and the quiet is broken as men of all ages stream from the subway cars arm-in-arm, laughing, singing and praying. The first thing you notice is that their colorful shirts and baseball caps proclaim not beer slogans, sports teams or name-brand clothing, but Jesus.

Promise Keepers brought together more than a million men on the Capitol Mall for Stand In the Gap. Men traveled from all over the world to Washington, D.C., to pray for America, their families and racial reconciliation.

To capture the largest Christian gathering in the history of the United States, Promise Keepers assembled a team of five photographers: Wayne Armstrong, Louis DeLuca, Pat Davison, Neal Lauron and Jim Mendenhall. Armstrong, who has served as the PK photographer for two and a half years, coordinated the coverage.

Anaheim Bulletin and while there had admired Mendenhall’s work.

“Pat Davison came in to see me about freelance work,” Armstrong says, in explanation of how he met the fourth photographer to join the team. “I hadn’t seen any of Pat’s work before, but God sent the CIP newsletter the day before he showed up. Pat kept asking, ‘Don’t you want to see my portfolio?’ I thought, Why? You obviously know which end of the camera to use and you know the Lord.”

Later Armstrong found out that Lauron, DeLuca and Davison were all good friends.

The team captured images the day before the event, when men worked on inner-city school buildings, fathers and sons walked around the mall praying for the gathering, and several thousand bikers held a rally to proclaim their faith in Jesus.

Lauron shot a little boy praying with his dad Friday afternoon. “I was standing there talking,” he explains, “when a guy taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘I don’t know about you guys, but that looks like a good shot to me.’ I dropped to my knees and started shooting. I turned back around to thank him and he was gone.

“Someone said he must have been my guardian angel.”

As the sun rose on Saturday, Mendenhall walked to the Capitol Building, looking for a special image. He found people laying their hands on the building, praying for the country.

“I was so moved that I began praying with them. I reached down and prayed for one man, and we had such an experience with God, we began praying together.”

Covering a crowd of more than 1 million is difficult. All the photographers agreed that getting from one vantage point to another was the hardest part of the day. As one put it, traveling one block was like a salmon fighting its way upstream, squeezing between the rocks and other salmon. It took determination to travel 100 feet to get into position for an image.

Lauron’s determination to get a crowd shot from the top of the Washington Monument paid off. When he and DeLuca met at the base of the Monument, the elevator was closed for repairs. Both shooters decided there was only one thing to do—climb the stairs, more than 80 flights.

“It took me 25 minutes to get to the top and 15 to get back down,” Lauron says, laughing.

Lauron rushed to the Reuters office with his photo, to try and move it on the wire. He learned that Newsweek was looking for a photo from the monument, but according to the Reuters editors, none of the four Newsweek shooters had the shot. Although AP had the shot, the photographer had used an older digital camera and only had a three meg file to work with, much too small for their needs.

“Newsweek used my picture in a double-truck,” Lauron says. “God blessed me by shooting it on film and being there at the right time.”

God’s timing was also just what Armstrong needed for his crowd shot. He had gone up three times in a helicopter to get the best view, and Mendenhall had done so once as well. In anticipation, PK pre-sold some 30,000 pictures of the shot. But the airspace with the best visibility was in an approach path for aircraft at Washington National Airport. Neither photographer was able to get the shot. On Armstrong’s fourth try, the pilot asked to be allowed to hover for a minute or so.

“While we were there,” Armstrong explains, “air traffic increased in another area and the air traffic controller made us stay there for 20 minutes, allowing me to get the shot.”

While they were hovering, several other news media helicopters requested permission to move into the space. The air traffic controller denied them access.

“I remember thinking, Of all the photographers in the world, here I am getting this historic shot. If this is the last picture I take, then I feel like I did what I was supposed to do.

“So often as a newspaper photographer,” he says, “there are 10 other guys getting the same picture.” The picture eventually sold over 100,000 copies.

So often photojournalists don’t get involved with the event they’re shooting; they’re just looking for that unique shot. Not so at Stand In the Gap.

“I was involved,” Lauron says. “Getting to spend time with Louis [DeLuca] and growing spiritually with my other brothers was the best part of the weekend. It was the best photography I’ve ever shot.”

DeLuca remembers a point where the Spirit’s presence descended on him. “I was walking with Wayne [Armstrong] to an assignment while everyone was repenting. Men were lying on the ground prostrate. It looked like a bomb had gone off. It was incredibly powerful.

“I remember the preacher saying, ‘If God were here right now, would we be giving Him a high five? No, we would be falling on our faces.’ It was a humbling experience.

“Sometimes I’m not in awe of God,” he admits. “It’s hard to realize that the One who designed the bumblebee cares about our lives.”

Being a part of history had its pull for shooting the event, but as Mendenhall says, “It was an honor to do it because you knew He was there."

“I felt like I was on God’s team,” agrees Davison. “I wanted to give 110 percent to Him. I shot over 40 rolls for the days I was there. I worked really hard and came away feeling good about my shooting. It was like a spiritual high all day long.

“It was one of three mountaintops in my Christian life: The first was my conversion, then my wife accepting the Lord, and Stand In the Gap was the third.”