Author: Geoff

Geoff Waugh is the founding editor of the Renewal Journal and an author of books on renewal and revival and Christian living.
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New Wineskins for Pentecostal Studies, by Sam Hey

by Geoff 12 April 2012 No Comments

New Wineskins for Pentecostal Studies

by Sam Hey

 

Dr Sam Hey, a former high school science teacher, lectures in Biblical Studies at Citipointe Ministry College, the School of Ministries of Christian Heritage College in Brisbane.  His article is part of his Ph.D. research studies.

Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins – PDF

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“Until recently it was possible to obtain a doctorate in theology at a Pentecostal Bible College without knowledge of ancient or modern languages, without knowledge of the origin or composition of the Bible, without secondary education, and simply on the basis of six years’ instruction on the Bible” (Hollenweger 1972, 292).

As Pentecostalism has matured and been accepted into mainstream denominations this pre-critical fundamentalist view of the Bible has had to be replaced by more sophisticated approaches which are more widely accepted by those with whom they interact.  But that change rang alarm bells for many Pentecostals who had discarded scholarship as faith-destroying and even demonic.

Pentecostal beliefs have been considerably influenced by the hermeneutical approaches that they have used.  Pentecostalism inherited from the Reformation the belief that Scripture has meaning which is clearly and easily discerned (Osborne 1991, 9).  From John Wesley they inherited the conviction that the text of Scripture needed to be integrated into their own life, speech, and devotional experience (Arrington 1988,378).  The Holiness movement gave them a subjective fundamentalist view of Scripture and a suspicion of critical scholarship (Hollenweger 1972, 291).

After an initial period of isolation, Pentecostal churches found increasing opportunity for interaction with evangelical churches which shared their common goals.   The large Pentecostal Assemblies of God (AOG) movement joined the National Association of Evangelicals when it was founded in 1942 (Hyatt 1996, 179).  The upward social mobility, higher incomes and suburbanisation which followed World War II led to a change in educational outlook and aspirations of American Pentecostalism led many members to pursue a more sophisticated understanding of their beliefs.

Bible school training was improved and the Bible-based theology programs of the 1940’s were mostly replaced by liberal arts degree programs (Menzies 1971, 376).  The change in training methods has led to changes in the thinking of the graduating church leaders.  Through them it is changing the Pentecostal movements.  The inauguration of credentialing of AOG ministers in 1959 was an indicator of the increasing concern for conformity (Menzies 1971, 376).

With an increasing interaction with evangelical churches came the adoption of their historical- critical methods.   This led to an emphasis on the context and the pursuit of the intention of original author of the text (Cargal 1993, 163; Fee 1991,86).   This development has not been welcomed by older traditional Pentecostals who say that it threatens the Pentecostal belief in a post-salvation reception of the Spirit evidenced by glossolalia.

The younger, newer graduates are also concerned.  Sheppard says that a dependence on critical exegesis challenges the vitality and freedom that characterised traditional Pentecostalism and will endanger its future (Sheppard 1994, 121).   He says that Pentecostals were beginning to pursue the historical-grammatical method at a time when biblical and theological scholarship has moved beyond this emphasis (Sheppard 1994, 121).   Sheppard singles out Gordon Fee as an example of this.  Joseph Byrd suggests that the Pentecostal emphasis on detailed critical exposition in seminaries has produced pastors with a good knowledge of technical exegesis but lacking the prophetic edge which characterised early Pentecostalism (Byrd 1993, 207).

The application of scholarly methods such as that of Fee and Menzies has challenged the distinctive Pentecostal belief that a post-salvation “baptism in the Spirit” evidenced by tongues is the intended teaching and the normative pattern of Scripture.  When Fee’s critical methods are used, the experiences of Jesus and the apostles are found to be so different from those of modern day Christians that they must be considered irrelevant (Fee 1991,94).  The Pentecostal claim to an intended pattern in Acts which can be applied to all Christians is found to be unwarranted.  Glossolalia as the sole evidence of the Pentecostal baptism is also found to be untenable (Fee 1991,99).

The historical method and pursuit of the author’s intention has created an unbridgeable historical gap which has led Pentecostal scholars in recent times to question this approach (Cargal 1993, 163).  Many Pentecostal scholars in recent times have begun to look to other approaches for support for the distinctive Pentecostal beliefs.

Post-modern Pentecostalism

Recent editions of the Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Pneuma, reveal that the hermeneutical sophistication of Pentecostals has risen dramatically over the last decade as they have begun to integrate the latest hermeneutical practices.   This is seen in the writings of Pentecostal scholars such as Cargal (1993), Byrd (1993), Harrington and Pattern (1994) and Arrington (1994).  These scholars have begun to point out the inadequacies and dangers of the Pentecostal emphasis on intentionality and the grammatical, historical, and critical context of the text.  They have looked to post-modern hermeneutical methods instead (Mclean 1984, 36).

While it is beyond the scope of this article to evaluate post-modernism to any large degree, it is important to consider the ways in which this influential movement is affecting the development of Pentecostal hermeneutics in general and the distinctive Pentecostal beliefs in particular.   In recent times the ability to locate an absolute, intended meaning within the text has been challenged by the recognition that the interpreters of the text “cannot silence their own subjectivity, or achieve an objective neutrality” (Thiselton 1977, 316).

Gerald Sheppard says that both liberals and fundamentalists have perpetuated the same false notion that the original intention of the author can be located.   Both of these “left and right wing modernist groups” are pursuing the same impossible task (Sheppard 1994, 121).

Cargal (1993, 163) and Arrington (1994, 101) observe that most Pentecostal preachers have been unaffected by the greater acceptance of critical scholastic methods.  Many Pentecostals have continued the Pentecostal practise of interpreting the same text differently at different times to meet the different needs that arise.  Pentecostal readings of Acts have had less to do with a rationalistic, inductive method of biblical interpretation and more to do with a creative interaction with the text of Acts (Macchia 1993, 65).

Pentecostals usually emphasise the immediacy of the text and multiple dimensions of meaning arising from the “leading of the Spirit”.   They give scant consideration to its historical-critical context.  This approach invariably leads to multiple meanings and multiple applications the same text.  At times one of these meanings can attract strong support and become a fixed belief.  The post-salvation experience evidenced by glossolalia is an example of this.

Many Pentecostal scholars in recent times have claimed that the Pentecostal method has “more continuity with post-modern modes of interpretation than with the critical-historical method” (Cargal 1993, 165; Arrington, 1994, 101).   Post-modernism distinguishes itself from modernism by the rejection of the notion that “only what is historically and objectively true is meaningful,” (Cargal 1973, 171).  However, it must be remembered that Pentecostalism and post-modernism have different reasons for rejecting this claim.

Some Pentecostals, such as Howard Ervin, have suggested that the post-modern questioning of modern scientific certainties provides support for a return to the ancient world views of biblical times (Ervin, 1981,19).  Ervin’s view is a naive misrepresentation of post-modernism.  While post-modernism recognise that reason and rationalism cannot tell us everything, it does not claim that critical thinking is passe, but simply that it is limited (Cargal 1993, 178).

Despite this qualification, the “post-modern vision of reality opens up the possibility of the transcendent virtually closed by modernity.” (Cargal 1993, 178).  Therefore Cargal is able to say that developments within post- modern methods of interpretation hold promise for Pentecostals (Cargal 1993,187).

The Pentecostal emphasis upon the Spirit as the source of multiple meanings of the text is an important contribution which Pentecostalism can make to the Western Church.  Cargal says that “the [Pentecostal] recognition of the dialogical role of the experiences of the believer in both shaping and being shaped by particular interpretations of the biblical text is both compatible with certain post-structuralist views of the reader as creator of significations and an important critique of objectivist views of the meaning of the Bible and its authority” (Cargal 1993, 186).

The larger text

In this last decade Pentecostals have recognised that the process of interacting with biblical narratives such as Acts is “more complex and creative than a mere historical investigation into the original intention of the author/editor” (Macchia 1993, 67).     Pentecostal beliefs such as the belief in the sign of glossolalia did not just arise from the biblical text, but from the larger historical and cultural texts with which Pentecostalism was interacting.

In recent years Pentecostal students of hermeneutics have recognised that the study of the text needs to be broadened to include the inter-textual connection which exists between the biblical texts, the ritual “texts” enacted in worship and the relational “texts” of the faith community (Dempster 1993, 129; Cargal 1993, 163).

A trans-contextual basis is needed which allows the “comparative evaluation of contextual criteria of interpretation and indeed the purposes for which each set of criteria gains its currency” (Thiselton 1992, 6).  Pentecostals have not interpreted the text as individuals, but as members of communities of readers who cannot be isolated from their communal expectations.  It was the expectations of the faith community and its social setting which ultimately determined the Pentecostal interpretation of glossolalia in Acts and not historical-grammatical concerns.

Pentecostalism is increasingly recognising the role of its traditions and Christian communities in shaping its beliefs (Fee 1991,69).  The text of Scripture is usually read in the light of one’s own sociological, cultural, religious, ecclesiastical and national histories.  Fee says that the Pentecostal belief in a baptism in the Holy Spirit distinct from conversion and evidenced by tongues “came less from the study of Acts, as from their own personal histories, in which it happened to them in this way and therefore was assumed to be the norm even in the New Testament” (Fee 1991, 69).

The Pentecostal New Testament scholar, Gordon Fee, has challenged the Pentecostal beliefs which have arisen from their traditions suggesting that they  need to be re-examined on the basis of the biblical texts (Fee 1991, 69).  Some Pentecostals see this approach as an implicit threat to the Pentecostal belief in tongues as the evidence of a post salvation Spirit baptism (Burgess and McGee 1988, 305).

Plurality of meanings

Church of God pastor and scholar, Joseph Byrd believes that new hermeneutical methods such as those of Paul Ricoeur are needed if the distinctive Pentecostal beliefs are to survive the sophisticated theological treatments by Pentecostal scholars such as Fee (Byrd 1993,203).    The hermeneutics of Holland and Ricoeur offer promise to those who seek to preserve the Pentecostal tradition as it acknowledges the role of the readers in projecting their own interests, desires, and selfhood into the text (Thiselton 1992,472).

Wolfgang Isler suggests that biblical texts are deliberately ambivalent (Thiselton 1992,517).  This ambivalence has enabling interpretations such as those of Pentecostals to meet the spiritual needs of twentieth century Christians.  Isler suggests that the text deliberately invites the reader to place themselves into different roles within the textual setting (Thiselton 1992, 517).

Sheppard suggests that Pre-critical Pentecostalism should not be dismissed as uncritical, but recognised as attuned and acclimatised to the cultural values of the marginalised groups in which it began (Sheppard 1994, 127).  Michael Foucault has shown that modern ways of knowing have led to  pre- and post-modern values being overlooked.  Early Pentecostal hermeneutics has focused on subjective, intuitive ways of knowing, the validity of which needs to be reconsidered (Foulcault 1973, 217-249).

Pentecostal hermeneutics must allow for the claim that the Holy Spirit reveals deeper meanings of the text that allows it to be culturally relevant (Cargal 1993,174).   The difficulty with this proposal is that it easily leads to excesses and misinterpretations.  The emergence of the unitarian Pentecostals is an example of this (Synan 1997,161).  Unless other controls exist, Fee suggests that  “we must abide by rules of good exegesis and exert extreme caution in considering any deeper meanings.” (Fee 1979, 39).

In recent times the task of hermeneutics has been widened to consider the way in which biblical texts have been used to serve the interests of different groups and to loosen or maintain dominating power structures and authorise values which serve the interests of individuals or corporate entities within religious communities (Thiselton 1992, 7).  Recent Pentecostal studies by Margaret Poloma confirm that glossolalia has provided support for the Pentecostal protest against modernity and motivation for evangelism (Poloma 1989, 3).

Glossolalia has also been a symbol used to promote individual, social and racial equality, they have been replaced by beliefs which condone organisational, sexual and racial dominance (Poloma 1989, 3).  Poloma says that while charismata such as tongues are a factor in the rise and revitalisation of religious movements, “it seems to depart quickly once it has completed the task of institution building” (Poloma 1989,232).

The Appeal of Pentecostalism in a Post-modern Age

It is not difficult to locate reasons for the appeal of Pentecostalism in a post-modern world.  Pentecostalism has challenged the perceived threats inherent in post-modern approaches and has provided appealing alternatives to post-modern dilemmas.  In contrast to the uncertainty arising from a complex multiplicity in post-modernists, Pentecostalism speaks of one absolute unchanging God who is behind all different views.

In contrast to the post-modern perplexity in facing an avalanche of information, Pentecostalism reduces truth to one source of information, the Bible and one interpreter – the Holy Spirit.   Post-modernism accepts the uncertainty of past and of the future events.  In contrast to the variety of experiences which exist in a post-modern world, Pentecostals claim the one Holy Spirit which behind the variety of charismatic experiences.   Glossolalia is still the chief Pentecostal experience and it continues to provided evidence of a supernatural God and an invisible world.

The attempt by some Pentecostals to align Pentecostal hermeneutics with the popular post-modern movement must not overlook the differences that exist between them.   While post- modernism is in reality an extreme form of modernism, and a “misnomer for ultra modernity” (Oden in Dockery 1995, 26), Pentecostalism is a reaction against modernity.

Post-modernism accepts the anti-supernatural, pro-critical approaches that were important in  modernism and these would  not  be accepted by most Pentecostals.   “Although the post-modernist hesitates to deny the validity of all religions”, says Lints, “he hesitates also to assert the exclusive truth of but one religion.” (Lints 1993, 206).  Pentecostalism, in contrast still holds to a single Christian truth.  Glossolalia is considered to provide support for the existence of the supernatural and evidence that Pentecostalism is the one true faith.

Paul Ricouer

Pentecostals appear to be divided between the modern, critical approach typified by Fee and the post-modern approach of recent scholars.   One solution to this dilemma is Paul Ricoeur’s post- critical hermeneutic (Byrd 1993, 207).  Paul Ricoeur has attempted to combine attempts to reconstruct the original meaning of the text with attempts to existentially apply readings of the text to contemporary situations (Bleicher, 1980, 217).  His description of the movement of the reader from a naive, intuitive interpreter of the text to an increasingly self-critical analyst mirrors the development of Pentecostal hermeneutics well.  This hermeneutic, which has developed from that of Schleiermacher asks us to listen with tolerance and mutual respect and to balance the creative with the analytical (Thisleton 1992, 4).

Ricoeur has shown that objectivity and subjectivity need not be considered as opposites, but two aspects of the one paradigm that exist along side each other as “two sides of the one coin”.   These two should interact.  The Pentecostal praxis informed what was found in Scripture, while at the same time careful study of the text has informed Pentecostal praxis (Moore 1987, 11).  By combining the benefits of the Critical-historical-literary method with the recognition that multiple interpretations of the text exist the Pentecostal interpreter is equipped to discover and applied the “biblical” message.  (Arrington 1994, 101).   The dual recognition of the objective and the subjective leads to the acknowledgement that the differing understandings of the glossolalic references in Acts have been shaped by the differing contexts in which they were formed.   Modern hermeneutics can no longer a search for the “true” or “historical” meaning.  It must examine the effect of the text and investigate the processes which the text creatively produces and sets in motion.

The hermeneutics of Ricoeur stresses the creative effect of symbols, metaphors and narratives on religious imagination and thought.  This method encourages an awareness of the diversity of meanings that the text will present to diversity of readers (Byrd 1993, 211).  When applied to the interpretation of the glossolalic passages in Acts this method would suggest that Pentecostal and non Pentecostal interpretations exist side by side as alternative readings of the text.

The recognition that symbols within the text will be re-experienced by succeeding communities and generations in different ways builds greater tolerance and understanding of the ways in which beliefs such as that concerning glossolalia change.   New generations of Pentecostals will not be expected to have the same experience of the text’s symbols as the first generation of Pentecostals (Byrd 1993, 211).  They must be allowed to develop their own views which are appropriate to their own times and situations.

Professor of Sociology, Margaret Poloma suggests that it is not the glossolalic experience alone which makes Pentecostalism distinctive, but the expectant social reality in which it occurs (Poloma 1989, 184).  Malony and Lovekin say that the charismatic group, and not the individual’s experience determine the effects of glossolalia upon a person (1977, 383).   Poloma says that the Pentecostal experience must involve the unexpected and be constantly renewed if it is to survive the pressures of typification, patterned role expectations and institutionalization (Poloma 1989, 185).

Consequently, an exciting new wineskins for biblical scholarship is the emerging hermeneutic of Pentecostalism which challenges the historical-critical approach, and invites the Holy Spirit who inspired Scripture to interpret it to the faith community and to individuals within that community.

Bibliography

Arrington F.L.  “Hermeneutics”, in Burgess S.M.  and McGee G.B.  Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Zondervan, 1988.

Byrd, J.  1993.  “Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Theory and Pentecostal Proclamation.”  Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 15, No 2: 203-215.

Cargal, T. B.  1993.  “Beyond the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy: Pentecostals and Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Age.” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 15, No 2: 163-188.

Dempster, M. W.  1989  “The Church’s Moral Witness: A Study of Glossolalia in Luke’s Theology of Acts,” Paraclete, 23:11-7, Winter.

Dempster, M. W. “Paradigm Shifts and Hermeneutics: Confronting Issues Old and New”, Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 15, No 2: 129-136.

Dockery, D. S., ed.  1995.  The Challenge of Postmodernism: An evangelical Engagement. Wheaton: Victor.

Ervin, H. M.  1981.  “Hermeneutics: A Pentecostal Option,” Pneuma: The Journal for the Society for Pentecostal Studies 3, Fall.

Fee, G. D.  1991.  Gospel and Spirit: Issues in New Testament Hermeneutics. Peabody, Massachusetts, Hendrickson, (Second edition, 1994).

Hollenweger, Walter J.  1972.  The Pentecostals : the charismatic movement in the churches.  Minneapolis: Augsburg.

Hyatt, E. L. 1996.  2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity. Tulsa, Oklahoma: Hyatt Ministries.

Poloma, Margaret.  1989.  The Assemblies of God at the Crossroads: Charisma and Institutional Dilemmas, Knoxvile: University of Tennessee.

Johns, D. A.  1991.  “Some New Directions in the Hermeneutics of Clasical Pentecostalism’s Doctrine of Initial Evidence,” in Initial Evidence, ed. G. B.  McGee.  Peabody: Hendrickson.

Macchia, F. D.  1992.  “Sighs too Deep for Words: Toward a Theology of Glossolalia,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology, No.  1, October, 1992, 47-73.

Malony, H. N. & Lovekin A. A.  1985.  Glossolalia Behavioural Science Perspectives on Speaking in Tongues.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Menzies, W.  1971.  Anointed to Serve: The Story of the Assemblies of God, Springfield: Gospel Publishing House.

Moore, R. D.  1987.  “Approaching God’s Word Biblically: A Pentecostal Perspective,” Seminary Viewpoint 8, November.

Sheppard, G. T.  1994.  “Biblical Interpretation After Gadamer”, Pneuma: The Journal for the Society of Pentecostal Studies. 16:121.

Synan, V.  1997.  The Holiness- Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Thiselton, Anthony C. New Horizons in Hermeneutics. Grand Rapids: Michigan: Zondervan, 1992.

White, J.F.  1983.  Sacraments as God’s Self-Giving, Nashville: Abingdon.

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The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny

The New Apostolic Reformation, by C. Peter Wagner

The New Believers, by Diana Bagnall (The Bulletin)

Vision and Strategy for Church Growth, by Lawrence Khong

New Wineskins for Pentecostal Studies, by Sam Hey

New Wineskins to Develop Ministry, by Geoff Waugh

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Vision and Strategy for Church Growth, by Lawrence Khong

by Geoff 12 April 2012 1 Comment

Vision and Strategy for Church Growth

by Lawrence Khong

Dr Lawrence Khong led his Baptist church in Singapore from 350 to a weekly attendance over 8,000, with a strong emphasis on expository preaching and the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.   This article is reproduced with permission from Chapter 14 of The Transforming Power of Revival edited by Harold Caballeros and Mel Winger.

Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins – PDF

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On August 17, 1986, I stood on the platform in a rented auditorium in Singapore to preach in the first worship service of a brand new congregation.  As I approached the pulpit, the Holy Spirit spoke clearly to my heart: “Son, today the new baby is born!”  Then the words of Haggai 2:9 flooded into my mind: “The glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house, … And in this place I will grant peace,’ declares the Lord Almighty” (NIV).

I was too emotionally worn out to be excited about the “greater glory.”  I simply took comfort in the fact that in this new church there will be peace.  I had just emerged from more than a year of leadership struggle in my former church.  I had grown up in this church, a Bible-believing congregation that had been growing consistently.  This had been my spiritual home throughout my teenage years.  The leadership of the church had clearly and lovingly affirmed my calling into the ministry.  They sent me to pursue my theological training in the United States.  I returned to be the pastor of the church.  Within five years, it grew from 350 to 1,600 under my pastoral leadership.

A career-changing experience

During the fifth year of my pastorate, I had an unexpected encounter with the Holy Spirit that opened my heart to the reality of God’s power.  In that encounter, I began speaking in a new tongue.  It was something I had always told my congregation would not and should not ever happen in this day and age.  I clearly taught them that this particular gift, together with other power gifts of the Holy Spirit, had ceased at the end of the apostolic age.  I taught them so well, in fact, that the leadership of the church rejected the validity of my experience and its theological implications immediately.  I realized they were doing the very thing I would have done if I were in their shoes.

I was confused.  My experience completely devastated my neat and tidy theology.  I could not at that point give a clear biblical understanding about what happened.  On the other hand, I could not deny the reality of that experience without compromising the witness of the Holy Spirit in my heart.  Meanwhile, my ministry began failing apart.  Before long, theological differences within the leadership degenerated to attacks on my personal integrity.  After many months of painful struggles, I was finally asked to relinquish my role as the senior pastor of the church.

In the midst of this agonizing process, the Lord gave me a clear word from Scripture: “A woman, when she is in labour, has sorrow because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world” (John 16:21).

The lord told me He was bringing forth a “new baby” in my life that would launch me into a new ministry.  The painful struggles I was going through were the labour pains needed to bring forth this new birth.

The new baby is born

When the Lord said, “Son, today the new baby is born!” on August 17, 1986, Faith Community Baptist Church (FCBC) began.  It brought unspeakable joy to my spirit.  Since then, the promise of God has been true.  The glory of this ministry has far exceeded what I would ask or think.  Indeed, in the last 10 years of our church, there has been peace.

As I am writing this (1998), the baby has grown considerably.  The attendance in our weekly worship services has reached close to 8,000.  In the past 10 years, we have baptized more than 6,400 new believers.  During the same period, some 16,000 persons have made professions of faith for the first time.  Most significantly, in my mind, almost every person who worships with us is also part of a cell group ministry during the week.  In these small groups, we train every member to be a minister of the gospel, calling forth a higher-than-average level of commitment.

As I reflect upon the grace of the lord in Faith Community Baptist Church during the last 10 years, the Lord has impressed me with four major factors that have contributed to the phenomenal growth in this local congregation.   These four factors include

(1) a clear vision and strategy for growth;

(2) a cell  church structure;

(3) a reliance on the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit;  and

(4) one strong and anointed leader.

A clear vision and strategy for growth

During the first 12 months of FCBC, I had the leaders of the church join me in seeking the Lord for a clear vision and strategy for growth.  We were determined not to be another church that religiously maintained traditional programs.  With all our hearts, we sought the Lord for a blueprint that would enable us to take our city for God.  The Lord showed us that to do this, we must move in unity, we must share a common vision and we must agree on the appropriate strategies to fulfil the vision.  As early as 1987, we developed  a three-part vision that has guided our programs ever since.  This three-part  vision has seen refinements through the years.  Today, it stands as follows:

By God’s grace, we will,

(1) establish integrated ministries of  outreach, discipleship and service that encompass the whole of Singapore;

(2)  be a model cell group church that provides quality pastoral training and  equipping resources for transitioning cell group churches in Singapore and around the world; and

(3) establish 50 cell group churches around the world by sending out teams to reach hidden or responsive people groups.

To achieve this vision, we have adopted the following strategies:

1.  Develop an exciting and meaningful celebration every Sunday through music and the pulpit ministry;

2.  Minimize committee meetings by decentralization of operations to full-time staff;

3.  Commit to active staff recruitment to establish a multiple-staff ministry.,

4.  Establish a discipleship network for evangelism, prayer and Bible study;

5.  Provide lay leadership training for all leaders of the church;

6.  Develop and establish specialized ministries of outreach;

7.  Train, equip, send and fully support missionaries from the church to the mission field;    8.  Build a “Touch Centre” consisting of an auditorium seating some 3,000, including other ministry facilities for both the church and the community;

9.  Develop within every member a deep commitment to regular, disciplined and intense warfare prayer for spiritual revival in Singapore and around the world;

10.  Strengthen the family so as to provide a solid base for reaching the unsaved with the love of Christ.

From the beginning, we were filled with a sense of excitement that God was going to fulfill these visions among us.  In FCBC, every one of us is given a corporate challenge to fulfill the vision the Lord has given us.  We believe that “everybody’s job” becomes “nobody’s job.”  Members of FCBC believe that if no one else will do it, we will assume the responsibility of winning our nation to the Lord.  Before long, most of us would begin to realize that we could no longer possess this vision.  Rather, this vision has now totally possessed us with a consuming zeal from the Lord!

Completely structured as a cell group church

In the last five years, FCBC has organized an annual “International Conference on Cell Group Church.”  Thousands from around the world have come to learn the principles and operations of a cell group church.  Every year, I begin the conference by proclaiming a statement that has become a major landmark of my teaching about the cell church. My statement is:

There is a heaven and earth difference; an east and west difference between a CHURCH WITH CELLS and a CELL GROUP CHURCH.

Just about every church in the world has some kind of small groups.  Some of these groups are Bible study groups, fellowship groups, counselling/therapy groups, prayer groups and many others.  However, these are churches with cells and not cell churches.  The major difference between the former and the latter is a structural one.  Hence there is a fundamental, not a superficial, difference between them.

In a church with cells, the cell ministry is only a department within the total ministry of the church.  Members of the church have many options.  They can choose to serve in the missions department or the prayer department or the Christian education department or the fellowship department.  They can choose between the Sunday School or the adult fellowship.  The cell ministry is just another one of the options.

This is not so in a cell group church.  In a cell group church, the cell is the church.  No menu of options is open to every member except that they be in a cell group.  Every department of the church is designed to serve the cell ministry.  Departments do not have any constituency of their own.  All are designed to support the ministry of the cells.

In FCBC, every believer is assimilated into cell groups, similar to military squads.  Each cell is trained to edify one another and to evangelize so that it will multiply within a year to a maximum size of 12 to 15 people.  These cell groups are not independent “house churches,” but basic Christian communities linked together to penetrate every area of our community.

Approximately three to four cell groups cluster to form a sub-zone, and a volunteer zone supervisor pastors the five cells and its cell leaders.  Five sub-zones cluster to create a zone of about 250 people pastored by a full-time zone pastor.  Five or more zones cluster to form a district, and a seasoned district pastor shepherds as many as 1,500 people.

From the start, we created zones that were geographical (north, east, west) and generational (children, youth, military).  Later, we added our music zone for those participating in our choirs, bands, orchestras, drama and dance.  Even these music cells are constantly winning people to Jesus Christ.  Every year, more than 2,500 make first-time decisions for the Lord in the cells.

