work?