Former football chaplain hopes to build a prayer wall using one million bricks

A former chaplain is pioneering a campaign to raise £10 million to build a wall that will aim to engage people with prayer.

A former football club chaplain has launched a campaign to build a wall that will be a national landmark representing one million prayers being answered.Instagram

"The Wall" is the ambitious dream of Richard Gamble, the former chaplain for Leicester City football club. He hopes it will rival the Angel of the North as a national treasure.

The wall would be built using one million bricks, each bought by an individual, and located alongside a motorway in Leicestershire.

"I'm going to get Christians from all over the UK to buy a brick and tell us what prayer God has answered for them," Gamble, currently the CEO of Sports Chaplaincy UK, told Christian Today.

Each brick will cost £10, meaning Gamble hopes to raise £10 million to fund the project.

"The idea is that people driving past this iconic structure will be able to see that Jesus has answered a million prayers," he said.

He hopes that this wall will "be an iconic structure that, as a piece of art, provokes a discussion or a thought process as to whether Jesus answers prayers."

"Imagine 200 years from now, someone driving past and saying 'my great-great-great grandmother has a brick in that wall and this is the prayer Jesus answered'," he said.

Twelve years ago, Gamble felt God tell him to carry a cross around Leicestershire at Easter to get people to think about Jesus. He estimates that 250,000 people saw that demonstration and says he's been told of many conversations inspired by it.

While he was doing that walk, he said he felt God give him the vision for the wall, inspired by the one described in Nehemiah 1:3.

He hopes the building of this wall will be "a project that the broad chrisitan church can get involved in" and will "be a piece of public art that shows the positive impact of the church."

Gamble hopes to open a design competition with the Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA) . They want to find a sculptor "with the right design that will be the most striking... and will make this country proud," Gamble added.

"We hope to launch the competition summer 2016," a spokesperson for RIBA told the BBC.

Although £10 million is a large sum of money, Graham said it was justified in that it will be money given by those "inspired by the project." He expects the project to run a surplus of £4 million.

For every brick that is bought for the wall, the project will buy a brick in social housing, ensuring it will have a positive social impact.

A crowdfunding campaign for The Wall is being launched on 3 April.