Foundations for ministry

In the early years, we worked hard to create the foundations for our ministry.  Pastors who had no previous experience with cell church structures were trained and cell leaders were equipped.  Nonexistent equipping materials had to be written.  Soon we had a nickname: “FCBC-Fast Changing Baptist Church”!  Every experimental step helped us learn how to equip and evangelize in the new paradigm.  We were determined to discard anything that did not help us achieve our goals, so we revised our strategy again and again as we gained experience.  Indeed, we are still doing so!

Like other cell churches, our life involves three levels: the cells, the congregations (a cluster of five zones) and the celebration on Sunday.  We quickly had to go to two and then three celebrations of 1,000 people to accommodate the growth in the cell groups.  We presently have one evening service on Saturday and four services on Sunday of two hours duration each.  A completely different congregation of people worships in the Saturday evening service.  We have studiously avoided advertising “seeker-sensitive services,” choosing instead to grow through the ministries of our members in the cells.

Our cells are seeker-sensitive, but our celebration is not.  For us, the celebration is an assembling of the Body of Christ rather than a means of attracting the unconverted.  Nevertheless, many profess faith in Jesus Christ as a result of the intense anointing that comes through worship, as well as my pulpit ministry that focuses on down-to-earth life issues.

The Year of Equipping

What we call “The Year of Equipping” has become an important part of our cell group life.  Each incoming member is visited by the cell leader, who assigns a cell member to be a sponsor for the new person.  A “Journey Guide” is used to acquaint the cell leader and sponsor with the spiritual condition of the person.  Guided by private weekly sessions with the sponsor, this person will complete a journey through the “Arrival Kit” and then be trained to share Christ with both responsive and unresponsive unbelievers.

Another major part of The Year of Equipping consists of three cycles of training for evangelism and harvest meeting in the cells throughout the year.  One such cycle begins in January, where new members of the cell are sent for a weekend of evangelism training.  This is followed by further practices during the cell meetings, leading up to the Good Friday weekend.

In these months, every member of the cell is asked to pray for unsaved people whom they would invite to a special Good Friday evangelistic cell meeting.  On that one Good Friday evening, we will have as many as 4,000 unsaved people in all our cell groups spread throughout the city.  More than 10 percent of them will give their lives to the Lord for the first time.  In that meeting, every member of the cell shares the gospel with unsaved friends.  We do this three times a year.  In this way, equipping for evangelism is an ongoing lifestyle of every cell.  It is my intention that every cell becomes a fit fighting unit in the army of the Lord!

Community service

Because of our strong desire to penetrate the society around us, we have formed the Touch Community Services.  This is the neutral arm of our church designed to relate to the community.  Through this separate corporation, we conduct childcare, legal aid services, after-school clubs, marriage counselling, a workshop to train the handicapped and many other social ministry areas.  This has earned the respect of unbelievers around us and has provided openings for the gospel we would not otherwise experience.  It has established good will for us among the many racial groups that live together in harmony in our nation.

Our community services have found so much favour with government authorities that much of our service ministry is actually funded by the government.  As of now, the juvenile courts make it mandatory for their offenders to seek counselling from our youth counselling services.  The registry of marriage has invited us to conduct premarital counselling for all who are getting married in Singapore!  This is our “root system” into the unconverted world.

Reliance on the supernatural works of the Holy Spirit

The structure of the cell church is nothing but a conduit for the power of the Holy Spirit.  Unless the living water flows, the cells are lifeless.  A major spiritual breakthrough came for us in those early years as we began to recognize the place of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in our midst.  As our cell groups were confronted by the need for spiritual power in caring for people, we saw a gracious outpouring of His presence in our midst.

I shall never forget a certain Sunday when the Lord visited us powerfully.  We were then conducting four worship services in a rented auditorium that seated about 800.  On that particular Sunday, I preached a message about repentance.  Many came forward to repent of their sins.  As I prayed for them from behind the pulpit, the Holy Spirit came into our midst.  Most of them fell under the power of the Spirit.  This was something we had never experienced in our church.  It surprised everyone in the auditorium, especially the people who found themselves lying on the church floor for the first time in their lives, completely unable to move.

The presence of the Lord was so overwhelming that by the beginning of the third service, members who were just walking into the auditorium for worship fell under the power of the Spirit, having no idea what had been happening in the preceding services!

This visitation of the Holy Spirit brought about a six-month period of deep repentance among the members of the church.  The anointing of the Spirit filled every cell meeting.  The sick were being healed.  The demonized were set free.  The church grew rapidly as our cell groups learned to minister in the power of the Spirit.

One strong and anointed leader

At the risk of misunderstanding me as being arrogant, I have always told audiences around the world that one of the main factors that has contributed to the growth of FCBC is the gracious gift of leadership the Lord has entrusted to me.  FCBC has grown rapidly because of my strong and anointed leadership.  In the early years of the church, the leadership team carefully studied a chapter written by Oswald J. Smith in his book Building a   Better World.  He began his chapter with these words:   “Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people” (Isa. 55:4).

God’s plan is that His flock should be led by a Shepherd, not run by a Board.  Committees are to advise, never to dictate.  The Holy Spirit appoints men.  To Bishops and Elders is given the care of the churches, never to Committees.  They are to be the Overseers, the Shepherds.  Each one has his own flock.  Because men have failed to recognize this, there has been trouble.  When God’s plan is followed, all is well.

The cell group church is vision driven.  It needs a strong leader to rally the people toward a God-given vision.  It is also structured like the military.  It calls for a strong commander to instil a sense of strict spiritual discipline needed to complete the task.  At the inception of the church, my core leaders asked,   “Pastor, what sort of leader will you be?”

My answer was unequivocal, “I believe I will be a strong leader, one who believes what the Lord wants me to do and who pursues it with all my heart.”

Traditionally, the church has been suspicious of strong leadership, especially when it is centred in one person.  As a result, many man-made systems of checks and counterchecks have been built into traditional church polity to ensure that there can be no one-man rule.  Although I agree that there is a need for mutual accountability, these checks have more often become major roadblocks for God’s appointed leaders to lead His people into victorious ministry.  Many lay leaders have expressed great fear of so-called   “dictatorship” behind the pulpit.  After 20 years of ministry, however, I must say that I have seen more “dictators” sitting in the pews than those standing behind pulpits.

What is leadership?

One day I was praying about this issue of leadership and the Lord impressed upon me to write down these words about leadership:

Leadership is not dictatorship

Leadership is rallying people to pursue a vision.  A leader successfully instils in those he is leading a deep desire to fulfil that vision.  He gains the trust of his people by virtue of his character, his integrity, his resourcefulness, his zeal, his good judgment, his people skills and, most importantly, his anointing from God.  As a result, the people grant him the freedom to decide and the authority to supervise and control.   Such leadership can never be provided by a committee or a board.  If, indeed, such leadership is provided by a group, it is because within that group someone can provide such strong leadership first to the group and through that to the rest of the people.

We often talk about New Testament leadership as if it is completely different from Old Testament leadership.  I believe that biblical leadership is consistent throughout the New and Old Testaments.  Whenever God wants to do a work, He chooses a man.  We have leaders such as Moses, Gideon, David, Elijah and others in the Old Testament.  In the New Testament, we have leaders such as Peter for the Jews and Paul for the Gentiles.   In FCBC, I assert my clear leadership in three areas:

Casting the Vision

I lead the people by casting a clear and concrete vision for the church.  In the early years, I spent countless hours sharing, discussing, praying and formulating the vision and strategies of the church.  I realize that a vision is only powerful when it is fully owned by the people.  Our vision and strategies were clearly set by the third year.  Since that time, I have constantly shared and reinforced this for my leaders and members.  I speak to every new member of the church about this vision in our new member orientation called “Spiritual Formation Weekend.”  I challenge every member to consider seriously our vision before joining our church.  If someone is not able to subscribe to the vision, I strongly recommend that the person join another church.

Once the vision and strategies have been forged, I expect every leader in the church to support them.  This is especially so for pastoral staff.  They are selected on the basis that as lay cell leaders and group supervisors they have demonstrated their commitment to the vision of the church.  Today, the church has a paid staff of almost 200.  In the last 10 years, we have had a staff turnover of fewer than 10 persons.  There is a tremendous sense of unity on the team.  The reason for this is that I have clearly provided leadership in casting for the people a clear vision and articulating specific strategies from the Lord.

Creating an environment for Growth

As leader, I am concerned about creating an environment conducive to growth.  We have written a clear mission statement and we have agreed upon specific core values that define the uniqueness of FCBC, both in terms of belief and of practice.  I will reproduce the mission statement here:  We seek to fulfil God’s role for us in bringing the gospel to the world by developing every believer to his full potential in Jesus Christ within a vision & value driven environment and a God-centred community.

Preaching and Teaching from the Pulpit

The main vehicle by which the growth environment is established comes through dynamic teaching and preaching during the celebration.  Some think that the cell church consists of only cells.  This is not true.  Although the cell is the church, the church is more than just cells.  The cells come together in the celebration meeting, absorbing the apostolic teaching that shapes the direction, commitment and spiritual atmosphere for the whole Body.  The church in Acts 2 met in homes, but they came together to listen to the   apostles’ teaching.  I spend some 20 hours every week preparing my sermon.  The sermon each week is more than teaching the Bible.  Every sermon conveys a passion for God and communicates His purposes for His people.

There is no doubt that the growth of FCBC is the result of God’s special grace in and through my life.  As long as I walk humbly before the Lord in intimacy, the Lord will lead us from glory to glory.  I realize that as I promote and support strong apostolic leadership, there is always the danger of abuse.  It is altogether possible for apostles to abuse the authority God has given us as His apostolic leaders.  Nevertheless, this apparently is a risk God is willing to take with us because, in His grace, He has chosen to do just that.  God is more than able to bring down His erring servants just as quickly as He raises them up.  Meanwhile, I believe in affirming God’s appointed leadership over   His people.

Affirmation with humility

I believe that God’s leaders need affirmation and encouragement as they agree to take positions of leadership.  Yet they must have the humility to serve.  Strong leaders have often been misunderstood to be dictatorial and proud.  For my part, though, I would rather affirm them, pray for them and release them to become a blessing to the Body of Christ.

When FCBC started, my heart was completely shattered by the rejection of the leaders of my former church.  The issues that finally brought about the split of the church turned personal.  I was attacked for being controlling, dictatorial and even dangerously influential.  At the inception of FCBC, I had lost my confidence to lead.  Thus I became laid back, relinquishing the leadership to my core leaders who, together with me, started the church.

In the beginning of 1987, a few months after the church had started, we invited Pastor Bill Yaegar from the First Baptist Church of Modesto, California, to speak to us about leadership.  Pastor Yaegar was in his 60s and since then has retired.   In his visit with us, Bill Yaegar noticed how discouraged I was.  I could never forget his parting words to me at the Singapore airport.  He said, “Son, I was praying for you this morning.  The Lord told me He was giving you a new name.  Your name shall be called ‘Ari.’  This is a Jewish name that means ‘lion.’  Lawrence, the Lord tells you that you are the ‘Lion of Singapore.’  You are to stand up and roar.  And whenever others forget that you are the ‘Lion of Singapore,’ stand up and roar again!”

No one had ever previously affirmed me that way.  It was an extremely important moment in my ministry career.  I realized in that instant that through all my years of Christian ministry, people were constantly warning me to go slower, to be more cautious and to be more “humble.”  This was the first time a seasoned servant of God had actually encouraged me to take charge, to lead and to press on.  Something burst forth within the depths of my spirit.  I have been roaring ever since for the glory of God and the advance of His kingdom!

© From Chapter 13, “A Vision and Strategy for Church Growth”, in The Transforming Power of Revival edited by Harold Caballeros and Mel Winger (Peniel, Buenos Aires, 1998), excerpted from The New Apostolic Churches edited by C.   Peter Wagner (Regal 8ooks, Ventura, 1998), used by permission.

© Renewal Journal #15: Wineskins, renewaljournal.com
Reproduction is allowed with the copyright included in the text.

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6  Worship,   7  Blessing,   8  Awakening,   9  Mission,   10  Evangelism,
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CONTENTS:  Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins

The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny

The New Apostolic Reformation, by C. Peter Wagner

The New Believers, by Diana Bagnall (The Bulletin)

Vision and Strategy for Church Growth, by Lawrence Khong

New Wineskins for Pentecostal Studies, by Sam Hey

New Wineskins to Develop Ministry, by Geoff Waugh

Book and DVD Reviews:
Pentecostalism, by Walter Hollenweger
The Transforming Power of Revival, by Harold Caballeros and Mell Winger
Transformations 1 and 2 DVDs (The Sentinel Group)

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BLOGS INDEX 4: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES)

BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)

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The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny

by Geoff 12 April 2012 2 Comments

The God Chasers

by Tommy Tenny

 

Evangelist Tommy Tenny describes people and churches who seek the Lord zealously in his book The God Chasers.  This article from his first chapter tells how he witnessed the visitation of God in the 3,000 member Christian Tabernacle Church in Houston, Texas, led by Richard Heard.

 

Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins – PDF

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The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny:
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An article in Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins:
https://renewaljournal.com/2012/04/12/wineskins/

See also: God’s Awesome Presence, by Dr R Heard

 

This body of believers in Houston had two scheduled services on Sundays.  The first morning service started at 8:30, and the second one followed and began at 11.

When I returned for the third weekend, while in the hotel, I sensed a heavy anointing of some kind, a brooding of the Spirit, and I literally wept and trembled.

You could barely breathe

The following morning, we walked into the building for the 8:30 Sunday service expecting to see the usual early morning first service “sleepy” crowd with their low-key worship.  As I walked in to sit down in the front row that morning, the presence of God was already in that place so heavily that the air was “thick.”  You could barely breathe.

The musicians were clearly struggling to continue their ministry; their tears got in the way.  Music became more difficult to play.  Finally, the presence of God hovered so strongly that they couldn’t sing or play any longer.  The worship leader crumpled in sobs behind the keyboard.

If there was one good decision I made in life, it was made that day.  I had never been this close to “catching” God, and I was not going to stop.  So I spoke to my wife, Jeannie. “You should go continue to lead us to Him.”  Jeannie has an anointing to lead people into the presence of God as a worshiper and intercessor.  She quietly moved to the front and continued to facilitate the worship and ministry to the Lord.  It wasn’t anything fancy; it was just simple. That was the only appropriate response in that moment.

The atmosphere reminded me of the passage in Isaiah 6, something I’d read about, and even dared dream I might experience myself.  In this passage the glory of the Lord filled the temple.  I’d never understood what it meant for the glory of the Lord to fill a place.  I had sensed God come in places, I had sensed Him come by, but this time in Houston, even after there was all of God that I thought was available in the building, more of His presence literally packed itself into the room.  It’s like the bridal train of a bride that, after she has personally entered the building, her bridal train continues to enter the building after her.  God was there; of that there was no doubt.  But more of Him kept coming in the place until, as in Isaiah, it literally filled the building.  At times the air was so rarefied that it became almost unbreathable.  Oxygen came in short gasps, seemingly.  Muffled sobs broke through the room.  In the midst of this, the pastor turned to me and asked me a question.

“Tommy, are you ready to take the service?”

“Pastor, I’m just about half-afraid to step up there, because I sense that God is about to do something.”

Tears were streaming down my face when I said that.  I wasn’t afraid that God was going to strike me down, or that something bad was going to happen.  I just didn’t want to interfere and grieve the precious presence that was filling up that room!  For too long we humans have only allowed the Holy Spirit to take control up to a certain point.  Basically, whenever it gets outside of our comfort zone or just a little beyond our control, we pull in the reins (the Bible calls it “quenching the Spirit” in First Thessalonians 5:19).  We stop at the tabernacle veil too many times.

“I feel like I should read Second Chronicles 7:14, and I have a word from the Lord,” my pastor friend said.

With profuse tears I nodded assent and said, “Go, go.”

My friend is not a man given to any kind of outward demonstration; he is essentially a man of “even” emotions.  But when he got up to walk to the platform, he appeared visibly shaky.  At this point I so sensed something was about to happen, that I walked all the way from the front row to the back of the room to stand by the sound booth.  I knew God was going to do something; I just didn’t know where.  I was on the front row, and it could happen behind me or to the side of me.  I was so desperate to catch Him that I got up and publicly walked back to the sound booth as the pastor walked up to the pulpit to speak, so I could see whatever happened.  I wasn’t even sure that it was going to happen on the platform, but I knew something was going to happen. “God, I want to be able to see whatever it is You are about to do.”

My pastor friend stepped up to the clear pulpit in the centre of the platform, opened the Bible, and quietly read the gripping passage from Second Chronicles 7:14:  If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.    

Then he closed his Bible, gripped the edges of the pulpit with trembling hands, and said, “The word of the Lord to us is to stop seeking His benefits and seek Him.  We are not to seek His hands any longer, but seek His face.”

In that instant, I heard what sounded like a thunderclap echo through the building, and the pastor was literally picked up and thrown backward about ten feet, effectively separating him from the pulpit. When he went backward, the pulpit fell forward.  The beautiful flower arrangement positioned in front of it fell to the ground, but by the time the pulpit hit the ground, it was already in two pieces.  It had split into two pieces almost as if lightning had hit it!  At that instant the tangible terror of the presence of God filled that room.

People began to weep and wail

I quickly stepped to the microphone from the back of the room and said, “In case you aren’t aware of it, God has just moved into this place.  The pastor is fine.  [It was two and a half hours before he could even get up, though – and even then the ushers had to carry him.  Only his hand trembled slightly to give proof of life.]  He’s going to be fine.”

While all of this happened, the ushers quickly ran to the front to check on the pastor and to pick up the two pieces of the split pulpit.  No one really paid much attention to the split pulpit; we were too occupied with the torn heavenlies.  The presence of God had hit that place like some kind of bomb.  People began to weep and to wail.  I said, “If you’re not where you need to be, this is a good time to get right with God.”  I’ve never seen such an altar call.  It was pure pandemonium.  People shoved one another out of the way.  They wouldn’t wait for the aisles to clear; they climbed over pews, businessmen tore their ties off, and they were literally stacked on top of one another, in the most horribly harmonious sound of repentance you ever heard.  Just the thought of it still sends chills down my back.  When I gave the altar call then for the 8.30 a.m. service, I had no idea that it would be but the first of seven altar calls that day.

When it was time for the 11 a.m. service to begin, nobody had left the building.  The people were still on their faces and, even though there was hardly any music being played at this point, worship was rampant and uninhibited.  Grown men were ballet dancing; little children were weeping in repentance.  People were on their faces, on their feet, on their knees, but mostly in His presence.  There was so much of the presence and the power of God there that people began to feel an urgent need to be baptized.  I watched people walk through the doors of repentance, and one after another experienced the glory and the presence of God as He came near.  Then they wanted baptism, and I was in a quandary about what to do.  The pastor was still unavailable on the floor.  Prominent people walked up to me and stated, “I’ve got to be baptized.  Somebody tell me what to do.”  They joined with the parade of the unsaved, who were now saved, provoked purely by encountering the presence of God.  There was no sermon and no real song – just His Spirit that day.

Two and a half hours had passed, and since the pastor had only managed to wiggle one finger at that point to call the elders to him, the ushers had carried him to his office. Meanwhile, all these people were asking me (or anyone else they could find) if they could be baptised.  As a visiting minister at the church, I didn’t want to assume the authority to tell anyone to baptize these folks, so I sent people back to the pastor’s office to see if he would authorize the water baptisms.

I gave one altar call after another, and hundreds of people were coming forward.  As more and more people came to me asking about water baptism, I noticed that no one I had sent to the pastor’s office had returned.  Finally I sent a senior assistant pastor back there and told him, “Please find out what Pastor wants to do about the water baptisms -nobody has come back to tell me yet.”  The man stuck his head in the pastor’s office, and to his shock he saw the pastor still lying before the Lord, and everyone I had sent there was sprawled on the floor too, just weeping and repenting before God.  He hurried back to tell me what he had seen and added, “I’ll go ask him, but if I go in that office I may not be back either.”

We baptized people for hours

I shrugged my shoulders and agreed with the associate pastor, “I guess it’s all right to baptize them.”  So we began to baptize people as a physical sign of their repentance before the Lord, and we ended up baptizing people for hours.  More and more people kept pouring in, and since the people from the early service were still there, there were cars parked everywhere outside the church building.  A big open-air ball field next to the building was filled with cars parked every which way.

As people drove onto the parking lot, they sensed the presence of God so strongly that some began to weep uncontrollably.  They just found themselves driving up onto the parking lot or into the grass not knowing what was going on.  Some started to get out of their cars and barely managed to stagger across the parking lot.  Some came inside the building only to fall to the floor just inside the doors.  The hard-pressed ushers had to literally pull the helpless people away from the doors and stack them up along the walls of the hallways to clear the entrance.  Others managed to make it part way down the hallways, and some made it to the foyer before they fell on their faces in repentance.

Some actually made it inside the auditorium, but most of them didn’t bother to find seats.  They just made for the altar.  No matter what they did or how far they made it, it wasn’t long before they began to weep and repent.  As I said, there wasn’t any preaching.  There wasn’t even any music part of the time.  Primarily one thing happened that day: The presence of God showed up.  When that happens, the first thing you do is the same thing Isaiah did when he saw the Lord high and lifted up.  He cried out from the depths of his soul:

Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts (Isaiah 6:5).

You see, the instant Isaiah the prophet, the chosen servant of God, saw the King of glory, what he used to think was clean and holy now looked like filthy rags.  He was thinking, I thought I knew God, but I didn’t know this much of God!  That Sunday we seemed to come so close; we almost caught Him.  Now I know it’s possible.

They came right back for more

People just kept filling the auditorium again and again, beginning with that strange service that started at 8.30 that morning.  I finally went to eat at around 4:00 that afternoon, and then came right back to the church building.  Many never left.  The continuous “Sunday morning service” lasted until 1 a.m. Monday morning.  We didn’t have to announce our plans for Monday evening.  Everybody already knew.  Frankly, there would have been a meeting whether we announced it or not.  The people simply went home to get some sleep or do the things they had to do, and they came right back for more – not for more of men and their programs, but for God and His presence.

Night after night, the pastor and I would come in and say,  “What are we going to do?”

Most of the time our answer to one another was just as predictable: “What do you want to do?”

What we meant was, “I don’t know what to do.  What does He want to do?”

Sometimes we’d go in and start trying to “have church,” but the crying hunger of the people would quickly draw in the presence of God and suddenly God had us!  Listen, my friend, God doesn’t care about your music, your midget steeples, and your flesh-impressive buildings.  Your church carpet doesn’t impress Him – He carpets the fields.  God doesn’t really care about anything you can “do” for Him; He only cares about your answer to one question: “Do you want Me?”

Ruin everything that isn’t of You, Lord!

We have programmed our church services so tightly that we really don’t leave room for the Holy Spirit.  Oh, we might let God speak prophetically to us a little, but we get nervous if He tries to break out of our schedules.  We can’t let God out of the box too much because He can ruin everything.  (That has become my prayer: “Break out of our boxes, Lord, and ruin everything that isn’t of You!”)

Let me ask you a question: How long has it been since you came to church and said, “We are going to wait on the Lord”?  I think we are afraid to wait on Him because we’re afraid He won’t show up.  I have a promise for you: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength” (Isa. 40:31).  Do you want to know why we’ve lived in weakness as Christians and have not had all that God wanted for us?  Do you want to know why we have lived beneath our privilege and have not had the strength to overcome our own carnality?  Maybe it’s because we haven’t waited on Him to show up to empower us, and we’re trying to do too much in the power of our own soulish realm.

God ruined everything in Houston

I am not trying to make you feel bad.  I know most Christians and most of our leaders genuinely mean well, but there is so much more.  You can “catch” God – ask Jacob – and it might ruin the way you’ve always walked!  But you can catch Him.  We’ve talked, preached, and taught about revival until the Church is sick of hearing about it.  That’s what I did for a living: I preached revivals – or so I thought.  Then God broke out of His box and ruined everything when He showed up.  Seven nights a week, for the next four or five weeks straight, hundreds of people a night would stand in line to repent and receive Christ, worship, wait, and pray.  What had happened in history, past and present, was happening again.  Then it dawned on me, “God, You’re wanting to do this everywhere.”  For months His manifest presence hovered.

© Tommy Tenny, 1998, The God Chasers, pages 5-12, reproduced with permission from the publishers, Destiny Image.

©  Renewal Journal #15: Wineskins (2000:1)  www.renewaljournal.com

Richard Heard’s account of that visitation is reproduced in the Renewal Journal, # 10: Evangelism.  He tells of continual evangelism and the whole carpet of the church being tear-stained from people repenting for over a year.
See also: God’s Awesome Presence, by Dr R Heard

© Renewal Journal #15: Wineskins, renewaljournal.com
Reproduction is allowed with the copyright included in the text.

Renewal Journals – contents of all issues

Book Depository – free postage worldwide
Book Depository – Bound Volumes (5 in each) – free postage

Amazon – Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins
Amazon – all journals and books – Look inside

All Renewal Journal Topics

1 Revival,   2 Church Growth,   3 Community,   4 Healing,   5 Signs & Wonders,
6  Worship,   7  Blessing,   8  Awakening,   9  Mission,   10  Evangelism,
11  Discipleship,   12  Harvest,   13  Ministry,   14  Anointing,   15  Wineskins,
16  Vision,   17  Unity,   18  Servant Leadership,   19  Church,   20 Life

CONTENTS:  Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins

Editorial: New Wineskins for the 21st Century

The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny

The New Apostolic Reformation, by C. Peter Wagner

The New Believers, by Diana Bagnall (The Bulletin)

Vision and Strategy for Church Growth, by Lawrence Khong

New Wineskins for Pentecostal Studies, by Sam Hey

New Wineskins to Develop Ministry, by Geoff Waugh

Book and DVD Reviews:
Pentecostalism, by Walter Hollenweger
The Transforming Power of Revival, by Harold Caballeros and Mell Winger
Transformations 1 and 2 DVDs (The Sentinel Group)

Revival Blogs Links:

See also Revivals Index

See also Revival Blogs

See also Blogs Index 1: Revivals

GENERAL BLOGS INDEX

BLOGS INDEX 1: REVIVALS (BRIEFER THAN REVIVALS INDEX)

BLOGS INDEX 2: MISSION (INTERNATIONAL STORIES)

BLOGS INDEX 3: MIRACLES (SUPERNATURAL EVENTS)

BLOGS INDEX 4: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES)

BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)

BLOGS INDEX 6: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 7: IMAGES (PHOTOS AND ALBUMS)

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charismatic, renewal ,

The New Believers, by Diana Bagnall

by Geoff 12 April 2012 1 Comment

The New Believers

by Diana Bagnall

 

Diana Bagnall wrote this cover story for the 11 April, 2000 issue of The Bulletin, with Newsweek, reproduced here with permission. 

___________________

 

Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins – PDF

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The Great Leap of Faith – comment by Max Welsh, Editor-in-Chief of The Bulletin:

In discussing the role of religion in Australian politics, especially with Americans, I stress the fact that Australia is probably the most secular of all the democracies. We do not have an established church.  At the individual level, people may claim allegiance to one faith or another but, in practice, we are not a church-going nation.

We do have religious leaders who speak with the authority of their rank. However, their ability to influence the national debate, let alone to set the national agenda is, at best, modest and usually marginal.

While committed Christians have formed themselves into non-partisan fellowships, at the federal parliamentary level there is no real equivalent of the Moral Majority movement in the United States.

I’m referring here to a mass political force.  The Pentecostal movement, which operates outside traditional religious groups, has been around for some time but it has a low profile in the national political-cum-social debate.

