'Pray at the Pump' activist: 'We shall overcome' high gas prices Nick Langewis

Published: Sunday August 17, 2008

Print This Email This Divine intervention, not the market, is bringing gas prices down, one campaigner says. 59-year-old Rocky Twyman of Rockville, Maryland has garnered worldwide attention after holding prayer meetings at gas stations across the United States since April as part of his "Pray at the Pump" drive. Recently, to celebrate a drop in the average price of gasoline to $3.80 a gallon, Twyman led a group meeting at their inaugural Washington service station, singing a version of "We Shall Overcome" whose words were changed to "We'll have to lower gas prices." "We believe not just in prayer," Twyman said, "because we believe that faith without works is dead. So we've encouraged people to car-pool more and organise their days more, because it's a combination of faith with these other factors." "God is the only one we can turn to at this point," Twyman said during an April stop in San Francisco. "Take it to the real CEO," Alabama DJ Todd Baker said during a recent prayer session at a Huntsville Texaco station on the heels of ExxonMobil's posting of a second-quarter profit of about $11.7 billion. Twyman also recently prayed for Tonight Show host Jay Leno, who mentioned him in a July 29 monologue: "Hey, have you heard about this group called Prayer at the Pump? They're a prayer group that sprang up, and they go to gas stations and they hold hands and they pray for lower gas prices. Otherwise known as the Bush energy plan." Twyman's involvement in the community also includes the recruitment of about 14,000 minority individuals into the national bone marrow registry since 1992, for which he received honors from Montgomery County, Maryland in April. He also led a petition drive in 2005 to nominate Oprah Winfrey for the Nobel Peace Prize. "We're just really impressed," Twyman told People Magazine, "with what she has done to raise the level of consciousness about hunger, poverty, homeless, women's issues and, of course, the issue of AIDS."