ORLANDO, Fla.—A giant infinity loop, constructed using 1 million white bricks, will serve as a monument to answered prayer in the United Kingdom.

“Every single brick represents a story of answered prayer,” Richard Gamble, founder of the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, told The Daily Signal in an interview last month at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Orlando, Florida. “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’s prayed to Jesus, and how He’s answered.”

“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,” Gamble said. “And it’s a way for us to make hope visible.”

Making Hope Visible

The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer will stand at 169 feet tall in Coleshill, Birmingham, 90 miles north of London. According to the project’s website, the colossal piece of architecture will be visible from nearly six miles away. The project estimates that 500,000 people will travel past the monument each week, and 200,000 will visit the site annually.

Gamble said he has a team focused on “gathering all the prayers from as early as we can go.” He said they recovered one “from 500 A.D. in Scotland, where somebody prayed for a young boy to be raised from the dead, and he came back to life.” He mentioned stories of martyrs praying for peace as they died, and witnesses recording that they looked peaceful.

He admitted that “a lot of stories of answered prayers are subjective,” but his team has “built in some fail-safes to make sure that nobody’s abusing the system.”

“Some of the answered prayers are undeniable,” Gamble noted. “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. Now, stuff like that, that’s undeniable. But, of course, some of the answered prayers are around character. ‘God gave me wisdom,’ ‘God helped me love my wife more than ever.’ I think those are equally as important.”

The project has gathered prayers from more than 85 countries and aims to acquire 80,000 more from the U.S. As researchers discover new answered prayers from history, and as people today send in their own submissions, Gamble said he hopes the database will grow well beyond 1 million.

Jesus Is Still Alive

He said he plans for this never to become 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,” he explained.

The project’s founder said he is not building any technology into the structure, because it will likely become outdated quickly. Instead, he plans to update the project to suit emerging technology.

“We want to use this monument to communicate to the younger generation that Jesus is alive,” Gamble said. “My hope and prayer is that a 13-year-old girl in Peru, she can go, and she can look at these stories in her own home, and she’ll be able to Google, ‘OK, 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 and the issues that she’s challenged with?’ And she’ll be able to see all those stories.”

A United Effort: We Believe in Prayer

Gamble has worked with many different Christian denominations to launch the project, and he said his position as a member of an independent church helped the project from becoming too sectarian.

Churches across the United Kingdom have joined his effort, blessing the project. “We’ve got the whole range of churches, because we should be able to unite on this fact: We believe in prayer,” he said.

Gamble told The Daily Signal that he successfully purchased the land and acquired zoning rights, and the project has accumulated 90% of the necessary funds. The project is estimated to cost $12.6 million U.S.

He encouraged U.S. listeners to go to eternalwall.us to submit stories or contribute to the project. He also told The Daily Signal how much money he expects the project to bring in, and what sort of charities will receive portions of those funds.

Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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