It may be that I’m the one out of touch, but I was surprised when senior writer Diana Bagnall told me more Australians attend Pentecostal services than Anglican churches.  This is a major, fast-growing religious force.

Its low profile is in large part due to its atomistic, as distinct from hierarchical, form of organisation.  But it also reflects a widely held view among Pentecostal leaders that the mass media – a singularly secular institution – has in the past sensationalised their activities, exhibiting more scorn and ridicule than sensitivity and understanding.

If that is true, it’s a pity because what is happening in this corner of Australian life is both interesting and important for what it says about our society.  It was on this basis that Bagnall researched and wrote our cover story.

____________________________________

The New Believers, by Diana Bagnall

Christianity is being born again.  Pentecostal congregations are swelling, the influence of their leaders is soaring, and politicians are starting to take notice.  Diana Bagnall examines the attraction of the absolute in an age of doubt.

There’s a point at which continuing to caricature a sizeable group of Australians as a weird or loony fringe when they are going about a lawful activity in a purposeful, well-organised manner begins to backfire.  Think of One Nation.  When the group numbers scores of thousands and has been notching up double-digit membership growth each year for the best part of two decades, the ridicule is clearly unsustainable.

Call them misguided if you want, or politically subversive, which they undoubtedly have the potential to become, but don’t trivialise born-again Christians as marginal or eccentric.  Because the numbers tell a different story.  Their signature mix of conservative theology and radical religious practice is as mainstream as the church comes these days if by mainstream we mean belonging to that part of the river where the water flows most strongly and in greatest volume.

That they are relatively invisible at a national level is partly because their culture and vocabulary is so particular (in many respects theirs is a parallel universe), and partly because the Pentecostal churches that attract them in the greatest numbers don’t have the street-corner presence of traditional churches.  Sure, a handful of Pentecostal congregations are housed on big acreages in large, purpose-built auditoriums, complete with cafes and youth centres, recording studios and schools, but more find a home in recycled buildings – warehouses, primary schools, community centres.  And that’s what’s fooled us.

We haven’t seen the communities and the networks.  And they’re big, vigorous and potentially powerful.  Brian Houston, who heads the Assemblies of God denomination in Australia, estimates that there are 3000 full-time trainees in AOG Bible colleges across the country.  Many of these churches are young churches.  In the Christian City Church, a Sydney-based denomination that didn’t exist 20 years ago and now claims 25,000 members worldwide, for example, 70% of attendees are aged I5-39.  The predominant style is contemporary and prosperous.  Hip even.

These are places where winners hang out, where the rewards are tangible and tantalising.  They promise the good life on Earth, and of course, the bonus of eternal life.  They offer intimacy and excitement, a sense of belonging and of righteousness.  A heady mix.

The church in decline has become a media cliché.  Church leaders, those whose opinions are sought out because their brands of Christianity are familiar and visible, are increasingly portrayed as desperate men, maximising what’s left of greatly depleted stores of spiritual and temporal authority.  One minute they’re talking of the need to market their spiritual “programs” more effectively, the next they’re wading more deeply, with government encouragement, into bureaucratised social welfare.

Save for the odd embarrassing episode where a triumphant Melbourne Cup jockey or superstar footballer takes advantage of his media access to proclaim his love for the  Lord, there is little in the mainstream media to suggest that the church is anything other than a cultural backwater populated by the elderly and the backward-looking.  Census data seems to prove the point.  It shows a 35.5% increase between I99I and I996 in the number of Australians saying they had no religion and the major Christian denominations losing market share.

So what about the 3500 people who turn up each weekend to worship at the Christian City Church in Oxford Falls, near Sydney’s northern beaches?  What about the 5000 women who milled among the marquees and pots of pink and magenta petunias at Pastor Bobbie Houston’s women’s conference last month at the Hills Christian Life Centre in Sydney’s Baulkham Hills?  What about the 1200-strong Ipswich Region Community Church in Queensland waiting on the completion of a new 1000-seat auditorium and 350-seat youth and children’s facility?  What about the 100,000 people who are expected to march into the Sydney Olympic Stadium on June 10  (the Day of Pentecost) under the banner of the Awakening 2000 movement to celebrate ‘the reason for the turning of the millennium’?  Don’t they count?

As a combined grouping, there are now more people worshipping in Pentecostal churches than at Anglican churches each week, according to the most recent National Church Life Survey.  Only Catholic parishes have a greater number of attendees.  But these new Christian communities don’t just restrict themselves to Pentecostal churches, which makes the business of mapping their influence much more difficult than simply counting bums on pews.  There are contemporary evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal churches across denominations, says Melbourne Anglican leader Peter Corney.  “The majority of adults attending Protestant churches on Sunday in Australia would go to one of these types of churches,” he says.  “Almost all the large churches (that is, over 500 members), and the churches with young congregations, fall into those categories.”

For just as loyalty to political parties has broken down over the past decade and capturing the swinging voter has become the measure of political success, so too the old religious tribal connections have broken down.  People are open to persuasion.  In the new churches the power of the message is in its communication.  “We scratch where people are itching,” says Mark Edwards, 41, an ex-lawyer who has increased membership of the Ipswich Region Community Church sixfold in the eight years he has been its senior minister.

His sermons are more likely to focus on financial management (he has just finished a two-year term as president of the local chamber of commerce) and work issues, relationships and raising children than on fine theological argument.  But, fundamentally, there is still only one message – salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.  Part and parcel of that is acceptance of the Bible’s authority, literally across the board. …  For it is now well understood by those who analyse patterns of church growth and decline that firmly drawn boundaries and clearly stated values are an asset rather than a liability to churches in a post-modernist world characterised by impermanence and relativity.  The balance of theological power is shifting on the ground as people vote with their feet for more conservative, orthodox Christian values.

“Liberal theology has reigned supreme in the theological colleges, and still does, but out there, in the trenches, the whole liberal theology thing just hasn’t worked,” explains Peter Corney, who until last June was vicar of St Hillary’s Anglican Church, in Melbourne’s Kew.  “It has failed to capture the hearts and minds of a generation of young people.”

The average size of Anglican and Protestant congregations in Australia is around 70, with more than a third having fewer than 25 attendees, according to the National Church Life Survey.  Yet in 20 years, under Corney’s evangelical leadership, the congregation at St Hillary’s grew from 150 to 1000.  Most of those filling the pews in the two Sunday evening services are under 25.  Further east in the same city, 2300 people pack the pews of Crossway Baptist Church which under ex-missionary Stuart Robinson’s leadership has grown by about 20% each year since the mid ’90s.  People lock into clearly defined vision and values, says Robinson.  “They want to know where they are going.”

In fact, St Hillary’s and Crossway are the exception rather than the rule in more than one respect.  For while Corney believes that the church is entering a post-denominational era, it is an undeniable fact that most of Australia’s mega-churches are Pentecostal, not in itself a denomination but a brand of Christianity that features as its centrepiece the highly charged experience called baptism of the Holy Spirit.  The most common sign of a Pentecostal experience is that a person begins speaking in tongues (making sounds that usually they can’t understand and feel they can’t control), but there are other signs such as falling to the ground in a trance or, as happened first in Toronto in the early ’90s, laughing uncontrollably (the Toronto Blessing).

Pentecostal churches have been around since the beginning of the century, but burst into international prominence in the ’70s during the so-called charismatic renewal.  At that time, a fair few people attending regular churches were also caught up in Pentecostal-style worship.  While some of them defected early on to the Pentecostal churches, many hung in with the old denominations hoping they would move with the times.  By and large they were disappointed, and by the mid ’80s large numbers of church-goers were spilling out of old churches and into new ones in a massive shift in the Protestant landscape that some have compared to the Reformation of the 16th century.

That exodus gathered momentum in the ’90s.  Between the 1991 and 1996 censuses, Pentecostal groups overall increased their membership by 16%.  In terms of the number of congregations established, the growth appears to be even more dramatic.  The National Church Life Survey found that between 1991 and 1996 the number of congregations within four Pentecostal denominations, the Assemblies of God, Foursquare Gospel, Christian Revival Crusade and the Apostolic Church, had grown from 832 to 1046, a 26% increase.

The NCLS found that the overall growth in Pentecostal denominations was predominantly due to ‘switchers’, that is people who are joining from other denominations.  The survey found nearly three times as many switches joining the Pentecostal churches as there were newcomers without a church background.

The leaders of these new churches make no apology for their gain at another’s expense,  “People will go where it’s happening for them,” Phil Pringle, 47, founding head of Christian City Churches and senior pastor of the mega-church at Oxford Falls.  At Brian Houston’s Assembly of God church at Baulkham Hills in the north-west of Sydney, growth is limited to how many carpark spaces can be accommodated on the 8.5-hectare site.   The church is about to embark on building a 3500-seat auditorium.  “Most people here think it is too small,” he says.  Already, the Hills Christian Life Centre pushes through 7000 churchgoers on any one weekend.  Like those who attend any of the big, new regional churches, they are likely to drive past 100 other churches on their way.  The question is, why?

We can talk, as Pringle does, about an “ache” for God, we can talk about seeking refuge from the confusion of modern life and about the eternal longing for meaning.  And all these things go some way to explaining the filling up of the churches.  But there are more temporal reasons, to do with charisma, seductive packaging, the power of positive thinking, professional standards and, possibly most importantly, the effective harnessing of youthful idealism and passion.

Men like Pringle and Houston bear as little resemblance to conventional clergymen as Brad Pitt does to Laurence Olivier.  Pringle, once an art student and still a painter, started his church in 1980 with 12 people in the Dee Why Surf Club on Sydney’s northern beaches.  It has grown into a denomination (a formalised denomination, that is) encompassing, according to his estimates, 25,000 people in 100 churches around the world.  Houston, 46, runs two Assembly of God churches and one of gospel music’s most successful recording stories, Hillsong Music, which claims annual worldwide sales of more than 2 million albums.  Aside from the Baulkham Hills operation, there’s a smaller church at Waterloo in central Sydney with a congregation of 2300.

Not for Pringle or Houston the quiet scratch of pen on paper within the sanctuary of a book-lined study.  They move at a furious pace, as much entrepreneur as pastor, as much celebrity as preacher.  It is nothing for them to be opening a new church in Los Angeles one week, addressing a conference on the Gold Coast the next, all the while churning out the next motivational book, overseeing the operations of their various training colleges and schools and co-ordinating the activities of roving teams of laptop-toting pastors, big pools of musicians and singers, and expanding counselling and community service arms.

Masters of communications technologies, they draw around them sophisticated teams to produce web sites and videos, music recordings and television programs for broadcast on both free-to-air and pay TV (the Australian Christian Channel is part of Optus TVs basic package).  Their core role, however, is to spearhead the growth of their churches by presenting their deeply conservative religious message week after week in a compelling, high-energy, contemporary format.

“I would struggle with that kind of pressure,” admits Father Mike Delancy, a Catholic parish priest at New Norfolk in rural Tasmania whose daily pastoral fare is much more likely to be a funeral service than a baptism of any sort.  He’s involved in the ecumenical Awakening movement, and unusually for a man of his cloth, counts many  Pentecostal pastors as his friends.  “The flip side for them is that when the high energy drops off, so do the people,” he says.

Physically, the churches these men lead (and make no mistake, this is a man’s world – women have a vital place in it, but the Bible’s teaching is firm on the gender hierarchy) are designed to be user-friendly for “seekers”, as newcomers are called.  No knee-bruising pews, no distracting religious icons.  The purpose-built auditoriums are cathedrals of modern entertainment with all the technological wizardry.  Christian City Church at Oxford Falls is in the process of redesigning its web site to give live online access to church services.  But even in more modest locations, church services are conceived of as multimedia events – display windows for marketing Christianity – rather than as liturgical set pieces to mark a religious calendar.

There’s none of that intimidating business of knowing when to stand and when to kneel, and which page of the order of service or which number hymn to turn to.  “Culturally relevant” is the buzz phrase used to describe the approach.  Instead of priests and altar boys, the focus of attention is a rock band, usually several musicians and singers who pump out music with the catchy rhythms and romantic tub of good pop.  The words are simple, and projected on big screens.

In fact, the services are not unlike Saturday night variety TV – seemingly effortless, but planned down to the last minute.  At Edwards’Assembly of God church in Ipswich each service (and, typically, there are several each Sunday, designed for different congregations) is planned six months in advance by a salaried creative arts director who leads a team of about nine people and draws on a bigger pool of about 70 musicians, singers, sound, lighting and drama people.  Edwards explains: “You go to a Barbra Streisand concert and you expect a certain standard of that concert.  Why should people who come to our church expect any less?”

Edwards is a former lawyer, a local lad who switched careers in his mid-30s to follow his passionate belief.  He’s typical of the new breed of church leader – intelligent, thoughtful and community oriented.  Bronwyn Hughes, a member of the National Church Life Survey team, says leaders of growing churches have a profile that closely matches the leadership profile of management literature.  “These people function in a similar change environment.  [Their role] is about mobilising people, and gaining their trust.”

Some of the new church leaders are traditionally trained denominational ministers but the great majority are not.  Melbourne pastor Mark Conner, for example, inherited the church from his father, Kevin.  He was a musician and a youth leader before he took over the reins.  Houston, too, inherited his church from his father Frank (there’s a dynastic streak in these churches).  Robinson, of Crossway Baptist, says his Pentecostal friends laugh at him because he has a string of degrees.  “In contemporary church, we don’t  place a high value on the status of ordination,” he explains.  A leadership “gift”, by contrast, is mandatory.  “I think all these guys could run a large company somewhere,” explains  Corney, who is now executive director of the  interdenominational Institute of  Contemporary Christian Leadership.

Yet, curiously, they have relatively little  profile beyond their own world.  That, it seems, is about to change.  “The church that  I see is a church of influence, a church so large in size that the city and the nation can’t ignore it, a church growing so quickly that the buildings struggle to contain [it] . . .” write Houston and his wife Bobbie in a manifesto placed prominently in the foyer at Baulkham Hills -just a few metres away from the Brian and Bobbie exhibition stand, a bookstall of their books and videos over  which their names are written in neon script.

Houston’s stated desire for influence more in keeping with the size of his church is a sharp new turn for the Pentecostals.  Until very recently, Pentecostals have lacked a cohesive national voice.  The hallmark of Pentecostal churches is that they are strongly autonomous.  Individual pastors run their own show and are not answerable to a church hierarchy.  To their members, that flat management structure is undoubtedly a drawcard, but it means these new churches lack any kind of  national cohesion, and they’ve punched  below their weight politically.  But if politics is about whose values are going to prevail, then these communities are finding their voice.

On February 18, Houston launched a new alliance of Pentecostal churches called  Australian Christian Churches claiming to represent more than 1000 churches and  170,000 members.  That’s by no means all the Pentecostals in Australia.  Pringle’s Christian City Church is not yet involved, and may never he (there is territorial jealousy in this arm of the church too).

But the intention behind the new alliance is what counts.  “If the people of God see themselves as grasshoppers, everyone else sees them as grasshoppers,” says Houston, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his long legs, the blond highlights in his hair an altogether unsurprising touch in a thoroughly modern preacher.  “I want to change inside the church  . . .  [I want it to be known] that the message of God is valid, that there is nothing to apologise for.  I believe it is time that we started to see ourselves as a legitimate voice of the church and no one else is going to see that if we don’t even see ourselves that way.”

Rearing its head here is the old Pentecostal underdog.  They are used to being out in the cold.  For example, Houston was only in January asked to join the National Council of Churches even though he was appointed national president of the Assemblies of God in May 1997.  Pringle comments wryly that “maybe we have enjoyed it out there a little.”  And it is undoubtedly true that Pentecostals revel in their outsider status.   When Hollywood pastor in pink, the impeccably manicured Holly Wagner (a dead ringer for Meg Ryan) excitedly told of a deal she had struck with “the secular publisher HarperCollins” to publish her book The Dumb Things She Does, The Dumb Things He Does, she spoke of taking her book “out there”.  There is that degree of them and us going on here.

So what is the Australian Christian Churches’agenda?  Making disciples, of course.   There is no other for Christians.  “I love this country and I really believe the church has answers for Australia.  I genuinely would like to see the church helping people and give them the answers that they want,” says Houston.

Pringle is going down another path.  Last year, Prime Minister John Howard opened Pringle’s church at Oxford Falls.  Pringle is in Canberra reasonably often, at the invitation of Alan Cadman, federal member for Mitchell, who attends some of the CCC’s services.  He has lunched with John Anderson, John Forrest and Brian Harradine.  He doesn’t like the idea of Australia developing a Christian political party.  Neither does Ian Jagelman, a former Pricewaterhouse Coopers accountant who is now senior pastor of a 1000-strong church in the Sydney district of Lane Cove-Ryde.  “I am not sure that we are not better off having strong relationships with our local members and when an issue comes up letting them know what we think about it,” he says.  “There comes a point where our church will be so big, where clearly people in the political process will want to know what we think.”

©  Reproduced with permission from The Bulletin, Vol. 118, No 6219, 11 April 2000.

[PS Including independent charismatic churches, in 2018 Pentecostal churches on any given Sunday in Australia represent approximately half of all active Protestants. Wikipedia]

© Renewal Journal #15: Wineskins, renewaljournal.com
Reproduction is allowed with the copyright included in the text.

Renewal Journals – contents of all issues

Book Depository – free postage worldwide
Book Depository – Bound Volumes (5 in each) – free postage

Amazon – Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins
Amazon – all journals and books – Look inside

All Renewal Journal Topics

1 Revival,   2 Church Growth,   3 Community,   4 Healing,   5 Signs & Wonders,
6  Worship,   7  Blessing,   8  Awakening,   9  Mission,   10  Evangelism,
11  Discipleship,   12  Harvest,   13  Ministry,   14  Anointing,   15  Wineskins,
16  Vision,   17  Unity,   18  Servant Leadership,   19  Church,   20 Life

CONTENTS:  Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins

The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny

The New Apostolic Reformation, by C. Peter Wagner

The New Believers, by Diana Bagnall (The Bulletin)

Vision and Strategy for Church Growth, by Lawrence Khong

New Wineskins for Pentecostal Studies, by Sam Hey

New Wineskins to Develop Ministry, by Geoff Waugh

Book and DVD Reviews:
Pentecostalism, by Walter Hollenweger
The Transforming Power of Revival, by Harold Caballeros and Mell Winger
Transformations 1 and 2 DVDs (The Sentinel Group)

Revival Blogs Links:

See also Revivals Index

See also Revival Blogs

See also Blogs Index 1: Revivals

GENERAL BLOGS INDEX

BLOGS INDEX 1: REVIVALS (BRIEFER THAN REVIVALS INDEX)

BLOGS INDEX 2: MISSION (INTERNATIONAL STORIES)

BLOGS INDEX 3: MIRACLES (SUPERNATURAL EVENTS)

BLOGS INDEX 4: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES)

BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)

BLOGS INDEX 6: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 7: IMAGES (PHOTOS AND ALBUMS)

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https://renewaljournal.com/2012/04/12/wineskins/
Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins – PDF

Also in Renewal Journals Vol 3: Issues 11-15
Renewal Journal Vol 3 (11-15) – PDF

 

 

 

church growth

The New Apostolic Reformation by C. Peter Wagner

by Geoff 12 April 2012 2 Comments

The New Apostolic Reformation

by C Peter Wagner

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Prolific author of over 40 books, C.  Peter Wagner, describes the emerging church wineskins for the twenty-first century.  This article is reproduced with permission from Chapter 14 of The Transforming Power of Revival edited by Harold Caballeros and Mel Winger.

I will soon complete 30 years as a professor of church growth on the graduate level.  During these 30 years, I have studied countless Christian churches of all sizes, in all kinds of locations, from new church plants to those hundreds of years old, spanning virtually every theological tradition, and rooted in varieties of cultures on six continents.  I have reported my research the best I have known how in an average of one or two books a year.

I have never been more excited about a book dealing with church growth than I am about The New Apostolic Churches, from which this chapter is reprinted.  I will begin with a personal testimony of how God has brought me to the place where I am now; it will explain why I am so excited.

Seasons of Research

During my decades as a scholar, God has seen fit to focus my research energies on certain aspects of church growth for certain periods of time.  As I have done that, I have tried to use what I have learned to develop new courses for my students at Fuller Theological Seminary, and many of the lessons eventually become books.

My mentor in church growth research was Donald A. McGavran, the founder of the whole field of church growth.  He is now with the Lord, but for years I have had the singular privilege of carrying the title of the Donald A. McGavran Professor of Church Growth.  One of the most basic lessons I learned from McGavran was that the best way to discover what makes churches grow is to study growing churches.  As a result, my first season of research, spanning the 1970s and into the 1980s, was spent doing exactly                                that.  In retrospect, I now look at this as researching the technical principles                                of church growth.

During that time, I began to notice something I obviously did not have the mental equipment to understand or to assimilate into my analysis of church growth.  I noticed that the churches worldwide that seemed to grow the most rapidly were, for the most part, those that outwardly featured the immediate present-day supernatural ministry of the Holy Spirit.

My mentor for helping me make a paradigm shift into what I now call the spiritual principles of church growth was John Wimber, founder of the Association of Vineyard Churches and Vineyard Ministries International.  This began my second season of research, focusing first of all on the relationship between supernatural signs and wonders and church growth, then on prayer and spiritual warfare.  This began in the early 1980s and continued to the mid-1990s.

My third season of research is now focusing on the New Apostolic Reformation, the subject of this chapter.  I am very excited because the new apostolic churches, better than any I have previously studied, combine, on the highest level, solid technical principles of church growth with solid spiritual principles of church growth.  I will tell more about that later.

Unity + Gifts = Growth

One of the most explicit Scripture verses about church growth is Ephesians 4:16, which says that the Body of which Jesus is the head, “joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body” (italics added).  A formula for growth, then, is: Unity (joined together) + Gifts (every part does its share) = Growth.

Paul tells us in verse seven that each one of us has a “measure” of grace, just as Romans 12:3 says we have a “measure” of faith, the measure being our spiritual gifts.  Then Ephesians 4:8 says that Jesus, when He ascended, “gave  gifts to men,” and it goes on to tell us that He gave gifted people to the Church on two levels:

(1) the government level (apostles, prophets,  evangelists, pastors, teachers) in verse 11, and

(2) the ministry of the saints in  general in verse 12.

When the government is in its proper place, biblical unity  of the saints emerges and “every part can do its share.”

How do these biblical principles unfold in real life?  For 2,000 years, the Church of Jesus Christ has grown and spread into every continent.  Jesus said, “I will build My church,” and He has been doing it.  As we review those 2,000 years, however, it is quite obvious that Jesus does not always build His Church in the same ways.  He did one way in the Roman Empire before Constantine;  another way after Constantine; another way in the Middle Ages;  another way following the Reformation;  another way during the era of  European colonization;  and yet another way post-World War 2, just to name  a few.

Growth: a Story of New Wineskins

Every time Jesus began building His Church in a new way throughout history, He provided new wineskins.  While He was still on earth, He said that such a thing would be necessary: “Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined.  But they put new wine into the new wineskins, and both are preserved” (Matt.   9:17).  The growth of the Church through the ages is, in part, a story of new wineskins.

Because this is the case, a crucial question not only for professors of church growth, but also for Christians in general, is this: What are the new wineskins Jesus is providing as we move into the twenty-first century?

Four Crucial Questions

My experience as a church growth scholar has led me constantly to ask four crucial questions:

1. Why does the blessing of God rest where it does?

2.  Churches are not all equal.  Why is it that at certain times, some churches  are more blessed than others?

3.  Can any pattern of divine blessing be discerned?

4.  Do those churches that seem to be unusually blessed have any common characteristics?

As I have tried to answer these questions, it is important to realize that I am a very traditional Christian.  For decades I have been an ordained Congregational minister, and I still am.  We Congregationalists came over on the Mayflower!  I find myself in one of the oldest wineskins on record.  Furthermore, I am a conservative Congregationalist (ordained in the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference).  This was definitely an obstacle to my early church growth research because while I was a missionary in Bolivia I was anti-Pentecostal, and the fastest-growing churches in Latin America at the time happened to be Pentecostal churches.   I finally overcame my biases, however, and, in 1973, wrote Look Out! The  Pentecostals Are Coming! (Creation House).  At that time, Pentecostal churches were one of the new wineskins, and their growth was showing it.

Wineskins of the 21st Century

That was back in the 1970s.  What, however, are the new wineskins of the 21st century?  Where does the blessing of God seem to be resting today?  The answer to this question began coming into focus in 1993.  As a professional missiologist, I had picked up certain bits and pieces of information through the years, but until then, at least in my mind, these bits and pieces were unrelated.  Then, however, I did begin to see a pattern among  three amazing church growth movements:

1. The African Independent Churches.  These roots go back to the turn of the century when large numbers of contextualized African churches began breaking away from the traditional mission churches.  Throughout the century,  the growth of the independent churches in Africa has far exceeded the growth of the traditional churches.

2. The Chinese house churches.  Particularly since the end of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, the multiplication of house churches under a  hostile Marxist government in China has been a missiological phenomenon.

3.  Latin American grassroots churches.  During the past 20 years, the largest churches that have been launched in virtually every metropolitan area of Latin America are largely those that are pastored by individuals who have had no formative experience with foreign missionaries or mission-initiated institutions.

I would put these three together with the rapid growth of the American independent charismatic churches I researched for the Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, published by Zondervan in 1987.  My article, entitled “Church Growth,” pointed out that this was the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the United States in our times.

What happened in 1993, then, was the realization in my mind that, indeed, a pattern of divine blessing today on certain identifiable groups of churches is discernible (Question #3).  The next question then becomes (Question #4): What are their common characteristics?

A Churchquake!

In the balance of this chapter, I will outline the nine most common characteristics of these churches I have been able to discern to date.  My exposition and comments about each will, of necessity, be brief so as to keep the size of this chapter proportionate to the others in this book.  I am simultaneously working on my textbook about the subject, which will provide abundant details.  The title I am considering for the textbook is Churchquake!, which, to me, reflects the magnitude of change these new wineskins are bringing to the Body of Christ.  In fact, I am sure we are seeing before our very eyes the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation.  Let’s take a brief look at nine components of the new wineskins that are shaping the Church for the twenty-first century.

1. A New Name 

When I began researching the Pentecostal movement years ago, it already had a name.  This new movement, however, did not have a name.  Because I was planning to teach a seminary course based on it, I needed a name for my course.  For a couple of years I experimented with “postdenominationalism,” but strong protests from my denominational friends persuaded me that it might not be the best name.  Besides many of the new apostolic churches have remained within their denominations.  “Independent charismatic” does not seem to fit either because (1) these churches see themselves as  interdependent, as opposed to independent, and (2) they are not all  charismatic in orientation.

The name I have settled on for the movement is the New Apostolic Reformation, and individual churches being designated as new apostolic churches.  I use “reformation” because, as I have said, these new wineskins appear to be at least as radical as those of the Protestant Reformation almost 500 years ago.  “Apostolic” connotes a strong focus on outreach plus a recognition of  present-day apostolic ministries.  “New” adds a contemporary spin to the name.

Although many people were begging for a definition of the New Apostolic Reformation from the beginning, I resisted formulating one until I believed I had a more mature grasp of the movement.  Now that I have taught my first Fuller Seminary course about the subject, I believe it is time to take the risk of a definition, hoping that it will not have to be revised too frequently in the future:

The New Apostolic Reformation is an extraordinary work of God at the close of the twentieth century that is, to a significant extent, changing the shape of Protestant Christianity around the world.

