The staff and students here are required to spend at least 25 hours a week in the prayer room, and they also engage in weekly fasts of a day or more. The focused worship, Mr. Bickle says, affects real-world events by weakening the demons and strengthening the angels that swirl among us. Most important, he says, the incantations, multiplied worldwide, may help usher in the long-awaited final days: seven years of bloody battles and disasters that will end with the Second Coming, with true Christians spirited to eternal bliss and everyone else doomed to hellfire.

“The Second Coming will probably happen within the lifetime of people living today,” Mr. Bickle said in an interview — the sort of prediction that leads some pastors to say he is overstepping and using apocalyptic predictions to seduce eager young believers. Mr. Bickle adamantly rejects such charges, as do followers like Mai Fink, a woman in her early 20s who was helping to run the church summer camp. She and her husband moved to Kansas City, she said, because “the prayer makes our hearts come alive.”

Mr. Bickle, 55, still has the rugged look of the high school quarterback he once was and has an informal and jocular manner despite his obsession with the end times. Mr. Bickle found Christ, he said, at 15 at a summer camp, when he heard the quarterback Roger Staubach describe his relation with God.

Mr. Bickle has had a controversial 30-year career. As a pastor in Kansas City in the 1980s, he led a group of men claiming to be prophets; other pastors attacked them as false, and some of Mr. Bickle’s colleagues were discredited by personal scandals.