Evelyn Christenson — What Happens When Women Pray

Who She Was Evelyn Maxine Wheeler Christenson was born on November 1, 1922, in Muskegon, Michigan, and spent her adult life as a pastor’s wife, raising three children and serving in local church ministry. In 1968, she led a small six-week prayer seminar for women in her home church in St.

Paul, Minnesota, which produced results so dramatic that she was invited to repeat it across the country, then internationally. Her book “What Happens When Women Pray,” published in 1975, became one of the most widely read books on prayer in the twentieth century, eventually selling over two million copies. She founded United Prayer Ministries and spent the next four decades teaching prayer in churches, conferences, and communities across the world, training an estimated fifteen million women in the principles of corporate and personal prayer before her death in 2013. She was not a seminary-trained theologian or a famous preacher; she was a pastor’s wife who asked a simple question and devoted her life to the answer.

Her Core Teaching on Prayer Evelyn Christenson’s teaching on prayer was built around the simplest possible question: what actually happens when we pray? Not what should happen theologically, not what has happened historically in famous revivals, but what happens right now, in ordinary churches, when ordinary Christians pray together with genuine faith. Her answer, drawn from decades of direct observation, was consistent and compelling: extraordinary things happen. Walls come down.

Relationships are healed. Addictions are broken. Churches are transformed. Communities are changed. Prayer works — and the evidence for this is available to anyone willing to pray long enough to observe the results.

Her foundational scripture was the great promise of James, which she quoted in virtually every seminar, every book, and every teaching opportunity: “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (James 5:16, NIV). She built her entire ministry on the conviction that this was not aspirational language but a factual description of reality. Prayer was not merely spiritually meaningful; it was causally powerful. Things happened as a direct result of prayer that would not have happened without it. This conviction was not mystical but practical, grounded in Scripture and confirmed by the thousands of testimonies she collected from women who had prayed and seen God answer.

One of Christenson’s most important contributions was her recovery of the New Testament pattern of corporate prayer. She observed that the early church — from the upper room prayer meeting before Pentecost through the whole of Acts — prayed together as a community, not merely as isolated individuals. She pointed her students to the extraordinary promise attached to this practice: “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:19–20, NIV). The gathering of two or three in prayer was not a consolation for the absence of large congregations — it was a specific and powerful configuration that Christ had personally endorsed with His presence. Christenson spent her ministry mobilizing those twos and threes.

Her teaching on listening in prayer — the often-neglected second half of the conversation — was particularly valuable. Most people, she observed, come to prayer with a list of requests and leave when the list is exhausted, without waiting to hear what God might want to say. She urged her students to practice the discipline of silence in prayer, of “two-way prayer” in which the believer speaks and then waits. She grounded this in the instruction of 1 John: “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us — whatever we ask — we know that we have what we asked of him” (1 John 5:14–15, NIV). Praying according to His will required first knowing His will — and knowing His will required listening.

Christenson also taught persistently on the relationship between prayer and personal holiness.

She had observed that the prayer lives of most Christians were hampered not by lack of technique or information but by unconfessed sin and unresolved relational fractures that blocked the free flow of communication with God. She drew on Paul’s instruction to the church at Colossae: “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful” (Colossians 4:2, NIV).

The “watchfulness” Paul described included watchfulness over the interior life — the attitudes, the grudges, the pride, and the self-deceptions that, left unaddressed, silently undermined the prayer life from within.

Her lasting legacy is the hundreds of thousands of prayer groups that formed as a result of her teaching, sustained long after the original seminar by communities of women who had discovered for themselves that her simple thesis was true. She had not promised them mystical experiences or dramatic miracles; she had simply invited them to pray and to observe what God would do. They prayed. They observed. They kept praying. The early church’s pattern was hers: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42, NIV). Devotion to prayer, practiced together, transforms everything it touches.

A Prayer: Lord, make us women and men who ask — and keep asking. Teach us to gather with even two or three in Your name and trust that You are present and working.

Show us not only how to speak our requests but how to listen for Your answers.

Where our prayer lives are thin and infrequent, deepen them. Where we are isolated, give us the body of Christ to pray alongside us. And let us discover, as Evelyn did, what happens when Your people truly pray. Amen.