For almost 500 years, Christian churches have largely functioned within traditional denominational structures of one kind or another.  Particularly in the 1990s, but having roots going back for almost a century, new forms and operational procedures are now emerging in areas such as local church government, interchurch relationships, financing, evangelism, missions, prayer, leadership selection and training, the role of supernatural power, worship and other important aspects of church life.  Some of these changes are being seen within denominations themselves, but for the most part they are taking the form of loosely structured apostolic networks.  In virtually every region of the world, these new apostolic churches constitute the fastest-growing segment of Christianity.

Infinite creativity seems to be the watchword for assigning names to local churches.  The “Crystal Cathedral” and “Community Church of Joy” are among the most prominent congregations in our country.  “Icthus” churches are multiplying in England.  On a recent visit to the Philippines I came in contact with “The Warm Body of Jesus Church.”  One of my favorite churches in Argentina is “Waves of Love and Peace.”  In Kenya, Thomas Muthee pastors “The Prayer Cave.”  A friend told me of a church in Zimbabwe called the   “Dodge the Devil and Go Straight to Heaven Church”!

2.  New Authority Structure

In my judgment, views of leadership and leadership authority constitute the most radical of the nine changes from traditional Christianity.  Here is the main difference: The amount of spiritual authority delegated by the Holy Spirit to individuals.  I have attempted to use each word in that statement advisedly.  We are seeing a transition from bureaucratic authority to personal authority, from legal structure to relational structure, from control to coordination and from rational leadership to charismatic leadership.

This all manifests itself on two levels: the local level and the translocal level.   On the local church level, the new apostolic pastors are the leaders of the church.  In traditional Christianity, the pastors are regarded as employees of the church.

It is a question of trust.  New apostolic congregations trust their pastor.  Traditional congregations trust boards and committees.  The difference between the two is enormous.  The most passionate description of this difference I have yet seen is Lawrence Khong’s chapter in this book [also reproduced in this Journal].   On the translocal level, one of the most surprising developments for those of us who are traditionalists is the growing affirmation of contemporary apostolic ministries.  Our English “apostle” is a transliteration of the Greek apostolos, which means one who is sent out with a commission.  This is an  important dimension of what we are seeing, but the more surprising feature is the reaffirmation, not only of the New Testament gift of apostle, but also of  the office of apostle.

3.  New Leadership Training 

Although new apostolic pastors are fervently dedicated to leading their churches, they are equally dedicated to releasing the people of their congregations to do the ministry of the church.  A characteristic of many new apostolic churches is an abundance of volunteers.  Church members are normally taught that part of being a good Christian is to discover the spiritual gifts God has given them and to minister to others through those gifts as well as through any natural talents they might also have.

Members of the paid pastoral staff of typical new apostolic churches are usually homegrown.  As all the believers in the congregation become active in ministry, certain ones tend to rise to the top like cream on fresh milk, and they are the ones who are then recruited for the staff.  Because for many this involves a midlife career change, the possibility of their enrolling for two or three years in the residence program of a traditional seminary or Bible school is extremely remote.  Therefore, academic requirements for ordination, so long the staple in traditional churches, are being scrapped.   New apostolic ordination is primarily rooted in personal relationships, which verify character, and in proved ministry skills.

Continuing education for leaders more frequently takes place in conferences, seminars and retreats rather than in classrooms of accredited institutions.  Little aversion is noticed for quality training, but the demands are many for alternate delivery systems.  A disproportionate number of new apostolic churches, especially the large ones, are establishing their own in-house Bible schools.

One of the most notable features of new apostolic churches, which traditional church leaders soon discover to their amazement, is the absence of nomination committees (to place lay leaders within the congregation) and of search committees (to locate and recruit new staff members).

4. New Ministry Focus

Traditional Christianity starts with the present situation and focuses on the past.  New apostolic Christianity starts with the present situation and focuses on the future.

Many traditional churches are heritage driven.  “We must get back to our roots.  We need to pray for renewal” – meaning that we should once again be what we used to be.  The founders of the movement are often thought of as standing shoulder to shoulder with the twelve apostles.

On the other hand, new apostolic church leaders are vision driven.  In a conversation with a new apostolic senior pastor about his church, I once asked, “How many cell groups do you have?”  I think that was sometime in 1996.

He replied, “We will have 600 by the year 2000!”  I can’t seem to recall ever finding out how many cells he did have in 1996.  As far as the pastor was concerned, though, that apparently didn’t matter at all.  In his mind, the 600 cells were not imaginary, they were real.  The 600 was what really mattered.

5. New Worship Style

With only a few exceptions, new apostolic churches use contemporary worship styles.  Contemporary worship is the one characteristic of the New Apostolic Reformation that has already penetrated the most deeply into traditional and denominational churches across-the-board.  Many churches that would not at all be considered new apostolic are now using contemporary worship in at least one of their weekend services.

Worship leaders have replaced music directors.  Keyboards have replaced pipe organs.  Casual worship teams have replaced robed choirs.  Overhead projectors have replaced hymnals.  Ten to twelve minutes of congregational singing is now 30 to 49 minutes or even more.  Standing during worship is the rule, although a great amount of freedom for body language prevails.

As you scan a new apostolic congregation in worship, you will likely see some sitting, some kneeling, some holding up hands, some closing their eyes, some clapping their hands, some wiping tears from their eyes, some using tambourines, some dancing and some just walking around.

“Performance” is a naughty word for new apostolic worship leaders.  Their goal is to help every person in the congregation become an active “participant” in worship.  Frequent applause is not congratulating those on the platform for their musical excellence, but it is seen as high tribute to the triune God.

6.  New Prayer Forms 

Prayer in new apostolic churches has taken forms rarely seen in traditional congregations.  Some of this takes place within the church and some takes place outside the church.

The actual number of prayer times and the cumulative number of minutes spent in prayer during the worship service of new apostolic churches far exceed the prayer time of the average traditional church.  Worship leaders weave frequent times of prayer into singing worship songs.  Many of them argue that true worship is, in itself, a form of prayer, so blending the two seems natural.  A considerable number of new apostolic churches practice concert prayer, in which all the worshipers are praying out loud at the same time, some in a prayer language and some in the vernacular.  At times in some churches, each one will begin singing a prayer, creating a loud, harmonious sound not unlike the sound of the medieval Gregorian chant.

New apostolic leaders have been among the first to understand and put into practice some of the newer forms of prayer that take place in the community itself, not in the church.  For many, praise marches, prayer walking, prayer journeys and prayer expeditions have become a part of congregational life and ministry.  For example, 55 members of one local church, New life Church of Colorado Springs, recently travelled to Nepal, high in the Himalayas, to pray on-site for each of the 43 major, yet-unreached people groups of the nation.

7.  New Financing

New apostolic churches experience relatively few financial problems.  Although no vision-driven church believes it has enough resources to fulfill the vision adequately, and although financial crises do come from time to time, still, compared to traditional churches, finances are abundant.  I think at least three discernible reasons explain this situation.

First, generous giving is expected.  Tithing is taught without apology, and those who do not tithe their incomes are subtly encouraged to evaluate their Christian lives as subpar.

Second, giving is beneficial, not only to the church and its ministry in  kingdom of God, but also to the giver.  Tithes and offerings are regarded  seeds that will produce fruit of like kind for individuals and families.  Luke 6:38, which says that if we give, it will be given to us in greater measure, is taken literally.

Third, giving is cheerful.  It is not yet a common practice, but I have been in new apostolic churches in which the congregation breaks out into a rousing, athletic-event kind of shouting and clapping the moment the pastor announces he is collecting the morning offering.  They are cheerful givers and  they want everyone else to know it.  I rarely hear the complaint in new apostolic churches I often hear in traditional churches: The pastor talks about  money too much.

8.  New Outreach 

Aggressively reaching out to the lost and hurting of the community and the world is part of the new apostolic DNA.  The churches assiduously attempt to avoid the “bless me syndrome” as they try to live up to their apostolic nature and calling.  They do seek personal blessings from God, but usually as means to the end of reaching others.  A worship song I frequently hear in new  apostolic churches says: “Let your glory fall in this room; let it go forth from  here to the nations.”

Planting new churches is usually an assumed part of what a local congregation does.  The question is not whether we should do it, but when and how.  The same applies to foreign missions.  One of the more interesting developments for a missiologist like me is that a large number of congregations are becoming involved, as congregations, in foreign missions.  This does not mean they are necessarily bypassing mission agencies, especially new ones such as Youth With A Mission, but it does mean that they are expanding their options for influencing their people to participate in a  more direct and personal way in world outreach.

Compassion for the poor, the outcast, the homeless, the disadvantaged and  the handicapped is a strong characteristic of most new apostolic churches.   Many other churches do a lot of talking about helping unfortunate people, but new apostolic churches seem to find ways to actually do it.  The Vineyard  Christian Fellowship of Anaheim, California, for example, distributes almost  $2 million worth of food to hungry people in their area every year.  The Cathedral of Faith in San José, California, has constructed a rnillion-dollar warehouse facility and it has become one of the largest food distribution centres in the state.  Other local churches are doing similar things.

9. New Power Orientation

I mentioned earlier that the New Apostolic Reformation seems to be combining the technical principles of church growth better than any similar grouping of churches I have observed.  Even those new apostolic churches that do not consider themselves charismatic usually have a sincere openness to the work of the Holy Spirit and a consensus that all the New Testament spiritual gifts are in operation today.

The majority of the new apostolic churches not only believe in the work of the Holy Spirit, but they also regularly invite Him to come into their midst to bring supernatural power.  It is commonplace, therefore, to observe active ministries of healing, demonic deliverance, spiritual warfare, prophecy, failing in the Spirit, spiritual mapping, prophetic acts, fervent intercession and travail, and so on in new apostolic churches.

A basic theological presupposition in new apostolic, as contrasted to traditional, churches is that supernatural power tends to open the way for applying truth, rather than vice versa.  This is why visitors will frequently observe in these churches what seems to be more emphasis on the heart than on the mind.  Some conclude from that that new apostolic churches are “too emotional.”

Conclusion

The more I have studied the New Apostolic Reformation during the past few years, the more convinced I have become that we have a major transformation of Christianity on our hands.  Don Miller titles his excellent new book on the subject Reinventing American Protestantism (University of California Press).  By extension, I believe we are witnessing a reinvesting of world Christianity.  If that is the case, it is all the more reason to give God thanks for allowing us to be alive and active in His kingdom in these enthralling days.

© From Chapter 14, “The New Apostolic Reformation”, in The Transforming Power of Revival edited by Harold Caballeros and Mel Winger (Peniel, Buenos Aires, 1998), excerpted from The New Apostolic Churches edited by C.  Peter Wagner (Regal 8ooks, Ventura, 1998), used by permission of Regal Books and the author.

© Renewal Journal #15: Wineskins, renewaljournal.com
Reproduction is allowed with the copyright included in the text.

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1 Revival,   2 Church Growth,   3 Community,   4 Healing,   5 Signs & Wonders,
6  Worship,   7  Blessing,   8  Awakening,   9  Mission,   10  Evangelism,
11  Discipleship,   12  Harvest,   13  Ministry,   14  Anointing,   15  Wineskins,
16  Vision,   17  Unity,   18  Servant Leadership,   19  Church,   20 Life

CONTENTS:  Renewal Journal 15: Wineskins

The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny

The New Apostolic Reformation, by C. Peter Wagner

The New Believers, by Diana Bagnall (The Bulletin)

Vision and Strategy for Church Growth, by Lawrence Khong

New Wineskins for Pentecostal Studies, by Sam Hey

New Wineskins to Develop Ministry, by Geoff Waugh

Book and DVD Reviews:
Pentecostalism, by Walter Hollenweger
The Transforming Power of Revival, by Harold Caballeros and Mell Winger
Transformations 1 and 2 DVDs (The Sentinel Group)

Revival Blogs Links:

See also Revivals Index

See also Revival Blogs

See also Blogs Index 1: Revivals

GENERAL BLOGS INDEX

BLOGS INDEX 1: REVIVALS (BRIEFER THAN REVIVALS INDEX)

BLOGS INDEX 2: MISSION (INTERNATIONAL STORIES)

BLOGS INDEX 3: MIRACLES (SUPERNATURAL EVENTS)

BLOGS INDEX 4: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES)

BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)

BLOGS INDEX 6: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 7: IMAGES (PHOTOS AND ALBUMS)

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Anointing

by Geoff 11 April 2012 3 Comments

Renewal Journal 14: Anointing

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Renewal Journals Index – 20 issues

All Renewal Journal Topics:

1 Revival,   2 Church Growth,
3 Community,   4 Healing,   
5 Signs & Wonders,   6  Worship,   
7  Blessing,   8  Awakening,  
9  Mission,   10  Evangelism,
11  Discipleship,   12  Harvest,   
13  Ministry,   14  Anointing,   
15  Wineskins,   16  Vision,   
17  Unity,   18  Servant Leadership,  
19  Church,   20 Life

CONTENTS:  Renewal Journal 14:  Anointing

A Greater Anointing, by Benny Hinn

Myths about Jonathan Edwards, by Barry Chant

Revivals into 2000, by Geoff Waugh

Book Reviews:

The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition by Vinson Synan

The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny

Primary Purpose, by Ted Haggard

See also: Immune to Fear: Anointing, by Reinhard Bonnke

See also: The difference between gifting and anointing, by Suzette Hattingh

Renewal Journal 14: Anointing – PDF

Editorial

Anointed for Ministry

 Jesus explained his ministry in terms of being anointed by the Holy Spirit.  He took his charter text from Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because he has anointed me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
(Luke 4:18-19; Isaiah 61:1-2)

He empowered his followers to do the same, in his name and authority.  Our anointing for ministry stems wholly from who Jesus is – the anointed Christ, the Son of God.  By his death and resurrection, he conquered sin and is both Saviour and Lord.

Our ministry is the ministry of Jesus in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Just as the Holy Spirit anointed Jesus, so he anoints us.

A quick look at any concordance affirms the significance of that anointing:

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him (Acts 10:38).

He who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us is God (2 Cor. 1:21).

You have an anointing from the Holy One and you know all things (1 John 2:20).

The anointing which you have received from him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teach you; but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true, and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you will abide in him (1 John 2:27).

One stupid application of that teaching is that we don’t need teaching because the Holy Spirit teaches us everything.

First, John is not saying we don’t need teaching.  He is teaching in his writing!  The purpose of his letters includes teaching.

Jesus taught.  Often.  He spent three years teaching his followers.

Every preacher teaches.  If all we needed was the Holy Spirit on our own, we should stop preaching and teaching.

A clue to understanding the anointing is to know God.  Knowledge can teach you about God, but you may not know God.  Or you may know God as a distant consultant, available for a crisis.  Or you may know God as a daily point of reference.  Or you may know God intimately.  Or, as is most likely, your knowing God ebbs and flows with the currents of your life.

Often when we feel most overwhelmed or in need, we know God much more deeply, for then we depend on him.  We come to him with deep longing and with the cry he is so quick to answer.  On the other hand, when we are busy and very competent we often know God dimly, not realizing how easily we depend on our own God-given abilities rather than on God himself, and how easily we quench or grieve the Spirit.

Jesus, on the other hand, lived in the full knowledge of God – not just intellectually, but totally and intimately.  He explained his relationship with God,  “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the Father do …  I can of myself do nothing” (John 5:19, 30).  Then he said the same of our relationship with him, “Abide in me … without me you can do nothing” (John 15:4-5).

The anointing of God on your life is linked with how you abide in your Lord, and he in you.

This issue of the Renewal Journal gives examples of a fresh anointing touching many people now with new intimacy and grace for powerful ministry.  Benny Hinn uses the life of Elisha to highlight principles for a greater anointing.  Barry Chant clears away some myths about Jonathan Edwards whose sharp mind and anointed writing still impact people.  I give an overview of many places and people experiencing deep encounters with God through the nineties.

© Renewal Journal #14: Anointing, renewaljournal.com

Reproduction is allowed with the copyright included in the text.

Renewal Journals – contents of all issues

Back to Renewal Journals

All Renewal Journal Topics

1 Revival,   2 Church Growth,   3 Community,   4 Healing,   5 Signs & Wonders,
6  Worship,   7  Blessing,   8  Awakening,   9  Mission,   10  Evangelism,
11  Discipleship,   12  Harvest,   13  Ministry,   14  Anointing,   15  Wineskins,
16  Vision,   17  Unity,   18  Servant Leadership,   19  Church,   20 Life

Revival Blogs Links:

See also Revivals Index

See also Revival Blogs

See also Blogs Index 1: Revivals

GENERAL BLOGS INDEX

BLOGS INDEX 1: REVIVALS (BRIEFER THAN REVIVALS INDEX)

BLOGS INDEX 2: MISSION (INTERNATIONAL STORIES)

BLOGS INDEX 3: MIRACLES (SUPERNATURAL EVENTS)

BLOGS INDEX 4: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES)

BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)

BLOGS INDEX 6: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 7: IMAGES (PHOTOS AND ALBUMS)

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Renewal Journal Vol 3 (11-15) – PDF

Christian ministry, revival

Ministry

by Geoff 6 April 2012 2 Comments

Renewal Journal 13: Ministry

Renewal Journal 13: Ministry – PDF

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CONTENTS: Renewal Journal 13: Ministry

Pentecostalism’s Global Language, by Walter Hollenweger

Interview with Steven Hill, by Steve Beard

Revival in Mexico City, by Kevin Pate

Revival in Nepal, by Raju Sundras

Beyond Prophesying, by Mike Bickle

The Rise and Rise of the Apostles, by Phil Marshall

Evangelical Heroes Speak, by Richard Riss

Spirit Impacts in Revivals, by Geoff Waugh

The Primacy of Love, by Heidi Baker

Book Reviews:  Fire in the Outback, by John Blacket;  The Making of a Leader, by J R Clinton

Renewal Journal 13: Ministry – PDF

Editorial:  Anointed Ministry

Our ministry is the ministry of Jesus – in us and through us. He said, “You will do greater things than these, because I go to my Father” (John 14:12).

The “greater things” include the ministry of the risen, glorified Jesus in and through us, millions of us, by the presence and power of his Holy Spirit.

The Gospels have only two references to the word “church” – both in Matthew, and both giving Jesus’ comments on ministry in his church and how he will build it.

Peter’s bold confession that Jesus is the Messiah – the Christ – the Anointed One – the Son of God – sounded like blasphemy then. For many people, such as Muslims, it still does.  A great prophet, yes.  A great teacher, yes.  A great leader, yes. But the Messiah – the Son of the living God?

C. S. Lewis brilliantly points out that Jesus does not leave open for us the option of regarding him as only a great prophet, teacher or leader. He is unique – God’s only Son – fully human but fully divine also.

That declaration, made in the fertile northern hills of Galilee, marks a turning point in the gospel story.  From that time on, Jesus began his final journey to Jerusalem and his gruesome death.  He kept explaining to his disciples the meaning of that revolutionary declaration, but they could not understand, especially as it involved his execution.

Acknowledging the inspired truth of that bold declaration, Jesus reminded his followers that the basis or rock-solid foundation of his church was that very reality.  He is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God.  Jesus Christ is Lord.

He is building his church and even hell’s gates cannot withstand the onslaught of his church, empowered by his Spirit.  We live in that reality right now.  Jesus has given his church the authority to bind and loose – an amazing claim (Matthew 16:13-19). 

The second use of ‘church’ by Jesus in Matthew’s gospel makes that same claim.  Where disputes arise, Jesus requires the church to address the problem if it cannot be solved personally or in a small group.  Again, he pointed out the church has authority to bind and loose (Matthew 18:15-20).  In that passage, we have Jesus’ promise to be personally present where even two or three gather in his name in unity.

Gradually we are rediscovering the truth of those claims.  Gradually we are learning to live together in unity and in love.  Gradually we are learning to use the authority given to the church – not to condemn (John 3:17) but to free people.

Jesus’ ministry is ours also.  He is building his church and is doing a truly marvellous job of it.  He involves us in his ministry, by the power, unction and enabling of his Spirit.

This issue of the Renewal Journal tells a little more of that story of how Jesus is building his church today through anointed, powerful ministry.

Walter Hollenweger takes a scholar’s look at the astounding growth of Jesus’ church in the power of his Spirit with 500 million now involved in the Pentecostal/charismatic stream of the church.

Stephen Hill tells how he has seen the Lord anoint ministry before and during his ministry at Pensacola where over 100,000 have indicated their commitment to Jesus Christ as their Lord.

Kevin Pate describes powerful ministry in Mexico City.  Raju Sundras, Nepalese pastor and evangelist, tells of strong moves of the Spirit in Nepal. 

Mike Bickle gives guidance in the use of the prophetic ministry gifts of the Spirit.  Australian Phil Marshall points out the emerging rise of biblical apostolic gifting in ministry.

Historian Richard Riss shows the close parallels between ministry issues in former and current revival movements, and I give an overview of the charismatic impacts of the Spirit in evangelical ministry in revivals.  You can read more about that in my books Flashpoints of Revival (2nd ed., 2009) and Revival Fires (2011).  See further details on renewaljournal.com.

Heidi Baker wrote a challenging article on the Primacy of Love in all ministry and mission, now added to this 2nd edition of this Renewal Journal 13: Ministry.

Anointed ministry is simply the ministry of Jesus in and through us by the anointing and empowering of his Holy Spirit within us. This is available to us all. Without him we can do nothing. With him, all things are possible.

Back to Renewal Journals

All Renewal Journal Topics

1 Revival,   2 Church Growth,   3 Community,   4 Healing,   5 Signs & Wonders,
6  Worship,   7  Blessing,   8  Awakening,   9  Mission,   10  Evangelism,
11  Discipleship,   12  Harvest,   13  Ministry,   14  Anointing,   15  Wineskins,
16  Vision,   17  Unity,   18  Servant Leadership,   19  Church,   20 Life

Revival Blogs Links:

See also Revivals Index

See also Revival Blogs

See also Blogs Index 1: Revivals

GENERAL BLOGS INDEX

BLOGS INDEX 1: REVIVALS (BRIEFER THAN REVIVALS INDEX)

BLOGS INDEX 2: MISSION (INTERNATIONAL STORIES)

BLOGS INDEX 3: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES)

BLOGS INDEX 4: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)

BLOGS INDEX 6: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 7: IMAGES (PHOTOS AND ALBUMS)

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Also in Renewal Journals Vol 3: Issues 11-15
Renewal Journal Vol 3 (11-15)– PDF

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Renewal and Revival Links

by Geoff 22 March 2012 No Comments

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Original Renewal Journal website – www.renewaljournal.com

Revival Library – revival-library.org

Lausanne Occasional Paper No. 37: Toward the Transformation of our Cities/Regions (2005)

Renewal and Revival Organizations

See also individual churches’ websites

The Sentinel Group – glowtorch.org – Transformation

Empowered21 – www.empowered21.com – Empowering a Generation

Transform World – www.transform-world.net –  – Transformation News

 

Renewal and Revival in Australia and the South Pacific

Church on Fire -renewal and revival in Australia

Early Evangelical Revivals in Australia – Robert Evans

Revivals in the Pacific Islands – Robert Evans

South Pacific Revivals – Geoff Waugh

Transforming Sydney – www.transformingsydney.org

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BLOGS INDEX 2: MISSION (INTERNATIONAL STORIES)

BLOGS INDEX 3: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES)

BLOGS INDEX 4: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)

BLOGS INDEX 6: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 7: IMAGES (PHOTOS & VIDEOS)

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Reviews (14) Anointing

by Geoff 20 March 2012 No Comments

Book Reviews

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The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition by Vinson Synan

Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997

Review by Eerdmans Publishers

Vinson Synan is dean of the School of Divinity at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. This review from the back cover of the book summarises the scope of this book written by a world recognised Pentecostal historian.

Called “a pioneer contribution” by Church History when it was first published in 1971 as The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States, this volume has now been revised and enlarged by Vinson Synan to account for the incredible changes that have occurred in the church world during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Synan brings together the stories of the many movements usually labelled “holiness,” “Pentecostal,” or “charismatic,” and shows that there is an identifiable “second blessing” tradition in Christianity that began with the Catholic and Anglican mystics, that was crystallized in the teaching of John Wesley, and that was further perpetuated through the holiness and Keswick movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the appearance of modern Pentecostalism.

Synan then chronicles the story of the spread of Pentecostalism around the world after the heady days of the Azusa Street awakening, with special attention given to the beginnings of the movement in those nations where Pentecostalism has become a major religious force. He also examines the rise of various mainline-church charismatic move- merits that have their roots in Pentecostalism. Because of the explosive growth of the Pentecostal movement in the last half of the century, Pentecostals and Charismatics now constitute the second largest family of Christians in the world.

“This could well he the major story of Christianity in the twentieth century,” writes Synan. “Pentecostalism has grown beyond a mere passing ‘movement’ . . . and can now he seen as a major Christian ‘tradition’ alongside the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformation Protestant traditions.”

The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition will continue to be an important handbook for shaping our understanding of this phenomenon.

 

The God Chasers by Tommy Tenny 

Shippensburg: Destiny Image, 1998

Review By Ruth A. McKeand

Some books will make you happy. Some will encourage you. Some will challenge you. Some will make you think. Some will even make you angry. The God Chasers will do all these and more.

Tommy Tenney, whose pen authored The God Chasers, has spent 30 years in the ministry. He’s seen and experienced much of God. Like King David, he has always sought to be “a man after God’s own heart.” To Tenney, this seeking after God’s heart is the essence of a God chaser.

The God chaser longs for deep intimacy with God. He or she wants more than just the “stuff” of ordinary religious experience. Tenney, like all true God chasers, has questioned why we find entering into the desired intimacy so difficult. Why, if God is all I truly want, am I so aware of “where He’s been” instead of being conscious of “where He is?” And so, painting picture after picture, Tenney reveals many of the things that get in the way of intimacy with God.

First, Tenney challenges us to ask ourselves if we are truly seeking God.  With statements like “it’s simply not enough to know about God. We have churches filled with people who can win Bible trivia contests but who don’t know Him,” he invites us to look at our own walks with God. Do we realize, as Tenney did, that “there is much more of God available than we have ever known or imagined, but we have become so satisfied with where we are and what we have that we don’t press in for God’s best.”

Secondly, we must honestly look at what we’re eating each day. Tenney’s comments may anger you but he believes that “most of us . . . keep our lives so jammed with junk food for the soul and amusements for the flesh that we don’t know what it is to be really hungry.” He views this daily diet of the typical believer as one of the main obstacles to intimacy with the Almighty for most of us. He sees too many of us being more concerned with our own comfort, and that of our families, and all the things we want (or have) to do, that God gets precious little of our attention. When we do come before Him, our minds are preoccupied with the cares of this life. He points out that “we’re happy with our music the way it is” and we’re content with services designed for pleasing men “instead of yielding to what God likes.” We want the stuff that God can give us, without the commitment and intimacy of union with Him. But Tenney calls us repeatedly back to the desire of the God chaser. The true God chaser wants to see His face, just as did Moses and the Apostle John.

Most of us want revival today. We truly believe we want God to be real to us and in us. But Tenney calls us to pause and think. There’s more to this relationship with God than getting the stuff. The first step to real, personal revival, according to Rev. Tenney, “is to recognize that you are in a state of decline.” Recognizing our true state will birth a “divine discontent” in us, out of which real hunger for God will grow.

Tenney contends that most of us have “become addicted to the anointing, the relayed word of good preaching and teaching,” preferring for someone else to go up the mountain to seek God for us. Like Israel of old, we prefer “distant respect” over “intimate relationship” with the Almighty. We seek revival instead of the Reviver just as we so easily fall into the selfish trap of seeking the gifts instead of the Giver.

