If 15 students prayed weekly at every middle and high school in the United States, one million students would be praying nationwide.
That’s the goal of Claim Your Campus (CYC), a student-led prayer movement that spans the country. Their vision is to see students at every school praying for change. To do so, CYC aims to have a prayer group present in every one of the 67,000 middle and high schools in the United States.
The director of CYC, Olivia Williamson, explains prayer as “students learning the heart of God and knowing that he’s listening to their every word.”
“How can this generation know Jesus if they’re not talking with him?” she says. “When students pray, they hear what God cares about.”
Olivia, who grew up in The Wesleyan Church, is passionate about prayer because she has seen firsthand how God uses it to change lives. As a teenager, Olivia and some friends organized a worship night for their high school. Six hundred students showed up. “Lives were changed and our school was transformed,” she says.
That event multiplied into an ongoing movement, now called Enlightened Students. Ten years later, Enlightened Students has partnered with CYC and has reached over 13,000 students. Adults offer coaching, but events continue to be totally student-run. “We have seen student-led events in high schools all over the country,” Olivia says. “We’ve trained high schoolers to lead worship, to share their testimonies, and to lead a time of prayer for their peers.”
Her experience with Enlightened Students also helped Olivia recognize her call to ministry. After high school, she studied Christian ministry at Indiana Wesleyan University, expecting to go into youth ministry on a local-church level. But she did her year-long residency with CYC, and during that time, Olivia felt called to join the CYC team more permanently. “There’s just something that’s kind of unexplainable, how God just ties your heart to a vision and a dream,” she says. “And that dream became kind of really personal to me. I really wanted to see a million students praying.”
CYC started building toward that dream in the early 2000s. In 2003, eight West Michigan high school students prayer walked their school with their youth pastor. They decided to keep meeting — but Olivia says that at first, they weren’t sure what to pray about when they gathered. So their youth pastor asked, “If you could see God change one thing at your school, what would it be?”
“Fighting,” they answered. “Our school is known for fighting and violence.” And they started praying.
“After some time,” Olivia says, “the school board got together — and this school hadn’t done any assemblies, they hadn’t addressed anything about the fighting — but they were like, for some reason, fighting has completely stopped in our school.”
When the students heard about the meeting, she says, “They were like, ‘Wow, God answered our prayer right in front of us. We chose to pray for something really specific, and that happened.’”
In 2021, Olivia became the director of CYC, which has grown into a nation-wide network of student prayer groups. She works with students all over the country, encouraging them to pray for their schools and communities.
“Schools are such an important mission field that we can’t neglect,” she says. “And I think for those students in our churches who are in schools — whether it’s public or private, Christian or charter, whatever — we need to equip them to be light. Because if they leave those schools, those schools lose light.”
A powerful way for students to have an impact, she continues, is through prayer groups. “We equip these students to lead a really simple 15-minute time of prayer at their school once a week. And it is radically transforming campuses — but not just campuses. It’s the teachers, and the faculty, and the parents, and the families that are impacted when students’ lives are changed.”
In partnership with See You at the Pole, CYC also promotes the Prayer Walk Project, which encourages parents and pastors along with students to prayer walk their schools on the Saturdays before and after See You at the Pole.
Olivia urges youth pastors to share the CYC app with their students. “Tell them to get on there and start praying for their school. Encourage them to do a prayer walk or to participate in See You at the Pole.” To parents, she says, “Don’t give up hope for schools. Like, go prayer walk campuses and bless the schools in your community.”
To students, she says, “Don’t underestimate faithfully showing up to pray. It might feel really simple. It might feel like you’re not making a difference. It’s not making a dent in what’s going on. But revival comes when we pray. And so things will change when we pray, and your faithfulness will matter. Your faithfulness will bring about change in your life and in the lives of people around you.”
Ed Love, the executive director of Church Multiplication and Discipleship for The Wesleyan Church, has similar words for the next generation. “To young people: your prayers matter more than you know. You’re not waiting to make an impact someday — God is using you right now to shape the future.”
Jerah Winn is a writer for The Wesleyan Church. She is passionate about sharing stories with others for the glory of God, and she currently resides in Central Indiana.
