This is a community prayer garden. It is open to all people, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Here's why:

This Prayer Garden is not our own. It is not even our own idea. We did not think it up; it has not sprung from the wellspring of our ambition or imagination. We did not congress together, brainstorming, until we hit upon the magnificent thought, “Here’s what we’ll do: we’ll build a Prayer Garden.”

Before Wonderful Mercy Church began — before a group of Midwesterners determined to build a church in Gilbert, Arizona, so they would have a Lutheran house of worship to call their own when wintering in the valley — before a pastor was called and before a brick was in place, this Prayer Garden was God’s idea for the southeast valley of the Phoenix metropolitan area. It was God who determined that a Prayer Garden be established precisely here: at latitude 33.64647 N and longitude 111.761656 W. It was one piece in his tactical plan for seeing the state of Arizona saturated with prayer. Fervent prayer. Sustained prayer. Focused prayer. Impossible prayer. Prayer that will not relent until heaven opens and rivers of kindness and mercy and hope and healing and salvation and refreshing are free-flowing and open to all who are thirsty.

As you come to pray in this place — and we hope you will do so often — know that this Garden, a sanctuary for the Presence and a place where God’s peace abides, is also a theater of spiritual war. It is a battlefield where culture and personal destinies will be won or lost. It is a dangerous square of land on which the invasive love of God will pour out through the consistent, contending prayers of Jesus’ friends, whose many voices will converge upon one purpose, the fulfillment of the prayer that Jesus taught his co-conspirators: Our Father in heaven,…your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

This is our understanding: Wonderful Mercy Church built the prayer garden but we do not own it—it belongs to the Lord. We are merely stewards of this gift to the community.

You are welcome here.