Tenney points out that “there is something in us that makes us afraid of the commitment that comes with real intimacy with God.” One reason, he says, is that “intimacy with God requires purity.” In this hour “God is calling people who want serious revival into a place of transparent purity. It’s you who He’s after.” This kind of purity requires death and that is the greatest barrier of all that the believer faces. We all fear death, but to see God’s face, one must die. No one can see God’s face and live according to Scripture.

“It is God’s mercy that keeps Him away from us,” Tenney says. We are sinful flesh and He is absolute holiness and purity. The latter will destroy the former if, and when, it comes into its presence. But be encouraged. There is hope. Through “repentance and brokenness—the New Testament equivalent of death,” we can become “dead men walking.” And dead men can enter the presence of God without fear. Brother Tenney urges us not to shrink back from the altar upon which God would have us sacrifice our egos. Instead he provokes us to embrace death of self and to see it as the only way we can truly see God’s face.

The God chaser is after God Himself. Many know about God. He’s everywhere all the time. That’s His omnipresence. But, Tenney declares, “There are also times when He concentrates the very essence of His being into what many call ‘the manifest presence of God.’” That’s the deepest desire of the God chaser, the manifest presence of God! For this, he is very willing to die! But first we must admit our need and our hunger. That’s what God is looking for. It’s in this state of brokenness, repentance, and hunger that God can come with His presence and His power and begin to really change us. It’s admitting our need and our hunger, and then seeing our true state, which brings the brokenness and repentance that opens the door for God “to take us through the complete process . . . without hindering or quenching His Spirit, then when the kabod, the weighty presence of God, comes among us and upon us, then we will be able to carry it without fear because we will be walking in the purity of Jesus and our flesh will be dead, covered by the blood of the Lamb.”

Tenney believes the world cannot be changed until God is freely allowed to change each of us. We can truly touch our world as witnesses and evangelists only when we engage in what Tenney calls “presence evangelism.” He believes God can, and will, change us as we experience His presence because experiencing “God’s glory is life-changing. It is the most habit-forming experience a human being can have, and the only side effect is death to the flesh.” This prepares us for God’s true purpose, evangelism. But the evangelism that Tenney looks for in the church is “when the residue of God on a person creates a divine radiation zone of the manifest presence of God, so much so that it affects those around you.” This type of evangelism is not “an emotional encounter with man but a death encounter with the glory and presence of God Himself.”

“It is time for God’s people to get desperately hungry after Him,” says Tenney, “because the fires of revival must first ignite the Church before its flames can spread to the streets.” But he warns, “Supernatural things . . .  will happen to you too, but it only comes one way. There is no shortcut to revival or the coming of His presence. God’s glory only comes when repentance and brokenness drive you to your knees, because His presence requires purity.” It’s only when we candidly look into our own hearts that we, like the prodigal son, see there the deep “poverty of heart.” It is this revelation that will propel us back to the Father’s arms. And once there we will see His face, sense His power, and experience His presence. It’s there, in the arms of Love Himself, the God chaser finds true happiness and a joy unspeakable and full of glory! It’s there that the God chaser finds that he’s been caught by the very One he’s been chasing all along! And that’s the purpose of this book by Tommy Tenney . . . to whet our appetites and change each of us into a God chaser so we too can get caught by the One Who’s caught him!

 

 Primary Purpose by Ted Haggard

Orlando: Creation House, 1995

Reviewed by Tony Peter

Primary Purpose is a practical book on winning souls for the kingdom of God, especially from a pastoral point of view.  Founder and senior pastor of the 6000 member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Ted Haggard is a graduate of Oral Roberts University and has co-authored with Jack Hayford a similar book called Loving your City into the Kingdom.

Ted Haggard writes with a pastor’s heart and a passion for winning souls to Christ in practical, relevant ways.  His book includes charts and diagrams as well as practical stories.

The book is focused on three foundations for any attempt to win the lost for Christ and to grow the church.  The first is prayer; all kinds of prayer.  The second is keeping focused on the task of evangelism; all kinds of evangelism.  The third is unity between individuals and the churches.

Haggard begins the book by giving a short testimony of the beginnings of his New Life Church in Colorado Springs.  He describes the difficulties and the challenges in starting a new church in an area once known as a difficult place to successfully start and continue a work for the Lord.  He describes not only his struggles in starting his church but also in continuing to keep his church on track for the primary purpose of winning the community and city to Christ.

The second part of the book deals with what he calls five principles of keeping your church on the primary purpose. The first principle is that of focusing on the absolutes of Scripture and not side tangents such as different doctrinal issues between individuals and churches.

The second principle is to promote Christ and his Word, not you or your own ideas.  This is the key to reaching the lost.  Haggard laments that too many individuals and churches focus on winning other Christians from other churches through transfer growth rather than focusing on winning the lost through conversion growth.

The Third principle is to pray for the Holy Spirit’s activity in your area.  Haggard describes this as increasing the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in the area where you want to win the lost.  This changes the climate of the area to open the way to win souls for the Lord.

The fourth principle is to appreciate and respect one another’s  interpretations of Scripture.  Different churches interpret Scripture differently and act accordingly. As long as they do not transgress the fundamentals of Scripture they will appeal to different people from all walks of life that become saved and then attend a church that will suit them.  Divisions or conflict between churches can stifle the Holy Spirit and stop evangelism.

The fifth principle is honouring others through supportive speech and actions.  Haggard explains that this is another way of maintaining unity in the body of Christ between the churches.

The third and last part of the book focuses on the lifestyle, character and fruit of Christians and churches in relationship to evangelism.  Haggard explains that it is the church’s function to live as the Bible calls us to live.  Then we shall see the fruit of this lifestyle, namely souls won for Christ and churches growing.

Haggard describes the Christian lifestyle as continuous spiritual warfare.  Only through a righteous lifestyle can the believer and the church truly advance the Kingdom of God as we are supposed to.

This is a practical, thorough book on evangelism from a pastor’s point of view rather than an evangelist’s point of view.  Ted Haggard writes with a passion not only to see souls saved and churches grow but to see the whole community, city and nation changed.  The book is a vital manual for any Christian wanting to start a new work or church in any part of the world.

The stories and principles make it a great book for anyone, especially pastors, wanting to reach people with the gospel.  This book focuses on proven strategies for the advancing the Kingdom of God today.  Essential strategies include prayer warfare, unity between believers and churches, and focusing on the primary mission of the church, evangelism.

This book is one of the best I have read concerning winning souls, communities and cities to Christ through a pastor’s heart for people and not just as a quest for numbers.  It shows that whole communities and cities can be won for the Lord and that God wants more of his children to step out in faith with love for the lost.

© Renewal Journal #14: Anointing, renewaljournal.com
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All Renewal Journal Topics

1 Revival,   2 Church Growth,   3 Community,   4 Healing,   5 Signs & Wonders,
6  Worship,   7  Blessing,   8  Awakening,   9  Mission,   10  Evangelism,
11  Discipleship,   12  Harvest,   13  Ministry,   14  Anointing,   15  Wineskins,
16  Vision,   17  Unity,   18  Servant Leadership,   19  Church,   20 Life

CONTENTS:  Renewal Journal 14:  Anointing

A Greater Anointing, by Benny Hinn

Myths about Jonathan Edwards, by Barry Chant

Revivals into 2000, by Geoff Waugh

Book Reviews:

The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition by Vinson Synan
The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny
Primary Purpose, by Ted Haggard

See also: Immune to Fear: Anointing, by Reinhard Bonnke

Renewal Journal 14: Anointing – PDF

Revival Blogs Links:

See also Revivals Index

See also Revival Blogs

See also Blogs Index 1: Revivals

GENERAL BLOGS INDEX

BLOGS INDEX 1: REVIVALS (BRIEFER THAN REVIVALS INDEX)

BLOGS INDEX 2: MISSION (INTERNATIONAL STORIES)

BLOGS INDEX 3: MIRACLES (SUPERNATURAL EVENTS)

BLOGS INDEX 4: DEVOTIONAL (INCLUDING TESTIMONIES)

BLOGS INDEX 5: CHURCH (CHRISTIANITY IN ACTION)

BLOGS INDEX 6: CHAPTERS (BLOGS FROM BOOKS)

BLOGS INDEX 7: IMAGES (PHOTOS AND ALBUMS)

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An article in Renewal Journal 14: Anointing:
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Also in Renewal Journals Vol 3: Issues 11-15
Renewal Journal Vol 3 (11-15) – PDF

 

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Revivals into 2000, by Geoff Waugh

by Geoff 20 March 2012 3 Comments

Revivals into 2000

By Geoff Waugh

Renewal Journal editor Geoff Waugh surveys revival movements in the decade of the 1990s leading into 2000.  Some of this information is reproduced from the author’s books Flashpoints of Revival (2nd edition 2009) and Revival Fires (2011) which give fuller details of these impacts of the Holy Spirit in revivals.

Renewal Journal 14: Anointing – PDF

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Revivals into 2000, by Geoff Waugh:
https://renewaljournal.com/2012/03/20/revivals-into-2000-bygeoffwaugh/
An article in Renewal Journal 14: Anointing

Also in Renewal Journals Vol 3: Issues 11-15
Renewal Journal Vol 3 (11-15) – PDF

See also: God’s Promise – I will pour out my Spirit
See also: Jesus’ Last Promise – You will receive power
See also: God’s Surprises, by Geoff Waugh
See also: Revival Fires, by Geoff Waugh

“I have heard more reports of revival-like activity in the last three years than in the previous thirty,” wrote church growth professor Peter Wagner in the Foreword to Flashpoints of Revival in 1998.

Revival reports have increased, not diminished, since then.  Healing evangelists such as Reinhard Bonnke, Benny Hinn, Rodney Howard-Browne and others are known worldwide. This article surveys some revival reports in the nineties as examples of the stirrings of revival at the end of the century.  My book Flashpoints of Revival gives further details.  This article summarizes some accounts from that book, and updates that information with additional accounts.

These reports provide signposts or flashpoints of revival.  They look like the early waves of a rising tidal wave of revival – Christians powerfully impacted, and large numbers won to the Lord.  Some of these outpourings of the Spirit have begun to transform communities, reducing crime, and some have begun to touch nations.

As with previous revivals, the manifestations include a mixture of the divine hand of God, human reactions, and demonic attacks.  We thank God for his great mercy and powerful work in individuals, churches and communities.  We long for God, especially in his awesome majesty and glory breaking in upon our sinfulness with holiness and grace.

1992 – Buenos Aires, Argentina (Claudio Friedzon)

During the 1980s, Carlos Annacondia, a businessman turned evangelist, won thousands to the Lord in mass crusades accompanied by signs and wonders, healings (including filling of teeth) and deliverances.  Churches grew dramatically.

Other pastor/evangelists such as Omar Cabrera and Hector Giminez won hundreds of thousands to the Lord.  All of them have powerful ministries in evangelism with many signs and wonders, healings and miracles.  Omar and Marfa Cabrera discovered the power of prayer for deliverance, and now lead a church movement of over 90,000 in 120 cities.  Hector Giminez, formerly a drug addicted criminal, lead a church which grew to 1000 in a year and now has over 120,000.

Claudio Freidzon, founder of a Buenos Aires church which grew to 4000 people in five years, continues to lead powerful crusades in another wave of revival since 1992.  The breakthrough came for him and his wife Betty after seven years of struggling as a pastor with a congregation of seven in a dilapidated building.  He reported:

Sometimes pastor friends came to visit and would find me alone in the meeting.  I felt like dying: I wished I could disappear.  I used to walk among the empty benches and the devil laughed and jumped around me, whispering in my ear: “You’re no good; you’ll never make any progress; it will always be like this.”

And unfortunately I believed him.  One day I thought: “This isn’t for me.  I’m going to give up the pastorate.  I’m going to resume my engineering studies and get myself a job.”  But deep down I knew that was not God’s plan.

I went and saw my superintendent for the purpose of handing in my credentials.  But before I could tell him, he said, “Claudio, I have something to say to you.  God has something to say to you.  He has something wonderful for you.  You don’t see it, but God is going to use you greatly.’ …  He went on: “Look, I started in a very precarious house and had no help from anybody.  Sometimes I had nothing to eat and I suffered greatly.  But we prayed and God provided for each day and we felt grateful.  I knew we were doing God’s will.  And when I think of you,  Claudio, I know you are going to be useful to God and that you are within his will.  I don’t know what your problems are, but keep on.  By the way, what brings you here today?”

I put my credentials back in my pocket and said, “Well… , nothing in particular, I thought I would just come and share a moment with you.”  There was nothing else I could say.  When I got home Betty was weeping and I said, “Betty, we’re going to continue.”  I embraced her tightly and we started all over again (Waugh 1998, 106).

Sunday, 2 May, 1993 – Brisbane, Australia (Neil Miers)

Pastor Neil Miers preached at Brisbane Christian Outreach Centre on Sunday night 2 May. 1993.  Darren Trinder, editor of their magazine A New Way of Living (now Outreach), reported:

Some staggered drunkenly, others had fits of laughter, others lay prostrate on the floor, still more were on their knees while others joined hands in an impromptu dance.  Others, although showing no physical signs, praised the Lord anyway, at the same time trying to take it all in.  People who had never prayed publicly for others moved among the crowd and laid hands on those present.

“When we first saw it in New Zealand early in April we were sceptical,” said Nance Miers, wife of Christian Outreach Centre International President, Pastor Neil Miers.  “I=ve seen the Holy Spirit move like this here and there over the years.  But this was different.  In the past it seemed to have affected a few individuals, but this time it was a corporate thing.”

Neil Miers himself was physically affected, along with several other senior pastors, early in this Holy Ghost phenomenon.  Later he viewed the series of events objectively.  “It started in New Zealand and then broke out in New Guinea, and now it’s here.  If I know the Holy Ghost, it will break out across the world ‑ wherever people are truly seeking revival.  For the moment this is what God is saying to do, and we’re doing it.  It’s that simple.”

But despite the informal nature of the events, Pastor Miers, adopting his shepherd role, was careful to monitor the situation.  “There are some who are going overboard with it; just like when someone gets drunk on earthly wine for the first time.  The next time it happens they’ll understand it a little better”  (Waugh 1998, 110-111).

Within two weeks this outpouring of the Spirit touched C.O.C. churches across Australia, from Townsville to Perth.  People were overwhelmed.  Many found release, healing and anointing amid laughter, tears, shaking or stillness.  Many saw visions.  Some had open-eyed visions such as seeing the glory of God or angels appearing in the building.  Many were ‘drunk in the Spirit’ for days or weeks.

The result?  The churches experienced anointed evangelism and mission.  The movement now has over 200 centres in Australia and more than 450 centres overseas.  It has powerful crusades in many countries, international ‘global care’ relief outreaches, international church-based Ministry Training Institutes, education from pre-school to tertiary including Christian Heritage College offering degrees in education, arts, business, and also in ministry through the Brisbane COC School of Ministries, and has regular teams involved in mission, evangelism and pastoral care.

November, 1993 – Boston, America (Mona Johanian)

During November 1993, revival touched the 450 member Christian Teaching and Worship Centre (CTWC) in Woburn, Boston led by Mona Johnian and her husband Paul.  Revival broke out in their church after they attended revival meetings led by Rodney Howard‑Browne in Jekyll Island Georgia, in November of 1993.  Richard Riss reported:

At first, Mona was not impressed by the various phenomena she observed there, but she was surprised that her own pastor, Bill Ligon of Brunswick, Georgia, fell to the floor when Rodney Howard‑Browne laid his hands upon him.  “Bill is the epitome of dignity, a man totally under control,” she said.  The first chapter of her book describes a meeting at her church in which revival broke out while Bill Ligon was there as a guest minister.  From the Johnians’ church, the revival spread to other churches, including Bath Baptist Church of Bath, Maine, pastored by Greg Foster.

In a video entitled Revival, produced in his church in August of 1994, Paul Johnian said, “We cannot refute the testimony of the Church. …  What is taking place here is not an accident.  It’s not birthed by man.  It’s by the Spirit of God. …  The last week in October of 1993, Mona and I went down to Georgia.  We belong to a Fellowship of Charismatic and Christian Ministries International, and we went down there for the annual conference.  And hands were laid on us.  And we were anointed.  And I’m just going to be completely honest with you.  What I witnessed there in the beginning I did not even understand.  I concluded that what was taking place was not of God … because there was too much confusion. …  I saw something that I could not comprehend with my finite understanding.  And it was only when I searched the Scriptures and asked God to show me and to reveal truth to me that I saw that what was taking place in the Body of Christ was a sovereign move of the Almighty.  And I, for one, wanted to humble myself and be a part of the sovereign move of the Almighty.  And I came back.  I really didn’t sense any change within me.  But I came back just believing God that He was going to be doing something different in our congregation (Riss 1996, 31) .

That has now happened in various forms in thousands of churches touched by this current awakening.

 Thursday, 20 January, 1994 – Toronto, Canada (John Arnott)

John Arnott, senior pastor at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship told how the “Toronto Blessing” – which they call the Father’s blessing – began:

In October 1992, Carol and I started giving our entire mornings to the Lord, spending time worshipping, reading, praying and being with him.  For a year and a half we did this, and we fell in love with Jesus all over again. …

We heard about the revival in Argentina, so we travelled there in November 1993 hoping God’s anointing would rub off on us somehow.  We were powerfully touched in meetings led by Claudio Freidzon, a leader in the Assemblies of God in Argentina. …  We came back from Argentina with a great expectation that God would do something new in our church.

We had a taste of what the Lord had planned for us during our New Year’s Eve service as we brought in 1994.  People were prayed for and powerfully touched by God.  They were lying all over the floor by the time the meeting ended.  We thought, “This is wonderful, Lord.  Every now and then you move in power.”  But we did not think in terms of sustaining this blessing.

We invited Randy Clark, a casual friend and pastor of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in St. Louis, Missouri, to speak because we heard that people were being touched powerfully by God when he ministered.  We hoped that this anointing would follow him to our church.  Yet Randy and I were in fear and trembling, hoping God would show up in power, but uncertain about what would happen.  We were not exactly full of faith ‑ but God was faithful anyway.

On January 20, 1994, the Father’s blessing fell on the 120 people attending that Thursday night meeting in our church.  Randy gave his testimony, and ministry time began.  People fell all over the floor under the power of the Holy Spirit, laughing and crying.  We had to stack up all the chairs to make room for everyone.  Some people even had to be carried out.

We had been praying for God to move, and our assumption was that we would see more people saved and healed, along with the excitement that these would generate. It never occurred to us that God would throw a massive party where people would laugh, roll, cry and become so empowered that emotional hurts from childhood were just lifted off them.  The phenomena may be strange, but the fruit this is producing is extremely good (Waugh 1998, 111-112).

Hundreds of thousands have visited their church since then, most returning to their home churches with a fresh anointing for ministry and evangelism.  People were saved and healed, more in the next two years than ever before in that church.

Sunday, 29 May, 1994 – Brompton, London (Eleanor Mumford)

The Anglican Church, Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) near Kengsington in London has been powerfully affected by the current awakening and widely reported in the media.  The famous Alpha evangelism and renewal course now used worldwide, comes from them.

Eleanor Mumford, assistant pastor of the South‑West London Vineyard and wife of John Mumford (the pastor and the overseer of the Vineyard Churches in Britain), told a group of friends about her recent visit to the Toronto Airport Vineyard in Canada.  When she prayed for them the Holy Spirit profoundly affected them.

Nicky Gumbel, Curate of Holy Trinity Brompton, was there.  He rushed back from this meeting with his wife, Pippa, to the HTB church office in South Kensington where he was late for a staff meeting.  The meeting was ready to adjourn.  He apologised, told what had happened, and was then asked to pray the concluding prayer.  He prayed for the Holy Spirit to fill everyone in the room.

The church newspaper, HTB in Focus, 12 June 1994, reported the result: “The effect was instantaneous.  People fell to the ground again and again.  There were remarkable scenes as the Holy Spirit touched all those present in ways few had ever experienced or seen.  Staff members walking past the room were also affected.  Two hours later some of those present went to tell others in different offices and prayed with them where they found them.  They too were powerfully affected by the Holy Spirit ‑ many falling to the ground.  Prayer was still continuing after 5 pm” (Riss 1995).

The church leaders invited Eleanor Mumford to preach at Holy Trinity Brompton the next Sunday, 29 May, at both services.  After both talks, she prayed for the Holy Spirit to come upon the people.  Some wept.  Some laughed.  Many came forward for prayer and soon lay overwhelmed on the floor.

Cassette tapes of those services circulated in thousands of churches in England.  A fresh awakening began to spread through the churches.  Nicky Gumbel’s Alpha Course has spread worldwide.  Sandy Miller prayed for Stephen Hill just before his evangelistic ministry began at Pensacola.  Thousands still pass through “HTB” seeking God, and finding him.

Sunday, 14 August, 1994 – Sunderland, England (Ken Gott)

Ken and Lois Gott founders of Sunderland Christian Centre (SCC) in 1987 in the north‑east   of England, felt dry and worn out in 1994.  Ken Gott and four other Pentecostals visited Holy Trinity Brompton in London.  The presence of God among Anglicans humbled and amazed those Pentecostals.

Andy and Jane Fitz‑Gibbon reported that “stereotypes were shattered as Ken and the other Pentecostals received a new baptism in the Spirit at the hands of Bishop David Pytches.  The change was so profound in Ken that the members at SCC took up an offering and sent Ken, Lois and their youth leader for a week to Toronto.  Like most of us who have made the same pilgrimage, they were profoundly touched, soaking in God for a week, never to be the same again.”

On August 14th, the first Sunday morning back from Toronto, the effect on the church was staggering.  Virtually the whole congregation responded to Ken’s appeal to receive the same touch from God that he and Lois had received.  They decided to meet again in the evening, although normal meetings had been postponed for the summer recess.  The same experience occurred.  They gathered again the next evening and the next . . . in fact for two weeks without a night off.  Quickly, numbers grew from around a hundred‑and‑fifty to six hundred.  Word reached the region and, without advertising, people began the pilgrimage to Sunderland from a radius of around 70 miles.

By September a pattern of nightly meetings (bar Mondays) was established and each night the same overwhelming sense of God was present.  That pattern has continued ever since, with monthly leaders’ meeting on a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon (with usually around 300 in attendance) and a daily ‘place’ of prayer being added.  The effect on many churches and on thousands of individuals has been profound (Waugh 1998, 122).

The church began two meetings a day with daily afternoon prayer meetings from January 1995.  Many former criminals were saved, and crime dropped in the community.

Saturday, 5 November, 1994 – Mount Annan, Sydney (Adrian Gray)

Christian Life Centre Mount Annan is an Assembly of God church located on 37 acres of park-like land near Campbelltown in the south west of Sydney.  They have been experiencing a sustained outpouring of the Holy Spirit since 5 November 1994.  This edited report is by Pastor Brian Shick, a member of the staff at Christian Life Centre Mount Annan, Sydney.

Adrian Gray, the senior Pastor of Christian Life Centre Mount Annan was born again in the mid 1960’s during a period of revival in Campbelltown.  This initial experience of the power and work of the Holy Spirit left a distinct impression on his spirit.  He believed for and worked towards full-scale revival as a major focus in his relationship with the Lord and in his ministry.

An outstanding prophetic sign occurred a short while before this outpouring took place when a helicopter flying over the church called the fire department reporting our building on fire.  Thirteen fire trucks screamed up the church driveway looking for the fire to extinguish, but there was no visible fire.  When we realised that it was a spiritual fire that had been seen, great awe came upon the church.  This happened at the conclusion of ten days of prayer and fasting for revival.

The arrival of the move of the Holy Spirit on the first weekend of November, 1994, could only be described as sovereign.  Randwick Baptist Church, which is in more central Sydney, experienced the same outpouring at exactly the same time.  Numbers of churches around the nation experienced a similar occurrence about the same time.

For many months the church had been praying for a visitation of God without perhaps really realising what that meant.  An evangelistic crusade with an “end-times emphasis” had been planned for that weekend.  The evangelist, recently returned from Toronto, Canada, preached his evangelistic message and called people forward who wanted a fresh touch from God.  Immediately over 300 people responded and as the evangelist and pastors prayed the presence of God came.  The Father’s heart of love was revealed to the people and as hands were gently laid on them they fell to the floor under the anointing of the Holy Spirit.  They lay there for a long time and when they got up there were dozens of amazing testimonies of healing and restoration and life changing transformations.  The next day, Sunday, the Holy Spirit came again, and then again on Monday and Tuesday and in every meeting held since that time.  The anointing was so strong that many people in those first months would fall to the floor as soon as they came through the door.

Two weeks later on arriving back from Toronto, Adrian and Kathy and the leadership team, convinced that this was of God and the fulfilment of the many prophecies, made a decision to commit the church to revival.  Renewal did not just become an appendage to the existing program, it became the entire program.  The Holy Spirit is free to move however he wants in any of the services.  While most pastors would say that this is the case in their churches, many have actually limited the style of meeting that is characteristic of this current move, to one or two services a week and the other meetings are “normal”.

Because of the numbers of people just visiting, it is hard to actually determine how many people in each service actually belong to the church.  There have been approximately 200,000 people pass through the church doors since the outpouring began.  The official membership has grown from 300 prior to renewal to 700 at present.  With all the services added together, 1,200 people are ministered to per week with many more during conferences.

Sunday, 6 November, 1994 – Randwick, Sydney (Greg Beech)

Greg Beech, the minister of Randwick Baptist Church in Sydney, reported:

Many Christians are talking about a significant work of God that is sweeping the church today which has become known as the Toronto Blessing.  Hundreds of churches around Australia have already been touched, blessed and changed.  Christians are testifying to significant life change, wonderful fruit and a new zeal for God.  People are laughing, crying, falling down, experiencing strange body movements.  Many who have exhibited these phenomena have never had such experiences before nor, by their own testimony, did they expect to.  Services are lasting for hours longer than usual.  Many pastors are rejoicing as they observe the spiritual fruit.

At Randwick Baptist Church, some of these phenomena have been present in lesser degrees for about nine years. They occurred spontaneously and without prompting or discussion.

Late in 1993 and the first seven or eight months of 1994 had been a considerable time of change for us involving difficult decisions, change of staff, relational tensions, loss of some members, and a rethink of the church’s vision.  The ‘ship’ of the church had slowed and was making a careful, yet sure change, in direction.

The outcome of this process was a greater sense of unity in the church, a growing commitment to corporate prayer, and a desire to get on with the work of the Kingdom.  In hindsight, we realise that some of the things we went through were necessary for God to be able to come and move freely among us.  Change is never easy and refining is often painful at the time. We are filled with gratitude as we reflect upon how God was working during this time.

We recognise and wish to emphasise that the outpouring was not so much a result of anything we did but was a sovereign movement of God.  The outpouring seems to have transferred from the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, and is being transferred to churches around the world.  We have been thrilled to learn of other churches in Sydney also being touched.

While we had prayed for the outpouring of the Spirit, it still caught us by surprise!  The sheer intensity and broad sweep of the Spirit’s work has been staggering.

At the same time the critics have been quick to respond.  Several have published claims that what they believe is the Toronto Blessing is in fact demonic.  Another church has arrived at the conclusion that this is a work of hypnotism.  Yet others claim it is just a passing fad for the deluded.

The secular media have been intrigued.  Newspaper, radio and T.V. have all visited church services to see for themselves.  The response of the secular media has been mainly positive.  We need to be aware however that the media often seeks sensationalism rather than an accurate portrayal of what is happening.

