January 8 1996

ARTICLE TOOLS

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"We don't have much time, but we can set aside one hour per week to pray for our kids."

It's a sultry mid-August afternoon, and Ruth Hilden, like millions of moms across America, is running around town, trying to get her kids ready for another school year.

A trip to the mall to buy some new clothes for daughter Carrie, a high-school sophomore? Nope. A stop at Wal-Mart to pick up notebooks and Nikes for son Peter, an eighth-grader? Well, not yet.

First things first. Hilden will get to the shopping list soon enough. But on this particular day, she has a higher priority: She's going to pray for her kids.

So Hilden, a 50-year-old homemaker from Rockford, Illinois, hops into her old station wagon and drives a few miles to a friend's house, where she joins six other women for a noon prayer session. They gather around Stacy Wells's dining-room table and spend much of the next hour praying for something unique: a high school.

"Welcome," Hilden tells a friend, "to Moms in Touch."

These women--who pray for nearby Jefferson High, where they all have children--make up one of approximately 30,000 groups that Moms in Touch International (MITI) boasts worldwide. In addition to having prayer groups in every state in the U.S., the organization has members in such places as China, Egypt, Germany, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Romania, and Russia.

Whatever the language, they all share the same focus: All are moms committed to praying their kids through school.

It all started in 1984 when Fern Nichols, then a Canadian, grew concerned about her sons, who were about to enter junior high school. Nichols found another mother to join her in weekly prayer sessions for their kids and their kids' schools. And so Moms in Touch was ...