Church Universal and Triumphant members worldwide are praying around the clock for the protection of the church's ranch at Corwin Springs, where a human-caused wildfire has charred 740 acres.
It's a variation of a tactic the church applied in 1988, when 250 followers gathered in a meadow to deliver high-speed spoken prayers known as decrees.
Standing in a meadow with arms outstretched that summer, people repeatedly chanted "reverse the tide, roll them back, set all free" in a rapid-fire monotone, opposing a fire that spread from Yellowstone National Park.
The 16,000-acre Fan Fire stopped at the church border. Slurry bombers had attacked the blaze, but Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the church's leader then, gave credit to the prayers.
"After we called for reversing of the tide, the wind shifted to the north and we attribute this to our prayer," she said.
Now the New Age sect is hoping for a repeat.
"We've gone back and printed out some of the old prayers we used in 1988," church spokesman Christopher Kelley said Tuesday. "We are praying around the clock. We've engaged the entire worldwide network."
This year, the locals doing the decrees are in the church's chapel, well away from the flames. And other things are different.
The Little Joe Fire began Saturday on church property and has burned into Yellowstone.
Park spokesperson Marsha Karle said officials there are monitoring the Little Joe Fire and cooling it with helicopter water drops, but they aren't putting in any fire lines.
Kelley said church followers are praying now for protection for the ranch and for the safety of firefighters.
"This is sacred land," Kelley said. "We don't want to see our spiritual retreat turned into a fire scar."
The fire is about one mile from a scenic meadow in the Mol Heron drainage that church members call the Heart of the Inner Retreat. Several church conferences have been held there and it also is the site of a 756-person bomb shelter buried there in 1989 and 1990.
Lawmen from the Forest Service and the Park County Sheriff's office have been investigating the cause of the blaze, which destroyed a pickup truck near the ignition site along the park boundary.
Park County Sheriff Clark Carpenter said Monday that federal officials are taking the lead on the investigation. For criminal charges to be filed, intentional or negligent misbehavior would have to be established, he said.
"Until we do a thorough investigation, we really can't say anything more," he said.
The rhetoric has changed also. In 1988, Prophet, who retired from the church's presidency after developing Alzheimer's Disease, was harshly critical of the National Park Service, which was practicing what it called a "let burn" policy then.
"They shouldn't have needed a prophet or a crystal ball to tell them this would happen," Prophet said as the flames approached. She also said the park should have been logged rather than burned.
Ed Francis, former church vice-president, said in 1988 that the Park Service policy was "bordering on pyromania."