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Richard Gamble’s passion for Jesus has always been great. Twenty years ago he had a dream God Dragging a 9-foot wooden cross 77 miles during Holy Week leading up to Easter.
After that grueling marathon in 2004, God gave him a bigger, bolder vision: Build a wall that would tell millions of stories of how God answered prayer.
Last week, Gamble, 56, brought that vision to life — a 168-foot-tall architectural landmark that is expected to be one of the largest Christian Monument in England, if not the world. (Christ the Redeemer, the iconic statue of Jesus in Rio de Janeiro, is 98 feet.) It is planned to open to the public in 2028.
However, The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayers, priced at £45 million (or $59 million), will not represent any familiar Christian symbols such as the cross, fish, lamb or Jesus. Instead it will consist of a giant white Mobius strip approximately the size of a football field, upon which will be placed a million tiny rectangular bricks, each containing a digitally linked story of an answered prayer, available on a mobile app.
“We live in a country where Christianity has been almost dumbed down,” Gamble said in an interview at his Eternal Wall office near the construction site. “To create something so big and unashamedly Christian, I don’t think anyone believed it was going to happen.”
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For Gamble, the cornerstone itself is the result of 21 years of fervent prayer. A one-time software developer, church planter and former pastor of Leicester City Football Club, Gamble became a Christian at the age of 20 after a visit to a charismatic church. It instantly changed his life. He quit drinking and gambling and enrolled in a Bible college. After several years in ministry, he decided that he was not suitable to be a pastor.
But he never gave up his deep Christian faith. In a country where only 21% of people say they pray daily, according to a Pew Research Center study, Gamble wanted to find a way to convey what he believed to be God’s active role in people’s lives.
The way he tells it, God answered his prayers in stages. One of the first signs was when a woman came up to him after a presentation at a 2015 conference at Bethel Church in Redding, California, and said, “God wants you to know he’s got some heavenly land for you.”
The exact plot of land, which someone on his prayer team in England identified – another sign – was given to him by Andrew Edmiston, son of British billionaire businessman Lord Robert Edmiston, who founded the charity Christian Vision and owns the land. Andrew Edmiston also had a dream of building a Christian memorial in the United Kingdom, Gamble said, and the family company’s contribution to the project now exceeds £30 million. Gamble said approximately 22,000 individuals have also contributed to the project.
The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer will be located just off the M6 motorway on the outskirts of Birmingham. The M6 is the UK’s longest highway, running from the Midlands to the Scottish border. The location was important to Gamble because the monument would be visible from six miles away and he hoped it would attract interest from thousands of drivers and travelers each day.
What they will see, however, will be a most unconventional design.
For his vision, Gamble wanted something new and unique, a work of art. he put forward his idea Royal Institute of British ArchitectsWhich held a global competition for the design in 2016. A total of 133 entries were received from 28 countries, and a UK firm with a Möbius strip design was selected.
That design was approved by North Warwickshire Borough Council in 2020, another sign of answered prayers for Gamble. Matthew Guest, a professor of sociology of religion at Durham University who researches evangelicals in Britain, said the neutrality of the design probably helped.
“In Britain it can be very controversial to have religious symbolism beyond the traditional architecture of churches,” Guest said. “In a polarized world where there is a lot of religious tension between religious groups, this could be perceived as a potential provocation. And I wonder if that’s partly the reason for making it this way.”
Christianity has been in decline across the UK for years, with a recent Pew study finding that between 2010 and 2020, the Christian share of the UK population dropped by more than half – to 49%. During the same time, the share of religiously unaffiliated people increased to 40%. (According to the 2021 census of the Office for National Statistics, Muslims make up 6.5% of the UK population, or about 3.9 million people.)
Independent evangelical churches, including charismatic and Pentecostal groups, may be a segment of Christianity that is thriving in the UK, Guest said. Gamble and his family attend Chroma Church, an evangelical congregation in Leicester.
For several years now, Gamble and his team of 10 full-time employees have been searching for stories of answered prayers, starting with the Bible. The idea is to collect millions of testimonies of answered prayer, written or video. Those testimonies, each 500 words or three-minute videos, describe a time Jesus answered prayers — for healing, for a job, for recovery from addiction, for reconciliation, for the birth of a child. Only Christian prayers will be included.
Each story will form part of a database loaded digitally onto a brick the size of a business card at the monument. visitors People will be able to download an app on the site that will identify their location and read, listen to or watch stories on their phone.
Gamble allows that not all prayers are answered with yes. Sometimes the answer is “wait” and sometimes the answer is “no.” He believes that the important thing is the conversation with Jesus. He knows that not everyone who visits the site will be convinced, but he is hoping to stir people to an encounter with Jesus.
Gamble said, “It’s like this secret world in Britain, where no one knows that God is alive and answering prayers.” “Nobody talks about it.”
He is counting on a monument – a stone’s throw from the church, where few people go these days – to be the catalyst that inspires people to seek faith.
He said, “If someone comes and looks at it and goes, ‘Brilliant piece of architecture, but a pile of garbage’, then that’s a victory because they’ve taken themselves out of the secular environment and considered the elements of the Christian message.”