What are we to make of this extraordinary outpouring?  What place should the phenomena have in our church?  How can we test it to ensure that it is a true work of God?  How should meetings be administered where such phenomena occur?  Furthermore, what is the fruit of all these things?  It is important that we follow the biblical injunction to test all things, and seek to establish biblical foundations for what we see happening.

The current refreshing is not some kind of new ‘latest and greatest’ programme which has been introduced to revitalize church services.  The ‘refreshing’ is not something that pastors introduce to see if new life can be breathed into their church.  We believe what we are witnessing is a sovereign work of the Holy Spirit.  It was with considerable amazement that we stood back and watched God pour out His Spirit in November 1994 at Randwick Baptist Church.  We found it difficult to come to terms with the sheer power and intensity of God’s work.

We have pastored this movement, prayed for discernment, discussed, theologized, debated with our critics, searched the Scriptures, and carefully watched and examined the fruit.  We are convinced this is a true work of God.  However, we acknowledge that any work of God which involves a human element, will encounter sinful tendencies, perhaps demonic attack, and therefore must be carefully dealt with.  The conclusions and positions we have reached, both in theology and practice, may well be rejected by other churches. We do not believe that ours is the only orthodox position.

Sunday, 1 January, 1995 – Melbourne, Florida (Randy Clark)

Five local churches in Melbourne, Florida, invited Randy Clark as guest speaker at the Tabernacle Church on New Year’s day of 1995.  Unusual revival broke out including large numbers falling down, laughter, weeping, and many dramatic physical healings.  Thousands flocked to meetings held six days a week.  Pastors and musicians from fifteen different congregations hosted the meetings in a new expression of co‑operation and unity.  Randy Clark reported:

In 1994 I spent about 150 [days] in renewal meetings. During that time I never was in a meeting which I felt had the potential to become another Toronto type experience.  That was until I went to Melbourne, Florida [on] January 1, 1995.  Another revival has broken out.  Many sovereign things have occurred which indicate this place too will be [the site of] unusual renewal meetings.  I shall share some of these.

First, what made me expect something special at these meetings?  I never schedule over four days for meetings, but I scheduled fifteen days for this meeting.  Why?  I believed there were things going on which indicated a major move of the Spirit was imminent. The Black and White ministerial associations merged a few months prior to my going. The charismatic pastors had been meeting together for prayer for six years, and pastors from evangelical and charismatic and pentecostal churches had been meeting and praying together for over two years.  There was a unity built which would be able to withstand the pressures of diverse traditions working together in one renewal/revival meeting.

The meetings are held at the Tabernacle, the largest church in the area.  It holds 950 comfortably.  This was Jamie Buckingham’s church, now pastored by Michael Thompson.  The church sanctuary is filled by 6:15 with meetings beginning at 7:00.  About 1,200 are crowded into the sanctuary, another 150 fills a small overflow room, and another 200‑300 sit outside watching on a large screen (Waugh 1998, 124-125).

The revival in Melbourne continues with an astounding mixture of white, black, Asiatic, Hispanic, and American Indian people being touched by God, filled with the Spirit and witnessing to others.

The Christian radio station WSCF, FM 92 at Vero Beach, Florida, an hour’s drive south of Melbourne, interviewed Randy Clark on Friday 6 January.  The General Manager of the radio station, Jon Hamilton, wrote a report which shows how this revival can break out of churches into the community.  Here are some exceprts from the full version in Flashpoints of Revival:

I had agreed to interview a pastor from St. Louis, Randy Clark that morning. … The interview was innocent enough at first.  The subject turned to a discussion of the Holy Spirit’s manifest presence in a meeting (as opposed to His presence that dwells within our hearts always).  Rather suddenly, something began to happen in the control room.

It began with Gregg.  He was seated behind me listening, and for no apparent reason, he began to weep.  His weeping turned to shuddering sobs that he attempted to muffle in his hands.  It was hard to ignore, and Randy paused mid‑sentence to comment “You can’t see him, but God is really dealing with the fellow behind you right now.”  I looked over my shoulder just in time to see Gregg losing control.  He stood up, only to crash to the floor directly in front of the console, where he lay shaking for several minutes. … I had always known Gregg to act like a professional, so I knew something was seriously going on.  I did my best to recover the interview under the embarrassing circumstances.  I thanked the guest and wrapped it up.  (And thought of ways to kill Gregg later!)

Before Randy Clark left, we asked him to say a word of prayer.  We formed a circle and began to pray for the staff one by one.  My eyes were shut, but I heard a thud and opened them to see Bart Mazzarella prostrate on the floor.  He had fallen forward on his face.  What amazed me most was that Bart was known to be openly sceptical.  He simply did not accept such things.  Within seconds, another and another staff person went down.  Even those that remained standing were clearly shaken.

When they prayed for me, I did not “fall down”.  What did happen was an electric sensation shot down my right arm, and my right hand began to tremble uncontrollably.  My heart pounded as I became aware of a powerful sense of what can only be called God’s manifest presence.

I thought the atmosphere would abate after a few minutes and return to normal… but instead, our prayers grew more and more intense.  The room became charged in a way that I simply cannot describe.  After an hour of this, we realized that it was 10:30, the time we normally share our listener’s needs in prayer.

I switched on the mike, and found myself praying that God would touch every listener in a personal way.  After prayer, with great hesitation I added “This morning God has really been touching our staff, so we’ve been spending the morning praying together.  If you’re in a situation right now where you are facing a desperate need, just drop by our studios this morning and we’ll take a minute to pray with you.”  This was the first time we had ever made such an invitation. …

Within a few minutes, a few listeners began to arrive.  The first person I prayed with was a tall man who shared with me some tremendous needs he was facing.  I told him I would agree with him in prayer.  As I prayed for his need, a voice in my head was saying “It’s a shame that you don’t operate in any real spiritual gift or power.  Here’s a man who really needs to hear from God and you’ve got nothing worth giving him!”  I continued to pray, but I was struggling.  I reached up with my right hand to touch his shoulder, when suddenly he shook, and slumped to the floor. (He lay there without moving for over 2 hours.)  I was shocked and shaken.

Two others had arrived at this point, and staff members were praying with them.  Suddenly they began weeping uncontrollably, and slumped to the floor.  This scene was repeated a dozen times in the next few minutes.  It didn’t matter who did the praying, whenever we asked the Lord, he immediately responded with a visible power, and the same manifestations occurred. …

Fairly early in all this, we ran out of room.  The radio station floor was wall to wall bodies… some weeping, some shaking, some completely still.  People reported that it was like heavy lead apron had been placed over them.  They were unable to get up.  All they could do was worship God.

Fortunately, our offices are inside of the complex at Central Assembly, so when the crowd began to grow, we moved across into the Church, leaving the radio station literally wall to wall with seekers. …

At some point I looked up and saw a local Baptist Pastor walk in the door.  I must confess that my first thought was, “Oh Boy…I’m in trouble!”  While I knew this brother to be a genuine man of God, nevertheless I was concerned about how a fundamental, no‑nonsense Baptist might take all these goings‑on. (Besides, I didn’t have an explanation to offer!)  I walked up to greet him.  He just silently surveyed the room, and with a tone of voice just above a whisper said, “This… is…God.  For years I’ve prayed for revival… This is God.”

Within minutes more local pastors began to arrive.  Lutheran, Independent, Assembly of God… The word of what was happening spread like wildfire.  As the pastors arrived, they were cautious at first, but within just minutes, they would often begin to flow in the same ministry.  The crowd was growing and pastors began to lay hands on the seekers, where once again the power of God would manifest and the seeker would often collapse to the ground.

It did not seem to matter who did the praying.  This was a nameless, faceless, spontaneous move of God.  There were no stars, no leaders, and frankly, there was no organization. (It’s hard to plan for something you have no idea might happen!) …

Amazingly, unchurched, unsaved people were showing up.  I got a fresh glimpse of the power of radio as person after person told us “I’m not really a part of any church…”  A few were sceptical at first, and later found themselves kneeling in profound belief.

Sometimes people would rise up, only to frantically announce to us that they had been healed of some physical problem.  One woman’s arthritic hands found relief.  Neck pains, jaw problems, stomach disorders and more were all reported to us as healed.

We have received at least a dozen verified, credible, reliable comments from people who told us that when they switched on the radio, they were suddenly, unexpectedly overwhelmed by the presence of God (even when they didn’t hear us say anything).  Several told us that the manifest presence of God was so strong in their cars that they were unable to drive, and were forced to pull off the road.

The “falling” aspect of this visitation was the most visible manifestation, but it was not falling that was important.  What was important was the fact that people were rising up with more love for God in their hearts than ever before.  They were being changed, and their hearts set ablaze. I have lost count of the numbers of people who told me of the change God worked in their life. …

Christian history is full of accounts of those times when God elected to “visit” His people.  When He has, entire nations have sometimes been affected.  I believe you’ll agree, our nation is ripe for such a revival.  For such a time as this, let us look to God with expectancy (Waugh 1998, 125-132).

Sunday, 15 January, 1995 – Modesto, California (Glenn & Debbie Berteau)

Glenn and Debbie Berteau, pastors of Calvary Temple Worship Centre in Modesto, California, from January 1994, strongly sensed the Lord would give them revival there.  Early in 1994, they challenged their congregation with that vision.  After the ‘vision Sunday’, individuals committed themselves to fast on specific days as the congregation became involved in a forty day period of prayer and fasting.  In early January 1995, they had a three day fast.  The church building remained open for prayer, and people prayed over names on cards left on the altar.  Those able to do so met together daily for prayer at noon.  Many pastors in the area began meeting each week to pray for the city.

On Sunday 15 January 1995, the church began holding performances of the play, Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames.  It was scheduled for three days originally but continued for seven weeks with 28 performances.  

Jann Mathies, pastoral secretary of Calvary Temple reported in April:

As of this writing, approximately 81,000 have attended the performance with 90% each night seeing it for the first time.  At time of printing, 33,000 decision packets have been handed out, and of that, (confirmed) 20,000 returned with signed decision cards.  Over 250 churches have been represented with hundreds of people added to the churches in our city and surrounding communities in less than one month.  People come as early as 3:30 pm for a 7 pm performance.  There are over 1,000 people waiting to get in at 5 pm, and by 5:30 pm the building is full.  Thousands of people have been turned away; some from over 100 miles away. …  Husbands and wives are reconciling through salvation; teenagers are bringing their unsaved parents; over 6,000 young people have been saved, including gang members who are laying down gang affiliation and turning in gang paraphernalia. . . .  The revival is crossing every age, religion and socio‑economic status. . . .   We have many volunteers coming in every day, and through the evening hours to contact 500 to 600 new believers by phone; special classes have also been established so that new believers may be established in the faith (Waugh 1998, 133).

The play became a focus for revival in the area.  Some churches closed their evening service so their people could take their unsaved friends there.  One result is that many churches in the area began receiving new coverts and finding their people catching the fire of revival in their praying and evangelising.

One church added a third Sunday morning service to accommodate the people.  Another church asked their members to give up their seats to visitors.  Bible book stores sold more Bibles than usual.  A local psychologist reported on deep healings in the lives of many people who attended the drama.

That play continues to be used effectively around the world.  For example, churches in Australia have performed the play with hundreds converted in local churches.  Hardened unbelievers with no place for church in their lives have been saved and live for God.

Sunday, 22 January, 1995 – Brownwood, Texas (Chris Robeson)

Richard Riss gathered these accounts of revival touching colleges across America beginning with Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas.

On January 22, 1995, at Coggin Avenue Baptist Church in Brownwood, Texas, two students from Howard Payne University, a Christian institution, stood up and confessed their sins.  As a result of this incident, many others started to confess their own sins before the congregation.  On January 26, a similar event took place on the campus of Howard Payne.  Word quickly spread to other colleges, and Howard Payne students were soon being invited to other college campuses, which experienced similar revivals.  From these schools, more students were invited to still other schools, where there were further revivals. …

One of the first two students from Howard Payne to confess his sins was Chris Robeson.  As he testified about his own life and the spiritual condition of his classmates, “People just started streaming down the aisles” in order to pray, confess their sins, and restore seemingly doomed relationships, according to John Avant, pastor of Coggin Avenue Baptist Church.  From this time forward, the church began holding three‑and‑a‑half‑hour services.  Avant said, “This is not something we’re trying to manufacture.  It’s the most wonderful thing we’ve ever experienced.”  …

At Howard Payne, revival broke out during a January 26 ‘celebration’ service, as students praised God in song and shared their testimonies.  Students then started to schedule all‑night prayer meetings in dormitories. …

Then, on February 13‑15, during five meetings at Howard Payne, Henry Blackaby, a Southern Baptist revival leader ministered at a series of five worship services, attended by guests from up to 200 miles away.  On Tuesday, February 14, more than six hundred attended, and students leaders went up to the platform to confess publicly their secret sins.  About two hundred stayed afterward to continue praying.  One of the students, Andrea Cullins, said, “Once we saw the Spirit move, we didn’t want to leave.” …

After Howard Payne, some of the first schools to be affected were Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Forth Worth, Texas, Beeson School of Divinity in Birmingham, Alabama, Olivet Nazarene University in Kankakee, Ill., The Criswell College in Dallas, Moorehead State University in Moorehead, Ky., Murray State University in Murray, Ky., Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, La., Gordon College in Wenham, Mass., and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.  In each case, students went forward during long services to repent of pride, lust, bondage to materialism, bitterness, and racism.

These revivals continued throughout and beyond 1995.  Details are given in Accounts of a Campus Revival: Wheaton College 1995, edited by Timothy Beougher and Lyle Dorsett (Wheaton: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1995).

Friday, 24 March, 1995 – Pasadena, California (Che Ahn)

From January of 1995, John Arnott of the Toronto Airport Vineyard and Wes Campbell of New Life Vineyard Fellowship in Kelowna, British Columbia began speaking for two or three days each at Mott Auditorium on the campus of the U. S. Centre for World Mission.  By 24 March people gathered for meetings five nights a week, usually going very late.

John Arnott conducted powerful meetings there on Friday‑Sunday 24‑26 March, hosted by Harvest Rock Church, a Vineyard Fellowship.  Then the combined churches in the area continued with nightly meetings from Monday 27 March.  Later that settled to meetings from Wednesday to Sunday each week.  Then Wednesdays were reserved for cell groups and meetings continued from Thursday to Sunday nights.

Che Ahn, senior pastor of Harvest Rock Church wrote in their monthly magazine Wine Press in August 1995:

I am absolutely amazed at what God has done during the past five months.  After John Arnott exploded onto the scene with three glorious and unforgettable renewal meetings, he encouraged the pastors of our church to begin nightly protracted meetings. My mind immediately rejected the idea. I thought to myself, “The meetings were great because you were here, but how can we sustain nightly meetings without someone like John Arnott to draw the crowd?”

The answer to my question was an obvious one. Someone greater than John Arnott would show up each night at the meetings ‑ Jesus. And each night since we began March 27, 1995, God has shown up to heal, to save, and to touch thousands of lives. There is no accurate way to measure the impact that the renewal meetings are having in our city. I do believe that we are making church history, and we are in the midst of another move of the Holy Spirit that is sweeping the world.  From March 27 to July 27, we have had 99 nightly renewal meetings.  We have averaged about 300 people per night, some nights with more that 1200 people and others with a small crowd of 120.

More than 25,000 people have walked through the doors of Mott Auditorium, many of them happy, repeat customers. We have seen more that 300 people come forward to rededicate their lives or give their hearts to Jesus Christ. These statistics don’t come close to representing other evangelistic fruit of those who have attended the meetings. For example, two church members, Justine Bateman and Jeff Eastridge, had an outreach at Arroyo High School and more than 60 young people gave their hearts to the Lord!

We have seen marvellous healings from the hand of the Lord, many of them spontaneous without anyone specifically praying for the healing.  I wish I had the time and space to share all the wonderful fruit I have seen at the renewal meetings.  Seeing the need to share what God is doing, I felt that we are producing this church newsletter to share these testimonies of lives that have been impacted by God during this current outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Waugh 1998, 133-134).

Sunday, 18 June, 1995 – Pensacola, Florida (Steve Hill)

Over 26,000 conversions were registered in the first year of the ‘Pensacola Revival’.   Over 100,000 conversions were been registered in the first two years.  It still continues.

On Father’s Day, Sunday 18 June 1995, evangelist Steve Hill spoke at Brownsville Assembly of God, near Pensacola, Florida.  At the altar call a thousand people streamed forward as the Holy Spirit moved on them.  Their pastor, John Kilpatrick, fell down under the power of God and was overwhelmingly impacted for four days.

That morning service, normally finishing at noon, lasted till 4 pm.  The evening service continued for another five and a half hours.  So the church asked Steve Hill to stay.  He cancelled appointments, continued with nightly meetings, and relocated to live there, where he continues to minister in revival.

John Kilpatrick, pastor of the Brownsville Assembly of God Church, reported on their revival in 1997: 

The souls who come to Christ, repenting and confessing their sin, the marriages that are restored, the many people who are freed from bondage that has long held them captive ‑ these are the marks of revival and the trophies of God’s glory.  No, I am not speaking of a revival that lasted one glorious weekend, one week, one month, or even one year!  At this writing, the ‘Brownsville Revival’ has continued unbroken, except for brief holiday breaks, since Father’s Day, June 18, 1995!  How?  Only God knows.  Why?  First, because it is God’s good pleasure, and second, perhaps because the soil of our hearts was prepared in prayer long before revival descended on us so suddenly.

On that very normal and ordinary Sunday morning in June of 1995, I was scheduled to minister to my congregation, but I felt weary.  I was still trying to adjust to the recent loss of my mother, and my years‑long desire for revival in the church seemed that morning to be so far off.   So I asked my friend, Evangelist Steve Hill, to fill the pulpit in my place.  Although he was scheduled to speak only in the evening service, Steve agreed to preach the Father’s Day message.  We didn’t know it then, but God was at work in every detail of the meeting.

The worship was ordinary (our worship leader, Lindell Cooley, was still ministering on a missions trip to the Ukraine in Russia), and even Brother Hill’s message didn’t seem to ignite any sparks that morning ‑ until the noon hour struck.  Then he gave an altar call and suddenly God visited our congregation in a way we had never experienced before.  A thousand people came forward for prayer after his message.  That was almost half of our congregation!  We didn’t know it then, but our lives were about to change in a way we could never have imagined.

We knew better than to hinder such a mighty move of God, so services just continued day after day.  We had to adjust with incredible speed.  During the first month of the revival, hundreds of people walked the isles to repent of their sins.  By the sixth month, thousands had responded to nightly altar calls.  By the time we reached the twelfth month, 30,000 had come to the altar to repent of their sins and make Jesus Lord of their lives.

At this writing, 21 months and over 470 revival services later, more than 100,000 people have committed their lives to God in these meetings ‑ only a portion of the 1.6 million visitors who have come from every corner of the earth …

If the prophecy delivered by Dr David Yonggi Cho [given in 1991] years before it came to pass is correct, this revival, which he correctly placed as beginning at Pensacola, Florida, will sweep up the East Coast and across the United States to the West Coast, and America will see an outpouring of God that exceeds any we have previously seen.  I am convinced that you, and every believer who longs for more of God, has a part to play in this great awakening from God (Waugh 1998, 137-138).

Pastors, leaders and Christians have been returning to their churches ignited with a new passion for the Lord and for the lost.  The awesome presence of God experienced at Pensacola continues to impact thousands from around the world.

Friday, 27 October, 1995 – Mexico (David Hogan)

David Hogan, founder of Freedom Ministries, a mission to remote hill tribes in Mexico told in a sermon about the outpouring of the Spirit there.  This is part of his account:

I visited an outlying village.  It took four hours in a 4 wheel drive and then two hours on foot, uphill ‑ very remote.  There’s no radio, no T.V., no outside influences.  I’m sitting up there in this little hut on a piece of wood against the bamboo wall on the dirt floor.  Chickens are walking around in there.  And this pastor walks up to me.  He’s a little guy, and he’s trembling.  He says, “Brother David, I’m really afraid I’ve made a mistake.”

I hadn’t heard of any mistakes.  I was wondering what had happened in the last few days.  He’s got four little churches in his area.  He said, “Man, it’s not my fault.  I apologise.  I’ve done everything right, like you taught me.  I pray everyday.  I read the Bible.  I’m doing it right.  What happened is not my fault.”

I said, “What happened?  Come on, tell me what happened.”  He was trembling.  Tears were running out of his eyes.  He said, “Brother David, I got up in our little church.  I opened my Bible and I started preaching and the people started falling down.  The people started crying.  The people started laughing.  And it scared me.  I ran out of the church.”

That’s what I was looking for.  That’s what I was waiting for, when God came in our work, not because somebody came and preached it, not because I said it was okay or not okay, because I was neutral about it.  I knew it was all right, but I wanted to see it in our work not because I ushered it in, but because the Holy Spirit ushered it in.  And he did.

After I had been through all the sections, introducing this softly, it finally came time to call all the pastors together from the whole work.  A couple of hundred of our pastors came.  I wish you had been there to see what we saw!  It was amazing.

On the first day, Wednesday, 25 October 1995, there were about 200 pastors there, and the whole church that was hosting us.  That made about 450 people.  The first day was awesome.  God hit us powerfully.  There were healings.  I was happy.  The people were encouraged.

The second day, Thursday, was even better.  It was stronger.  I thought we were peaking out on the second day.  I got there at eight o’clock in the morning and left a ten o’clock at night, and there was ministry all day.  We were fixing problems, and God was working through the ministry.  It was wonderful.   But I tell you, I was not ready for the third day.

I don’t have words to describe what happened to us when the Holy Spirit fell on us on Friday, 27 October, 1995.  We were coming in from different areas.  The Indians were all there.  I didn’t know they had been in an all night prayer meeting.  I didn’t know that the Holy Spirit had fallen on them and they couldn’t get up.  I didn’t know that they had been pinned down by the Holy Spirit all night long, all over the place, stuck to the ground.  Some of them had fallen on ant beds, but not one ant bit them.

I was staying about 45 minutes away.  I got in my 4 wheel drive and as I drove there I began listening on the two‑way radio.  Some of our missionaries were already there, and were talking on the two‑way radio saying, “What’s happening here.  I can’t walk.”

As I listened to them on the radio I felt power come on me.  And the closer I came, the more heat I felt settling on me.  I could feel heat, and I had my air conditioner going! When I got to the little church, I opened the door of the truck and instantly became hot. Sweat poured off me.  I was about 300 yards from the church.  The closer I got, the more intense was  the heat.  I could hardly walk through it, it was so thick.  I’m talking about the presence of God.  That was 7.30 in the morning!

I walked around the corner of the building.  People were all over the place.  Some were knocked out.  Some were on the ground.  Some were moaning and wailing.  It was very unusual.  By the time I got to the front of the church where the elders were I could hardly walk.  I was holding on to things to get there.  I could hardly breathe.  The heat of the presence of God was amazing.

The people had been singing for two hours before I got there.  At 8.15 on the morning of October 27th, 1995, I walked up there and lay my Bible down on that little wobbly Indian table.  Hundreds were looking at me.  Some were knocked out, lying on the ground.  I could hardly talk.

I called the nine elders to the front and told them the Holy Ghost was there and we needed to make a covenant together, even to martyrdom.  We made a covenant there that the entire country of Mexico would be saved.  They asked me to join them in that pact.  When we lifted our hands in agreement all nine fell at once.  I was hurled backward and fell under the table.  When I got up the people in front fell over.  In less than a minute every pastor there was knocked out.

We were ringed with unbelievers, coming to see what was going on.  The anointing presence of God came and knocked them all out, dozens of them.  Every unbeliever outside, and everyone on the fence was knocked out and fell to the ground.  There were dozens of them.  From the church at the top of the hill we could see people in the village below running out screaming from their huts and falling out under the Holy Ghost.  It was amazing.

We always have a section for the sick and afflicted.  They bring them in from miles around, some on stretchers.  There were 25‑30 of them there.  Every sick person at the meeting was healed: the blind, the cancerous, lupus, tumours, epilepsy, demon possession.  Nobody touched them but Jesus.  There was instant reconciliation between people who had been against each other.  They were lying on top of each other, sobbing and repenting.

I was afraid when I saw all of that going on.  I looked up to heaven and said, “God what are you ‑ ?” and that was the end of it.  He didn’t want to hear any questions. Bang!  I was about three or four metres from the table.  When I woke up some hours later, I was under the table.  When I finally woke up my legs wouldn’t work.  I scooted myself around looking at what was going on.  It was pandemonium!  When some people tried to get up, they would go flying.  It was awesome.

“And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1).  I saw that river.  I actually saw the river, it’s pure water of life from God’s throne.  If I could see it again I would know it, I saw it, I experienced it, I tasted it.

We had five open‑eyed visions.  One small pastor was hanging onto a pole to hold himself up.  He was there, but he wasn’t there.  He said to me, “Brother David, look at him.  Look at him, Brother David!  Who is it?  Look how big he is!  Oh, he’s got his white robe on.  He’s got a golden girdle.”  It was Jesus.  He said, “Brother David, how did we get into this big palace?”

I looked around.  I was still on the dirt floor.  I still had a grass roof over me, but he was in a marble palace, pure white.  I crawled over to look at him.  He was seeing things we could not see.  Another of the elders, a prophet from America, who had been working with me for thirteen years, crawled over and we were watching this pastor who was in a trance.  It was amazing.

The three of us were inside something like a force field of energy.  Anybody who tried to come into it was knocked out.  It was scary.  The pastor said, “He’s got a list, Brother David.”  And the pastor started reading out aloud from the list.  I was looking around, and as he was reading from the list people went flying through the air, getting healed and delivered.  It was phenomenal, what God was doing.  And he’s done it in every service in our work that I’ve been in since then.  It’s been over a year.  It’s amazing.  Wonderful.

Between 150 and 500 people per month are being saved because of it, just through what the North American missionaries are doing (Waugh 1998, 139-144).

Sunday, 24 March, 1996 – Smithton, Missouri (Steve Gray)

Like thousands of pastors across America, Steve Gray was discouraged and disappointed.  He was even considering leaving the ministry.  For twelve years he had pastored the Smithton Community Church in the sleepy little town of Smithton, Missouri, nestled among the wheat.  Steve Gray was discouraged and disappointed.  He was even considering leaving the ministry.  Steve Gray was ready to quit.

Knowing he had to get away from the church for some “R and R,” he chose revival over relaxation.  In March 1996, he drove from Missouri to Florida to visit the Brownsville Outpouring at Pensacola that was then in its 37th week.  Gray attended the services each night and spent the days in his motel room, praying and seeking God’s face.

During the Tuesday night prayer meeting, while hundreds gathered around the “Pastor’s Banner” to pray for the nation’s shepherds, Gray was praying especially for one pastor, himself.  He knew if he continued in the ministry, he had to be restored.  After about three days, he felt some recovery and his focus began to change.  God was restoring his hope and he found this to be the first signal of his personal revival.

Before this change in focus, Gray didn’t even know what to ask from God.  Gray says he came to Brownsville not to “get something” but to “see something,” as Moses went to “see” the burning bush.  After several more days, Gray was “seeing” again.  One night, in what Gray described as a “perfect atmosphere,” God spoke to him and said, “I want you to have a revival.” The very thought was too much to accept.  Smithton, Missouri, is not Pensacola, Florida, and Gray could not imagine himself in the role of revivalist.  Then God spoke again, “I didn’t say I want you to be a revival, I said I want you to have a revival.”

On Sunday morning, 17 March 1996, Pastor Kilpatrick shared part of his personal testimony of how revival came to Brownsville.  Gray reached the place of faith and could believe “there is a place for me in revival.”  He observed Kilpatick as he was “watching, guiding, and pastoring a truly sovereign move of God that was changing the world.”  Kilpatrick’s words and example showed Gray that “revival needs to be pastored and can be pastored.”

