A year ago, science teacher Crystal McDowell was driving to work one day listening to Joy FM, the local Christian radio station. She heard that Christian students around the St. Louis area and nation-wide were gathering at their school flag poles to pray in an event called See You at the Pole (SYATP).

SYATP is an annual gathering of Christian students of all ages at a flagpole in front of their school for prayer before school starts. SYATP occurs on every fourth Wednesday of September on the global day of student prayer.

SYATP began in 1990 after a small group of Texas teenagers felt compelled to pray after a youth retreat. After praying at three different school flagpoles in the area, they challenged other students to continue the tradition. Today, millions of students across the U.S. participate, in addition to students in 20 other countries.

This year was the first year of Lafayette participation in SYATP, which was advertised around the school as Meet Me at the Pole (MMATP). As the sponsor of Lafayette Christian Fellowship (LCF), McDowell introduced the idea to the students.

“This year I mentioned it to the kids and they looked into it, and we talked about it. It was something they wanted to do, and of course they were all on board,” McDowell said.

The event itself occurred on the Lafayette football field around 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 25. However, as excited as the group was for the event, a low turnout was expected.

“I literally thought that there was going to be 10 of us, and I thought they would all be the people that usually come to LCF. There were over 20; it really was a lot of people. I thought it was going to be the little, small core that we thought knew about it,” Junior Abi Miller, LCF member, said.

Miller also first heard about SYATP from Joy FM and was inspired by the morning prayer meetings that she regularly attends at her church, Church STL.

“On Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30-7:30 a.m., my church does morning prayer, where we just meet and we start praying. This is kind of where it came from to where it’s like ‘Hey! I’m prepared for this because I’ve been going to morning prayer,” Miller said.

Not only are both McDowell and Miller hoping to continue the tradition, they aim to expand the original idea of SYATP to a monthly, rather than annual, practice.

“I’m hoping we can get started through LCF once a month. We could pray in the morning once a month and we could have an overlying theme or topic. The Global Day is really cool and it’s really major because it’s everybody doing it, but if we get this thing going once a month, that’s how our school is going to be changed,” Miller said.

McDowell agreed, saying that the overall feeling after the prayer was very positive.

“I think it meant enough to them and what they’re doing outside of school that it’s something they definitely want to carry on and make bigger, now that we know when it is and when we need to act to plan it,” McDowell said.

Both McDowell and Miller hope that LCF can organize future events like SYATP that include other Christian groups, rather than just LCF as well as anybody else who is interested.

“The students are really excited about maybe uniting some of the Christian groups that are here and anybody else that wants to attend as well.  Just for certain things like ‘See You at the Pole’ that everyone can come to and everybody can come together, even though we meet separately for other things,” McDowell said.

Lafayette’s first SYATP has provided the spark to set Lafayette’s Christian groups on fire to reach out to each other, the rest of the school and the community at large.