After Sunday worship, Gray called his wife, Kathy, and said, “I have just been in the best Sunday morning service I have ever been in.  Tell our church.” Near the end of his second week in Brownsville, Gray headed for home, repentant and on the road to revival and restoration.

While God was working on Gray, he was also working on the members of Smithton Community Church.  For two and one-half years the church had held a Tuesday night prayer meeting, but as God prepared the church for revival, the prayers became more intense.  Associate Elder Randy Lohman says there was “lots of brokenness” in the months immediately preceding the outpouring.

As the pastor sought God in Florida, the congregation sought him at home.  On Sunday night, March 17, Kathy Gray relayed the pastor’s message about the great Sunday morning service in Brownsville.  David Cordes, one of the elders, was deeply convicted.  Weeping, he asked the congregation, “Why should our pastor have to travel a thousand miles to be in the best service he has ever been in?”  He fell on the floor in repentance.  Soon he was followed by several other men in the church, repenting for their lack of support and crying out to God to do the same thing at Smithton that he was doing for the pastor in Florida.  God continued his work on Wednesday night as a five year old girl prophesied and said, “It’s coming!  It’s coming!”  The Lord had seen their brokenness.

When the pastor arrived on Sunday night, the glory fell.  To be exact, at 6:12 p.m. on 24 March 1996 God the Holy Ghost arrived in his awesome power at Smithton Community Church.  They will never be the same.  Immediately they added services to their church schedule.  Now, the outpouring has continued for two years with five services every week.  Visitors have come from all fifty states and many foreign countries, often in numbers that vastly exceed the population of the town.

Thousands of lives have been changed.  Sick bodies have been healed.  Visiting pastors have taken the fire back to their congregation.  Steve, Kathy, and teams from the church are taking the revival all around the world.  As for the future of the revival, Lohman said, “God started it and we are going to let him do what he is doing.”

Move to Kansas

The revival that has brought some 200,000 people from around the world to the small town in the middle of nowhere.

Smithton Community Church (SCC) in the tiny town of Smithton, is relocating to Kansas City to allow the almost-four-year “outpouring” to continue to spread.  Weekly revival meetings have been held at the church in Smithton – population around 500 – since March 1996.

Services last for three or more hours, with intense prayer for visitors.  Many have testified of healings and renewal of their love for God.  Similar revivals have been sparked in other churches as a result of visits to the Smithton church.

Now Steve Gray and his small staff are moving 90 minutes away to take over the former property of Raytown Baptist Church, in suburban Kansas City.  The building has seating for 1,400 and other facilities that can better meet the demand for space created by visitors to the Smithton church, who even come from overseas.

The last revival services were be held in Smithton on Thanksgiving weekend, with a transition period leading to the first service at the new church in January, 2000.  Gray said that many of SCC’s 300 local members are considering making the move to another part of the state.

“I don’t have any doubt that the glory of God will show because it’s the same people, same staff, same everything.  When we go to another city or another country it’s not like nothing happens.  Something always happens,” he said.  “But maybe the city isn’t ready for this kind of commitment.  That’s what this is; it’s a revival in your heart.”

Gray said he was approached out of the blue by the leaders at Raytown Baptist, wondering if he could use their former property.  Revival services will be held Fridays and Saturdays at the new church.  Other services will focus on the local congregation.  The new property is fitted for a TV ministry, which may follow the radio program “Prepare the Way,” started on a Christian station in the city over the summer.

“We feel that we are hopefully getting ready for the next move of God in the United States, which is a great awakening,” said Gray.  “We never intended for this to happen, but for whatever reason we feel the lifting and the moving.”

Sources: http://members.aol.com/azusa/index.html from The Remnant International;  Daily News Update from Charisma magazine, 29 October, 1999.

Sunday, 28 April, 1996 – Hampton, Virginia

Bethel Temple Assembly of God has been experiencing a move of the Holy Spirit since April 1996. Church membership is 2,200.  Revival meetings are held Wednesday, Thursday & Friday.

During 1-6 April the drama Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames drew large crowds with nearly 3,000 responding to the altar call for salvation.  Later, 75 were baptized in an outdoor baptismal service.

During the week, 22-27 April, several pastors journeyed to Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, to a revival conference.

On Saturday 27th, at a Women’s Ministry Outreach, revival broke out in the parking lot and at a meeting.  People rested in the Spirit, and miracles occurred with the prophetic gifting of pastor Don Rogers.  He opened the sanctuary for a prayer meeting which extended to midnight.

On 28 April, the Sunday 7.30 am service started and did not end till 3.24 pm which bypassed the 10.30 am service.  Church members were repenting, numerous people converted to Christ, and many were delivered of evil spirits.  The pastors displayed manifestations similar to those in past historical moves of God.  Powerful conviction fell on the people, with many overwhelmed.

Hampton, Virginia is the oldest English speaking settlement in America.  Bethel Temple Church is racially diverse: 40% African-American, 50% white, 10% Hispanic and Asian.

In 1996 the Senior Associate Pastor, Don Rogers, had an open vision of the Holy Spirit coming to Hampton.  He saw the Spirit of the Lord coming like a storm and it blew into their church.  In his vision when this happened it blew out a glass window in the church.

Fourteen months later, on 1 June, 1997, the Sunday service at Bethel Temple was starting.  Senior Pastor Ron Johnson was praying and asking God to come “like a pent-up flood”.  Suddenly Pastor Johnson looked at his hands and oil was dripping from his hands.  The pastor began to tell the congregation of what was happening to his hands.  The head usher told the pastor the front window of the church just blew out.

The pastor began telling the congregation of what happened.  People ran to the altar.  Many publicly repented of sins.  God’s manifest presence filled the building.  Marriages are being restored, sexually broken people healed, myriad conversions to Christ, and many being filled with the Holy Spirit.

The vision was beginning to be fulfilled.  Part of the interpretation of the glass breaking signified the Spirit of the Lord blowing into Bethel church and blowing out.  The mission of Bethel church is to proclaim God’s glory to the nation.  The breaking of the glass window is a prophetic symbol of God’s power to release the church to carry the gospel to the nations.  Also that week, several “signs and wonders” happened.  An unexplained earthquake tremor and circular rainbow 360 degrees appeared over the city.

Unity of churches in the Hampton area is growing.  Twenty churches gathered for Easter Services this year in the town’s coliseum.  According to Pastor Don Rodgers it’s unprecedented to get twenty churches to lay down the most important service of the year.  Eleven thousand people attended.

Sunday, 29 September, 1996 – Mobile, Alabama (Cecil Turner)

Joel Kilpatrick described revival in Mobile, Alabama:

Cecil Turner was a shy man with a stutter – a pipe-fitter with no Bible college education – when God called him to lead Calvary Assembly of God in Mobile, Alabama, in 1963.   Even family members questioned whether or not Turner could pastor the young congregation.

Now, 34 years later, the church literally overflows with people coming to see what’s been happening since Sunday, 29 September, 1996, when God’s presence came in power during the church’s annual “camp meeting.”

“I’ve thought we’d close out a number of times,” Turner says.  “But the Holy Spirit says we’re going on.”

The church has been in continuous revival from week to week, meeting Tuesdays for intercessory prayer, and Wednesdays through Fridays for services that draw 250 to 300 people.   Sunday mornings draw 400, the maximum number they can pack into the sanctuary.

Some services are exuberant and intense; others so heavy all they can do is “lay on the ground.”  Sometimes the Spirit is so strong during praise and worship that they throw open the altars.  “We come in each night and never know what’s going to happen,” Cecil says, pausing for a moment.  “I like it.”

The church started praying for revival in 1992, says Cecil’s son Kevin, who has been on staff for 11 years.  “At times we wondered if revival would happen,” Kevin says.  “But we saw the intensity and the hunger growing.”

After five years of prayer and some dry stretches, God came mightily when a travelling evangelist, Wayne Headrick, came to preach.  God spoke to Headrick that if they got out of the way, God would make something happen.  That “something” keeps on happening.

“It seems like it’s accelerating,” Headrick told the Mobile Register in May 1997.  “Each service there’s more . . . anointing and more of the power of God.”

Unchurched people are coming in droves to this church that sits at a 3-way stop on the western city limit of Mobile.  “They may not understand it,” says music pastor Kevin Turner, Cecil’s son, “but they want more of it.”

Many come from other denominations:  Nazarene, Catholic, Methodist, to name a few.  “We agreed from the beginning that this wasn’t an Assembly of God revival – it was for the whole church,” Cecil says.

People are saved in every service – and some 150 were saved in the last two months alone, Kevin says.   Some say afterwards that they felt a need to come, and several testify that they were drawn in as if to a beacon.   One man pulled into the parking lot, not fully understanding why he was there.   The congregation prays regularly that people will be drawn by the Lord’s presence.

The Mobile revival is redefining Calvary’s concept of pastoral leadership, steering them away from man-generated structure and teaching them to encounter God together.

“It’s like God said, ‘I’ve been trying to move.  Now get out of the way,’” says Kevin.  “It’s liberating for both pastors and the people.”

Kevin, who grew up a pastor’s kid, testifies that the move of God now enveloping their church has brought him to a new level of faith.  “I’ve always loved the Lord, but this has changed my life,” Kevin says.  “I want to be intimate with him.”

Revival has also redefined his ministry.  Kevin and his 10-piece music team keep a greulling schedule, sometimes singing for 3 hours straight.  Before revival began,  Kevin would lose his voice after a week of services, he says.  But he asked God to sustain him, and has gone 10 months with few problems.

Revival has also forced him to be more in tune with the Holy Spirit before leading worship.  “I make a song list, but often it gets tossed out,” he says.  “Some nights it’s like being held over a cliff.  I know God wants to do something, and I’m asking, ‘What is it?’  I’ve had to become comfortable with silence.  Sometimes he just says to wait.”

The revival is not personality-driven.  Headrick is often gone for weeks at a time, and the river continues to flow.  The pastors say the move of God keeps changing colours as God takes the church to different places in him.

Glenn McCall, pastor of Crawford United Methodist church, frequently takes members of his congregation to Calvary for revival services.  “[People] are looking for something, and only God can meet that need in their spirit,” he says.  “I feel like it’s a nationwide thing.  I’ve heard a lot of testimonies from around the country and the world.  There’s some phenomenal things happening in the church world.”

McCall believes the fact that Calvary is drawing from other denominations signifies that America is ready for awakening.  “I think people are wanting a revival regardless of what the name is on the [church] doorpost.  They’re willing to crawl through barriers to get a touch from God,” he says.

Sunday, October 20, 1996 – Houston, Texas (Richard Heard)

Richard Heard led the Christian Tabernacle in Houston in growth from 250 to 3,000 members.  On Sunday October 20, 1996, a move of God exploded in the church.

During the previous year the church had a strong emphasis on knowing Christ intimately.  That August of 1996 Hector Giminez from Argentina ministered there with great power and many significant healings.  Awareness of the presence and glory of the Lord increased during October, especially with the ministry of an evangelist friend of Richard, Tommy Tenny, who was to speak that morning.  Richard was preparing to welcome him and had just read about God’s promise of revival from 2 Chronicles 7:14 when God’s power hit the place even splitting the plexiglas pulpit.

He spoke about it by telephone in November 1996 with Norman Pope of New Wine Ministries in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, who put the transcript of the discussion on the Awakening E-mail.  The following account is an edited selection of Richard Heard’s comments: 

I felt the presence of the Lord come on me so powerfully I grabbed the podium, the pulpit, to keep from falling, and that was a mistake.  Instantly I was hurled a number of feet in a different direction, and the people said it was like someone just threw me across the platform.  The pulpit fell over that I had been holding for support, and I was out for an hour and a half. …  I could not move.  And I saw a manifestation of the glory of God.  …  There were thick clouds, dark clouds, edged in golden white and the clouds would ‑ there would be bursts of light that would come through that, that would just go through me absolutely like electricity. …  There was literally a pulsating feeling of ‑ as though I was being fanned by the presence of the glory of God.  …  There were angelic manifestations that surrounded the glory and I didn’t know how long I was out.  They said later that I was there for an hour and a half.

In the meanwhile, all across the building people, they tell me, were falling under the presence of God.  That’s not something that has happened much in our church, but people were stretched out everywhere, and at the altar.  We have three services on Sunday and people would enter the hallways that lead to the foyer and then into the auditorium and they would enter the hallways and begin to weep.  There was such a glory of God and they would come into the foyer and not stop ‑ they would just go straight to the altar ‑ people stretched out everywhere. …  There were all kinds of angelic visitations that people had experienced.  And we’ve got professional people in our church ‑ doctors, professors, their bodies were strewn everywhere.

When I felt the glory of God lift, I tried to get up and couldn’t.  It was as though every electrical mechanism in my body had short‑circuited.  I couldn’t make my hands or my feet respond to what I was trying to tell them to do.  It was as though I was paralysed.  …  And we had one service that day, and the service literally never ended ‑ it went all the way through the day until 2:00 that morning.  It had started at 8:30, and we decided to have church the next night, and I didn’t want to be presumptuous, but we went on a nightly basis on that order, just announcing one night at a time, and as we got deeper into the week I could begin to see that God was doing something that was probably going to be more extended.  …

There have been numerous healings. The evangelist didn’t speak at all that Sunday.  In fact, the entire week he spoke maybe twenty minutes.  There’s been a really deep call of God to repentance.  People come in and they just fall on their faces. …

We had a great choir.  We’re a multi‑ethnic congregation.  A Brooklyn Tabernacle kind of sound, if you’re familiar with that.  Great worship and praise.  Sunday morning there wasn’t a choir member standing on the platform.  They were all scattered like logs all over the platform.   And we go in ‑ [musicians] begin to play, to lead us into the presence of the Lord, and they play very softly.  Because of our background, usually our worship is very strong, very dynamic, a lot of energy.  Not any more.  It’s like you’re afraid to even lift your voice. …

We’ve cancelled everything that we had planned.  We have a lot of outside activities. We have 122 ministries within the church that have helped our church to grow, and these ministries were primarily either for getting people here or holding people once they’ve converted.  …  I was telling our staff  ‑  they were asking, “Are we going to have Christmas musicals and children’s pageants ever?”  And we do a big passion play every year that brings in thousands and thousands of people.  And I asked them, “Why do we do all of this?” and they said, “Well, we want people to come here so they can encounter God.”  I said, “Look at what’s happening.  We’ve got people storming in here that we’ve never seen, never heard of, never talked to.  And God’s doing it in a way that is so far superior to what we could do that whatever we’ve got going on, we’re cancelling everything.”  And that’s literally what we’ve done. …  And there hasn’t been a single objection.  That’s what amazes me.

I think that this is probably going to end up ‑ whatever this season is that the Holy Spirit is bringing us through in terms of our commitment to Him and the deep searching of our own hearts, it has the feeling at this point like it’s going to ‑ like it’s building toward even a greater evangelistic outpouring. …

There’s a big difference in renewal and revival.  I had the same scepticism of the laughter.  I was raised in a classical Pentecostal background.  I saw that from time to time, but the latest thing ‑ I just ‑ something inside of me just had a difficult time with it.  And there are people that are laughing like crazy now, and, I mean, all of this stuff I said that I had reservations about and didn’t particularly care to see ‑ I mean it’s just as though God has said, “This is My Church.  It’s not yours.”  And I see the reality of it now.  I think it’s going to end up turning strongly evangelistic.  It has that feeling and a lot of people are coming and being saved each night.  There are many being saved, and there’s not even really an altar call made that distinguishes between people that are already saved ‑ that just need renewal and those that need conversion [because] it’s just so intense right now (Waugh 1998, 144-147).

A year later people were still being converted, often 30-40 a week.  Richard Heard commented that everywhere in the church the carpet is stained with the tears of people touched by God and repenting.

Sunday, 19 January, 1997 –Baltimore, Maryland (Tommy Tenny)

Elizabeth Moll Stalcup interviewed Bart Pierce and Tommy Tenny at Baltimore, as reported in Charisma, July 1998:

When Baltimore pastor Bart Pierce cried out for more of God in January 1997, he had no idea the Holy Spirit would change his life, and his congregation, forever.  Bart Pierce will never forget the day the Holy Spirit fell at his church in the rolling suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland.  It wasn’t gradual, nor was it subtle.  God showed up during the Sunday morning service on January 19, 1997.

Pierce, pastor of Rock Church in Baltimore, and his wife, Coralee, had just returned from a pastors’ retreat in St. Augustine, Florida.  Pierce says he went to the retreat with “a desperate, deep hunger for more of God.”

While there, he heard Tommy Tenney recount an event that occurred in a Houston church a few months earlier.  Without warning, during the early morning service on 20 October, 1996, God had sovereignly split a Plexiglas pulpit in two before the amazed congregation.  Afterward, an unusual movement of repentance broke out at the Houston church.

Tenney, a third-generation travelling evangelist, told the gathered pastors that the drama of the split pulpit was totally eclipsed by the awesome presence of God that filled the sanctuary immediately after the supernatural event.  “The revival,” Tenney told them, “was characterized by a deep sense of humility, brokenness and repentance.”

While Tenney spoke, many of the pastors, including Pierce, fell on their faces weeping.  Pierce spent much of his time at the retreat prostrated and weeping before the Lord.  When it ended, he asked Tenney to come back to Baltimore with him for the weekend.  On the 18-hour drive home, Pierce, his wife and Tenney had “an encounter of God as we talked about what God was doing and what we believed,” Pierce says.  “We would sit in the car and weep,” recalls Tenney.  They reached Baltimore on Saturday night, filled with a hunger for more of the Lord.

The next morning Pierce knew something was up as soon as he got to the church building.  “Two of my elders were standing inside the door weeping,” he says.   “We started worshiping, then people began standing up all over the building crying out loud.”  Some came forward to the altar; others would “start for the altar and crumple in the aisle.”

Even those outside the sanctuary were affected.  “Back in the hallways, people were going down under the power of God.  We never really got to preach,” Pierce says.  Tenney and Pierce were supposed to be leading the service, but both were too overcome by the intense presence of God to do anything but cry.

“There was a deep sense of repentance that grew increasingly more intense,” Pierce recounts.  At 4 pm there were still bodies lying all over the church floor.  Pierce and Tenney tried several times to speak, but each time they were overwhelmed by tears.

“Finally,” says Pierce, “we told our leadership team, ‘We’re going home to change clothes.’  We were a mess from lying on the floor and weeping.”  The two men went home and changed.  When they got back to the church at 6 pm, people were still there, and more were coming.  That first “service” continued until 2 in the morning.

Monday night, people returned, and the same thing happened.  It happened again Tuesday night.  “Many people simply crawled under the pews to hide and weep and cry,” remembers Pierce.  “At times the crying was so loud, it was eerie.”

Pierce noticed new faces in the congregation.  “We didn’t have a clue as to how they knew about the service, because we don’t advertise at all,” he says.  When he asked, some of the visitors told amazing stories.

One man said he was driving down the road when God told him, “Go to Rock Church.”  Another woman said she was sitting at her kitchen table when she got the same message.  She didn’t know what a “Rock Church” was, but she found a listing in the phone book.  After the service she tearfully confided that she had been planning to leave her husband the next morning.  “God had totally turned her heart,” says Pierce.  “She and her husband have been totally restored.”

For the first few weeks, Pierce says, “every ministry at the church was turned upside down.”  The church has always been known for its mercy ministries — its homeless shelter for men, its home for women in crisis, its food distribution program, which moves 7 million pounds of food a year, and its ministry to revive Baltimore’s inner city.

But when the revival started, everything took a back seat to what God was doing.  Pierce would find his staff lying on the floor in the hallways or hear a thump against the wall and find someone lying on the floor in the next room, crying uncontrollably.

People reported supernatural events in their homes, too.  One woman’s unsaved husband had a dream in which everyone spoke Chinese.  He came downstairs and found his wife lying on the floor speaking Chinese.  His son, who was supposed to be getting ready for school, was lying on the floor in the living room, weeping and crying.  That day, the man got saved.

One night a boy from a local gang came forward weeping while Tenney was still preaching.  “He came to the front, looked up at me and said, ‘You’ve got to help me, because I just can’t take it anymore,’” Tenney recalls.  “This type of brokenness is what draws God’s presence,” he says.  “God will never turn away from a broken heart and a contrite spirit.”

Pierce agrees.  He believes the congregation has “opened the heavens somehow by our crying for him.  He has become our pleasure.” Both he and Tenney say they have “turned to seek his face, from seeking his hands,” meaning they are seeking to know God intimately rather than seeking him for his benefits.

“We don’t have any agenda,” says Pierce.  “We come in and begin to worship, and his manifest presence comes in.  It is overwhelming.  Sometimes there is nothing any of us can do.  We have turned from trying to control the meeting to letting him be the object of why we have come.”

Tenney calls it “presence evangelism.” He explains, “We understand ‘program evangelism,’ where you pass out tracts or put on an evangelistic play or host Alpha classes.  John Wimber helped us understand ‘power evangelism,’ where people encounter the power of God as you pray for the needs in their lives.

“But what happened in Houston and what is happening in Baltimore we call ‘presence evangelism.’  The presence of God becomes incredibly strong to where people are literally overwhelmed.  They are drawn to his presence.  They aren’t drawn by the preaching; they aren’t drawn by the music; they are drawn by the presence of God.  It is hard to talk about without weeping.”

The church doesn’t keep figures on the numbers of people who have come to faith in Jesus since the revival started because they encourage people to go back to their home churches.  Many pastors bring their people to the services in Baltimore because they know that Rock Church won’t steal their flock.

In contrast to the Toronto Blessing services that have drawn people by the thousands from all over the world to the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship in Canada, most of the people who have come to the Baltimore revival services have been from the local area, including pastors from other churches.  “On any given night we have 12 to 20 pastors from the Baltimore area,” Pierce says.

Still, some do come long distances.  One night they looked out and saw 47 Koreans who had chartered a plane to come.  Another time a group from Iceland was there.  They have had visitors from Britain, Germany, the Ukraine and all across America.

Before Easter, the church put on a play about heaven and hell called Eternity.   Crowds filled the 3,000-seat sanctuary.  Some nights several hundred people had to be turned away because there was no more room.  And during one two-day period, more than 700 came forward to give their lives to Christ.  The church originally planned to host the play for two weeks, but they continued an extra week because of the tremendous response.

Tenney believes there is “a connection between what the Rock Church has traditionally done” — meaning the church’s strong ministries to hurting people outside the church — and the way the heavens have opened in Baltimore.

Today, services in Baltimore are quieter and gentler than they were during the first few months of revival.  But the worship music is powerful, and the singing draws the congregation to Jesus.  Most of the songs were written by people in the church after the revival began.

After an hour or so of worship, Tommy Tenney takes the microphone and begins to preach.  He asks the audience to worship Jesus in a way they never have before — to worship Him the way Mary did when she broke the alabaster jar, poured the ointment on Jesus’ feet and wiped His feet with her hair.

As Tenney continues to speak, people begin to cry, most quietly, but some more openly.  He invites people to come forward.  Almost everyone does.  “Just for one night in your life, worship Him,” Tenney encourages them.  “He wants to manifest himself to his people.  For once in your life set aside what you want from God, and give him the glory.”

Those looking for dramatic supernatural displays won’t find them here.  But they will feel the intense presence of God.  The impact of the revival is seen in the lives that have been changed for eternity.  There have been physical healings, healed marriages, burned-out people empowered to follow God, prodigals returned and hundreds of people who have found Jesus for the first time.

“It is not for us to point the way to a lost world.  It is for us to lead the way.  If the church will begin to walk in humility and repentance, then the world will see his glory.”

June, 1997 –Kawana Waters, Queensland (Peter Barr)

Australian Evangelist Jeff Beacham describes a weekend at Kawana Waters, Queensland, which has been experiencing revival blessing since June 1997:

For the last few days I have been ministering at Living Waters Christian Centre, a church that is moving greatly in revival.  Revival began here in June 1997 with a visit from Darrell Stott and a team from Seattle, USA.  Darrell returned here in September and stayed until Easter 1998.  Since October 1997 they have been having extended meetings, sometimes up to 12 meetings a week.

At one point, they were having 3000 come through for several weeks in a row.  However, they do have a wise pastor, Peter Barr, who is committed to revival but understands that good pastoring and discipleship need to be maintained and developed if this church is going to get to where it is destined to be.

They have guest speakers in every second week or so including some prominent international, national and local speakers that have a heart for revival.  People from many parts of Australia have been coming, with awesome testimonies of healing, restoration, reconciliations, re‑direction of lives and salvations.  Many have testified of a fresh encounter with God and a new personal intimacy with Him.

There is certainly no lack of life here.  It is not just emotional hype, but a genuine excitement for the things of God and it is a joy to preach to this very responsive audience.  The church was full for the first two nights.  On Friday night the power of God hit the young people in a big way.  I called every one under the age of 25 to the front.  Time after time they were all flattened to the floor, all together and without any one touching them.

Saturday night was a youth rally and young people came from all over the district.  There was bedlam as the leader was introducing me with most of the kids talking or walking around.  But by the time I was giving my challenge to them to rise up and be Champions of the Truth, God’s word must have been going straight to their hearts because there was not a sound, and we saw a huge altar call in response.

Many visitors came to the services on Sunday, some from as far away as Toowoomba, a large rural city two and a half hours drive from here.  Several of the young people publicly testified today about how their lives had been changed and that this weekend had made them more happy and excited about God than they had ever been before.  One man in his fifties sent this testimony: “Not only did I have a good time but my life has been forever changed.  I realize that you are only the messenger and do not seek earthly rewards but, it is good to know of and sometimes see the results of the Holy Spirit moving through you.”

I believe that this church will accomplish much for the Kingdom of God.  They have a vision to be a thousand strong by the year 2000, and to extend their building to be twice the size that it is now.  There is a tremendous enthusiasm, and a great anticipation and excitement about the future.  They know where they are going and many will want to go with them.

Thursday, 10 July, 1997 – Caloundra, Queensland (Ken Kilah)

Pastor Ken Kilah, senior pastor at Caloundra Baptist Church on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland reports on a move of God in the church and at Caloundra Christian College:

Since February 1995 the Caloundra Baptist Church has experienced several waves of the Spirit as he has sovereignly moved on the congregation.  At times people would fall in their seats as the Spirit moved in power.  Since that time the church has consistently made altar calls at the end of services with various manifestations occurring.

These manifestations increased during and after a ‘Catch the Fire’ conference in October 1996.  Guy Chevreaux was the guest speaker.  Many people were touched by the power of God and testified to healings, refreshing, release from fears and a whole lot more.

On Thursday 10 July, 1997, the Holy Spirit unexpectedly came upon students in a Year 7 class at the Caloundra Christian College.  The College is a ministry of the Caloundra Baptist Church.

Students began shaking, and falling to the floor.  The teacher, well aware of what was occurring took several of the students from class to the prayer room in the church where they were prayed for and cared for by church staff.

This caused a strong reaction from certain parents who protested by collecting a petition asking the school to stop what was happening or they would remove their students from the school.  The church and school responded by saying we believed that this was God at work.

A letter sent to the entire parent body explaining this position.  This letter reaches the local press which carried front page articles in the weekend papers.  During the next week the TV channels ran news and current affairs reports on the school and the views of opponents.  Some of the major newspapers also ran magazine and news reports, and radio stations called for interviews.

Ultimately some parents did respond by withdrawing 30 children from the 371 enrolled.  However, new enrolments occurred and schools across the country sent encouraging reports.

The most encouraging result has been to see the lives of children changed.  The children were not afraid of what God is doing and continues to do in their lives.  They were the ones who praised God for his grace towards them, and so do all at the Caloundra Baptist Church and school.

Sunday 12 October, 1997 – Greenville, Alabama (Ken Owen)

Ken Owen, Senior Pastor of First Assembly of God Greenville, South Carolina, reports:

In April 1995 a first wave of revival began to crest over the congregation at First Assembly of God, Greenville, South Carolina.  Nightly meetings were held for a month with Ed Nelson.  Since then a number of waves have rolled in, building into what is now a tsunami of revival.

In August, 1997, the tide began to significantly deepen.  I called Ed – a director of  a mission work to unreached peoples – to return immediately.  On October 11, 1997, Ed returned to us from Asia.  The Sunday morning service flowed like a mighty river — hundreds came forward to repent of sins.  The meeting carried on through the day till 4:00 pm.  With an hour break, it began again at 5:00 pm with a large prayer meeting and evening service.  Since then there has been no let up, only an increase.

More than two thousand people have repented of sins, converts being baptized weekly.  Many miracles and healings are accompanying the revival.

People from a variety of church backgrounds and denominations are driving to the meetings from several cities and states as momentum continues to strengthen.  There has been almost no promotion of the revival, but word-of-mouth has brought thousands of people to the meetings.

November, 1997 –Pilbara, Western Australia (Craig Siggins)

The closure of a pub through lack of customers is big news in Australia.  This is what drew the media to a small town called Nullagine in the far north of Western Australia.  But the media didn’t know quite how to report the religious revival that is keeping people out of the pubs‑as well as the jails and hospitals.  Aboriginal church worker Craig Siggins wrote this account of the spiritual awakening that is changing Aboriginal communities in Western Australia.

“Kuurti yarrarni kuwarri ngangka mungkangka” (“Holy Spirit, we welcome you in this place tonight”) is the first line of a song being sung at many Aboriginal communities around the Pilbara.  It was composed by Len “Nyaparu” Brooks, also known as Kurutakurru, one of the many leaders God has raised up among the Martu Wangka, Nyangumarta and other peoples of the Pilbara.

A spiritual awakening took place in many communities last year, in 1997.  Things started at Warralong, where many became Christians and were baptised after being influenced by three Christian Aboriginal leaders.  Then just before Christmas, Kurutakurru joined two other leaders at Nullagine, and many from Nullagine and other communities became Christians and came across to the dam at Newman to be baptised.

Many communities started having meetings almost every night and prayer meetings every day.  Leaders travelled to different communities for the meetings and to encourage people, sometimes holding meetings at night after a funeral service when hundreds of people were gathered.  Some meetings went on for eight hours or more as people shared in song, testimony, prayer, Bible reading and preaching.

When Franklin Graham visited Perth in early February, over 200 Martu people travelled the 1150 km for his meetings.  It was like one long church service all the way there and back.  Everyone was bursting to sing and witness to the people in Perth.

When we got back there were more meetings and baptisms, even from communities that had previously rejected Christianity.  Old people, Aboriginal elders, were turning to Christ and being baptised.  Four hundred people gathered at the Coongan River near Marble Bar for three days of meetings, with many more being baptised.

Our Easter Convention, 1998, was a wonderful time of celebrating Jesus.  Over 1000 people came, including many new Christians from communities that had never come before.  The meetings went nearly non-stop over the Easter period.  Singing is a prominent feature of the revival.  There is a real sense of joy that comes out in song.  Many new songs have been written and many old songs translated into Martu Wangka, Nyangurnartu and other languages.  Everywhere you go you bear kids singing and tapes playing songs of the revival.

So many people were becoming Christians and giving up the grog that the pub in Nuilagine lost a lot of its business and went into receivership.  The story made news around Australia.  Nyaparu Landy and I were interviewed on Perth radio!  A Current Affair went to Nuilagine.  Police, hospitals and others have noticed a decrease in alcohol related incidents.  The media has begun to take notice.

Amazingly, a simultaneous and apparently quite separate revival began at about the same time among the Pintubi people and others across the border in the Northern Territory.  A team from Kiwirrkura, just on the WA side of the border, travelled across the desert and joined up with the Pilbara meetings, arriving early for our Easter Convention held in a wide dry river bed near Newman.  More than 1000 people from different communities and Christian traditions came together to celebrate.

Why the revival?  It is nothing more or less more than a work of the Holy Spirit.  It has similarities to the revival that spread to many Aboriginal communities in the early ’80s, which reached the Pilbara but never really took hold.  Like that revival, people have had dreams and visions.  Recently Mitchell, a leader from Punmu, got up and read from Acts 2 about Joel’s prophecy and said it was being fulfilled.  Not long ago, people told me they had seen a cross in the sky one morning.  And like the ‘80s revival, it is the Aboriginal people taking the Wangka Kunyjunyu (Good News) to their own people in their own way and their own language.

The revival has not stopped.  The Martu people themselves are reaching out to other Martu people.  Neilie Bidu from Yandeyarra came back, fired up from hearing Franklin Graham, to reach out to his own community.  He began a small prayer meeting and then invited Kurutakurru and other leaders from Warralong and Punmu to help him.  So they went to Warralong and many there became Christians.  Yandeyarra people in turn have reached out to Banjima people near Tom Price.  Other communities have also been reached, including some that were closed to Christianity.  Some of these communities had turned away Crusade teams from the 1981 revival.  Now they have turned to the Lord.

Aboriginal leaders empowered by the Holy Spirit are leading the revival.  These leaders would like to see the revival reaching the wider Kartiya (non‑Aboriginal) society.  But for these shy desert people to reach out to Kartiya in these days of Mabo, Wik and the struggle for reconciliation will only be by the hand of God.

But there have also been some excesses and difficulties in the revival.  Some still struggle with alcoholism and some have gone back to the drink.  Many are new Christians with little knowledge of Christianity.  Even the leaders are in the main untrained.  Some are illiterate.  And other groups have come in with different ideas and practices that have caused division even within families and have led to much debate and argument, some of it bitter.  One is a legalistic group that stresses the keeping of the 10 commandments, especially the fourth (keeping the Sabbath).  Another is a fairly extreme charismatic group.

Then there are issues of a more cultural nature.  Some couples who have become Christians are married the wrong way in a tribal (though not biblical) sense, including some leaders.  What to do?  What to do about some of the tribal laws and ceremonies?  Reject them all?  Keep some?  These are big issues to be worked through.

We are encouraging the leaders to read the Bible for themselves and to come to solid biblical conclusions as they struggle through these issues with the help of the Holy Spirit, but it will take time.  Pray for the people and the revival!

Adapted from Alive magazine, June 1998 and Vision magazine, July 1998.

Pentecost Sunday, 31 May, 1998 – St Helens, Tasmania (Stuart Lumsden)

Pastor Stuart Lumsden is the pastor of St. Helens Christian Fellowship in the town of St. Helens, 3,000 population, on the east coast of Tasmania.  He wrote this article two months after revival began in their church at the end of May, 1998.

Here is a brief report as to what happened on 31 May, Pentecost Sunday, in St. Helens Christian Fellowship.  We had Ronnie Fynn, a South African Zulu evangelist, doing a two day ministry, which had been planned during the previous six months.  Through prayer and fasting (we were in the latter days of a 40 day corporate fast), the expectancy of what God would do was very high.  During the meetings, it was obvious that we had moved to another level in the praise and worship, especially in the areas of clapping and shouting.

We really sensed we had broken through by the end of Sunday’s meeting.  Ronnie had shared from Isaiah 40:31, pointing out that the word ‘wait’ means ‘expect’ God to be God.  This word increased the faith level of the people.  As we were closing (well, we thought we were closing), Ronnie was sensing the Lord speaking to him and taking him back to the revivals in South Africa of the mid-seventies, in which he was involved.  He saw the same signs that God was about to do something significant and so he was waiting to share that with me, and really felt the urgency as I was beginning to close the meeting.  In my heart I felt the same, although at that point I was unaware of what Ronnie was experiencing.  I called him over, and as soon as he shared it with me, he asked me, “What are we gonna do?”  I said “Go for it!”

A word of knowledge came, that as a church we were to go out into the town and get all the sick and infirm who would come.  At that moment it was like great boldness fell on the church, as in Acts 1:8 ‘You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.’

With that, the presence of God was tangible.  It was as if heaven had opened up; awesome, but also very gentle.  The love of God filled the house.  Not long after that, folk started to return with the sick and infirm.  Incidentally, all these people that came, were not born again.

The first lady who came had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was experiencing a lot of pain, especially at night.  We prayed for her and not much seemed to happen, although by faith we declared the word of healing over her.  She had a brother in the church, and their relationship had been strained over the years.  The brother went and asked her for forgiveness, and the moment he did, she felt the presence of God all over her, a warm tingly feeling, and now testifies that although the lumps are still there, the pain has gone.

Another lady, a Sister at the local hospital, had a bad car accident a few years ago.  She has suffered migraine headaches and energy drain and dizzy spells ever since.  We prayed for her and she now testifies to feeling great.  Even her countenance has changed; no headaches, dizzy spells or fatigue since Sunday.

Another lady who, together with her husband, are well known and well loved in the local community for their work with children and within the local school, was brought in for healing.  She has been in callipers and on crutches since contracting polio at the age of ten years.  She is now in her fifties.  After she was prayed for, she raised her hands above her shoulders, something which she has not been able to do before without severe pain, she also walked without the aid of her crutches, hands above her head, for several metres around the church.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.  The children particularly were moved with the compassion of God and gathered around her, embracing her and loving her.  She testified later that she had never felt so loved in her life.  I told her how much she loved children and had given herself for them, and how today she had experienced the true love of God for her, that being a significant reality she had not experienced before.

My daughter, Asha, (12 years old), had a vision that the heavens were opened up, and God dropped a mustard seed into our midst.  The seed represented an impartation of faith into the body, and I encouraged everyone to partake of it that they would have their own personal burning bush experience.  Another child, Rose (12 years old), spoke prophetically and declared with tears and weeping that ‘Revival has begun’.  All in all it was an amazing day, and the meeting which started at the usual time of 10 a.m. didn’t end until 5.30 p.m.

In the ensuing three weeks, we had meetings every night, with attendance ranging around 180 ‑ 200 people during the first two weeks, with many travelling from all parts of the State.  Again, to this date we have witnessed 48 conversions, that is, first time decisions.  We’ve seen numerous miraculous healings, such as curvature of the spine being straightened, ulcers instantly healed; a gentleman with a history of kidney disease testified to being healed, this being evidenced by his constantly yellow eyes becoming white overnight.  One man, testified that a constant ringing in his ears, which been there for many years, stopped after prayer for healing.  We have witnessed several instant healings from back pain.

Another lady, unsaved, received prayer for severe kidney disorder and a stomach ulcer, and was at the time in severe pain from this disorder.  She immediately experienced quite a measure of healing, then accepted Jesus as her Lord and Saviour.  She testified, the following day, that the pain had returned, however, she stood on the Word and claimed her healing, and had the best night’s sleep she has had in years, and did not need to use her painkillers.  She was clearly very much at ease and not in any pain whatsoever.  Further testimony concerning this lady is that she is attending church in Hobart and has already been instrumental in bringing another lady to the Lord.

A husband and wife, unsaved, who attended one of the meetings, came forward for prayer as the man was suffering from a severe muscular degenerative disease.  Doctors told him that he would be in a wheelchair in a couple of months.  He had a fused neck, no feeling in his hands or legs of feet and was in constant pain.  As we prayed for him, God flooded him with fire, he felt hot all over, his neck was freed and he received feeling in his hands and feet and legs, and was jumping up and down as the pain was released from him.  They returned the next night, came forward again for more prayer, and he again experienced intense heat throughout his body as God touched him.  They stood together and received Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.

On another evening, an elderly couple came.  The lady, in her seventies, has had two strokes and could barely walk even with the aid of crutches and her husband’s help.  As we prayed for her healing, Ronnie told her to follow him.  She began to walk, without her crutches, and as she shuffled you could see her freeing up, she was almost scurrying around after Ronnie.  We were told later, that at home, she was actually raising her legs higher and lifting her knees above her hips.  This couple also, accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.

Only a few nights ago, a lady in well-advanced stages of cancer came forward for healing.  As we prayed for her, Ronnie testified to seeing a ‘lump’ leaving her body, she also testified to a ‘warmth’ flooding through her.  She has since testified to being relieved of much discomfort, sleeping better and has turned her heart back to the Lord.

We have seen in numerous families, the hearts of the fathers being turned to the children; testimonies of deep reconciliation and forgiveness between fathers and sons.  We have witnessed deliverance of addictions, rejection, secret sin being exposed with repentance following.

We have been very encouraged by testimonies from pastors and visitors from other churches.  Many have experienced personal breakthroughs and have seen God begin to move amazingly among the people in their churches.  Praise God!

August, 1998 –Kimberleys (Max Wiltshire)

Robert McQuillan reported in The Evangel:

An enthusiastic Max Wiltshire, Australian Aboriginal Outreach (AAO) coordinator, shared briefly at the Assemblies of God Western Australia state conference some of the exciting things God is doing in the Kimberley region in the north of Western Australia in 1998.

A number of Aboriginal leaders had accompanied him to the conference, including Kenny Boomer who received his ministry credential.  Pastor Wiltshire also acknowledged the role Western Australia Women’s Ministries had played in supplying a bus for the AAO work .

“Fire is falling in the Kimberleys,” he reported.  “Thousands are being powerfully touched by God in salvation, healing and release.  And in many other ways too, some of which are unbelievable.  Hundreds of people are falling out – not with each other, but ‘falling out’ under the anointing.”

Affectionately known by Aboriginals as ‘the man in the big hat,’ the AAO coordinator went on to add that so much has happened since their outstanding Christmas meetings.  He reported:

The Kimberleys are ablaze.  The fire of God in the hearts of his people burns brighter than ever, new churches have been started, others have doubled in size – one leaping from 10 percent of the community to 90 percent in just a few weeks.  Further afield in the Pilbara area the move of God has been so intense that the local hotel went into receivership.

This move has seen the number of Christians doubled in the area over the last twelve months, which means our conventions are climbing toward a thousand people in the evening meetings.  Are the manifestations still occurring as at first in this move of God?  Yes, in fact the increase that we are seeing is in direct relationship to the outstanding manifestations of the Spirit.

But – what manifestations are we talking about?  The usual?  Yes, laughing, shaking, rolling, crying, running and so on continue.  However, if these are the normal, what are the outstanding ones?  In truth, some would make you cry in awe and wonder.  Such as seeing people falling under the power of the Spirit as they give their offering to the Lord.  As they have come to the front and put their offering in the containers, they ‘fall out’ there and then as the blessing of giving overcomes them.

After a recent crusade, one Aboriginal lady handed a ministry offering to the speaker on behalf of the church, and fell at his feet, again under the power and blessing of giving.

We have also seen folks falling out in the opening prayer as the very name of Jesus is mentioned.  They just fall from the seats to the floor, not knowing they are meant to wait until the altar call before they let the Lord touch them.  Back up singers are unable to stand, also people bringing items are unable to finish them because the anointing is so great.

Actually, it’s a case of the mores!  We need more buses to pick up more people to receive more of the blessing!  Transporting Aboriginals to services is a cultural thing.  It shows you care and that the meetings are very important.  Provide transport and they’ll be there with open hearts.

Sunday, 25 October, 1998 –Vancouver, Canada (Charles Ndifon)

David Culley reports from Glad Tidings Assembly in Vancouver, Canada.

“And it shall come to pass in the last days that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh …”  We are seeing it!  For the past months Glad Tidings in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada has been experiencing the same renewal that is happening all over the world. Yesterday, we crossed over into full blown revival.  The morning service started much like any other.  The worship was anointed as usual, and we had a visiting revival minister as we often had before.  The thing that was different was the sea of turbans and saris in the building.  Vancouver is a multi-national city with a large Sikh population, and over 200 had come to our morning meeting.

Our guest minister, Charles Ndifon from Nigeria and New York, had been in Victoria, British Columbia, for some meetings a few weeks ago, and a young Sikh woman, who had been invited by her Christian husband was healed of blindness and deafness.  She went back and brought her favourite uncle, Charnjit, who was dying of cancer, and he left the meeting healed and saved.

Since then Charnjit has been witnessing to all his relatives, and when Charles Ndifon came to our church in Vancouver, this man invited his whole extended family.  Yesterday, after watching many people be healed of athsma (as an example of how simple it is for God to heal anything), and a 90 year old woman receive a new ear-drum, about 200 Sikhs came forward to give their hearts to God.  And it’s real.  They had already heard the Gospel from Charnjit, and to make sure, the altar call was translated into Punjabi.  After the service, the people were so excited to have found Jesus, and to be so accepted by these white people.  At the evening service another 104 Punjab Sikh people responded to the altar call.

We saw many miracles.  A 14 year old boy born blind saw his mother for the first time, deaf ears were opened, cancers were healed.  But the greatest miracle of all was that God now seems to be bringing in the Sikh population that we have been so unable to reach for all this time.

Bob Brasset from Victoria, Canada, writes about the move of the Holy Spirit in British Columbia:

The outpourings continue.  In fact, it seems to be getting stronger.  We now meet four nights a week.  The response of the pastors in the area is simply an overwhelming gratitude for the goodness of God for deigning to visit us in such an awesome way.  There is an amazing, astounding hunger in North America right now.  People know that we are on the edge of not only revival but a genuine Awakening: perhaps the greatest since the day of Pentecost.  This Awakening, I feel, will be characterized by the very kabod glorious presence of God coming and abiding in a room, a church and even a city, or a whole region (as in Charles Finney’s revivals).

The worship in our services now continues and flows for 1½  to 2 hours, unabated with spontaneous songs of the Lord from worship team and congregation.  Bodies lie on the floor, prostrate in worship.  People report seeing angels.  Visions, mighty, inspiring ones, are plenteous.  Healings happen during the preaching of the word or worship without anyone praying or laying on hands.  We are not advertising this.  People are just coming.  Salvations are happening in each service – even when we don’t give specific calls.  We now have reported healings of fibromylagia, diabetes, cancer, chronic pain, ears opening, many necks and backs healed and severe allergies gone.

Sunday, 14 March, 1999 – Hobart, Tasmania (Ian Turton)

Pastor Ian Turton of River Christian Church in Kingston, Hobart, reported in April, 1999 on their series of miracle meetings:

We have been hearing about what God has been doing overseas filling people’s teeth with gold, silver and platinum, and even braces turning to gold.  At River Christian Church in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia we have been believing the Lord for miracles, signs & wonders like we have never seen before for a while now.  He led us into a time of intense warfare for a few months and then began to put on our hearts the real desire to see the miracles happen and that souls would be added because of what He is doing like in Acts 4 where the disciples asked the Lord to give them boldness to preach the gospel by stretching forth His healing power and that signs & wonders be done in the name of Jesus.

On Sunday night, 14th March, 1999, we asked all present to lay hands on their mouths and we prayed that the Lord would fill the teeth with gold.  By Monday night we were amazed as we actually saw fillings change into gold before our eyes.  Personally gold fillings appeared in my mouth, my wife also and others are getting blown away by their fillings changing before their eyes.  God is awesome.  …

We had a couple of crew from the USS Carl Vincent in port for a few days visit come to some of the meetings.  One of them received gold fillings, praise the Lord. What a thing to carry back on board.  We prayed that revival would break out onboard that warship. …

Jeannette (my wife) was ministering in Richmond at a ladies night (when) … a whole bunch of them including the pastor’s wife saw their teeth turn to gold.  Some of the ladies when they returned home prayed for their husbands who in turn received gold fillings. The pastor apparently didn’t believe what had happened but when the pastor’s wife prayed for him he received gold.  One lady had just had her teeth refilled at the dentist last week with white porcelain.  They were gold also.  She was a little put out by it at first!

This is our first – gold dust appeared on people’s faces.  One unsaved guy had it and got saved.  He shared that his wife has been coming along and has been gloriously healed and her life completely changed, as has his mother in law.  His other unsaved family members are coming along and in his own words ‘they are next’.

Thanks especially for your prayer; it is so very much needed.  Alas there are the knockers and sceptics but let me assure you we have seen more lives changed, more healings and more salvations in the last four weeks then in many previous years.

The church continues to experience God’s powerful presence, and from mid-1999 Ian Turton began leading and speaking at meetings around Australia and beyond where similar healings and manifestations have continued.

July, 1999 –Tacoma, Washington (Bill Wolfson)

Aggressive fasting is fuelling hunger for God at a Tacoma, Washington, church that has baptized more than 700 new converts during 90 weeks of revival.  During the first year of the move of God at Bethel Church, members fasted a total of 165 days.  The church sets 40 days at the start of each year and four days at the beginning of each month for fasting.

“This radical fasting is not normative, and we do not recommend it to others,” said pastor Bill Wolfson, who completed a 70-day liquids-only fast.  “But it is what God has for us.  Fasting causes unbelief to come out of our lives.”

Prostitutes and gang members are among those who have come to Christ at the four-nights-a-week services, which can often last for hours.  One man was even reportedly raised from the dead through prayer after CPR failed to revive him.  “I can only conclude that he was miraculously revived,” said retired paramedic Cornelius Winesberry Jr., who attended the man.

The revival began at the church – recently renamed Church for All Nations, to mark its renewed commitment to interracial outreach – after Wolfson travelled to an Illinois church to witness the Smithton-like revival happening there.

Source: News Update from Charisma magazine, Friday, October 15, 1999.

July, 1999 –Caldwell, Texas (Deon Hockey)

Caldwell, approximately an hour north of Houston, has experienced revival also.

Revival has hit a small Assemblies of God church in Caldwell.  The church has been having nightly services, drawing people from all across the area.  All sorts of physical healings are reported, including eyes and backs healed.  Deon Hockey was the visiting speaker and because of what is happening there, has cancelled his future engagements and will stay for the time being.

The presence of God is so strong that people are being frozen-like against the walls of the church for an hour or more.  Praise and worship has continued for two hours at a time.  Someone will run to the altar and get on their face before God, and twenty others will follow.  The power of God will cause twenty or so people to fall out on the floor all at once.

People from all around the area are coming to the church.  When asked how they found out about it, they’ll say they heard of someone being healed which drew them.  We are entering into a period of time in the church of signs and wonders.  These will be signs that God is still alive.  God still heals.  God still speaks.  God still loves his children.  And God still cares.

Church services continued nightly at First Assembly of God.

Source: Awakening List via grn@crown-house.com, 16 July, 1999 (Guido Kuwas)

Tuesday, 27 July, 1999 – Mornington Island, Queensland

The following account, adapted from reports Brian Pickering and Jesse Padayache, gives details of a powerful move of God that has occurred among Aboriginal communities on Mornington Island, Arakun and Weipa in the Gulf of Carpentaria, North Queensland, as well as on Psalm Island north east of Townsville.

Mornington Island was a pretty awful place, noted for its drunkenness and violence.  Iranale Tadulala, a Fijian Pastor was posted there five years ago.  About two years ago, an angel appeared to him and told him that there was to be a revival on Mornington Island and he was to facilitate it.  However it would not be easy.

He began a 40 day fast from 1st June until 11th July, 1999.  A colleague visited Mornington Island when Iranale was 28 days into his fast and was deeply challenged just being with the man.  He was so committed, close to tears all the time.

During the fast one of the scriptures impressed on him was the similarity between the city of Pergamum (Rev 2:12-17) and Mornington Island.  So much awful stuff kept on happening there that it had to be something like Satan’s throne.  And, just like Pergamum, a good Christian man had been martyred there in the early days of the Mission.  At the end of his 40 day fast he believed he had to go out to the site of the killing and fast there a further seven days.  This was a rather harrowing experience and he was conscious of doing battle with cosmic forces throughout.

At the conclusion of the fast (only days after the national prayer gathering at Uluru in July), they planned meetings at Mornington Island which began on 27th July. At the end of the first meeting 100 stayed behind for prayer and counselling.  By the end of the crusade there had been 300 conversions (25% of the population) and they were still going on with 500 reported by September.

Five other pastors helped with this marvellous happening.  Two are Fijians from Palm Island and Weipa.  The pastor from Aurukun and a white pastor from Townsville are also involved as is an Indian South African from Brisbane.  They are working on discipleship, want Bibles, and are already getting phone calls from surrounding areas asking them to go there, but are saying: “When God says it is right!”

One of the team leaders was Pastor Jesse Padayache, the South African Indian.  He has ministered in Australia for many years.  His wife Cookie was healed miraculously through prayer from a tumour on the brain.  They have x-rays showing total healing.

In February and May, Jesse had spoken at revival meetings in Palm Island north east of Townsville, among the tribes there, where there has been much drunkeness.  Many were converted, delivered and set free from addiction to alcohol, tobacco and fornication.  A man, angry with Jesse because his de-facto wife was converted in February and wanted to get married, was later converted.  He asked Jesse to marry them during the meetings in May.  Now money formerly spent on addictions is spend on food, clothes and shelter and many people are prospering for the first time.

News of the revival meetings on Palm Island reached Mornington Island.  In Mornington Island, alcohol abuse has been extreme.  Drunkenness was everywhere.  The place was littered with piles of beer cans.  About 10 people attended the services.

On the first night, Tuesday, 27 July, 1999, the team was casting out demons till midnight.

People were healed – the deaf, cripples, back pain, diabetes, blood pressure, heart diseases.  Many committed their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ and were freed from generational curses.  A report from the pastors says: “Spirits of suicide, alcoholism were driven out and old curses of sorcery and witchcraft were broken.”

On the second night, Wednesday, an angry lady with a beer can came in abusing Jesse and the team for casting out spirits.  She yelled, “Me and my beer, we live together.  Don’t listen to this man.”  But the people wanted to be delivered because of the changes they saw in their friends.  Many were healed and delivered.  Two healed people threw away their crutches.  A lady with a stroke was healed and freed from her wheelchair.  The drunk lady saw the healings and eventually wanted prayer.  She gave her life to Jesus and became instantly sober.  She said, “Pastor, I don’t want this stupid habit” and gave her six pack of beer to the pastor.

Their report tells of a young boy, born disabled – dumb, deaf and unable to walk – was healed, running around.  His first word was “Mom”.  A woman with a stroke who could not speak and could hardly walk is walking around testifying about what God had done for her.  A woman came to the meeting with a walking frame, but left the frame and walked home without it when the Lord healed her.

They have a Women’s Refuge which is usually chock-a-block on Thursday and Friday nights.  It had one customer!  Around midnight one night, a man called his family together and spoke of what God had been doing in bringing the whole family to the Lord, saying, “Everyone is welcome in this home, but from now on there never to be any alcohol in this house.”

A white policeman came to a meeting, drawn to what Aborigines were experiencing but feeling too ashamed to go forward.  Next day, a pastor found him sitting in a corner, spoke to him about his shame, took him home and led him to the Lord.  The pub shut an hour early, with no customers.  Next day there was no one at the women’s shelter – they didn’t need that sort of help any more!

Many leaders in the community were saved, and the sale of beer dropped dramatically.  Around 500 in that community of 1200 became Christians.  Now former enemies are reconciled.  Revival has brought reconciliation between blacks and whites also.  Community leaders encouraged people to kick the demon drink out and give themselves to God.

A young man, lying in bed at home heard the loud speakers, and so came to the meetings to give his life to God.  On Sunday the church was packed with people standing outside to listen.  Many were healed in the morning, and many more on Sunday night.

Large numbers, formerly in de-facto relationships, have now married.  The pastor has been busy performing marriages.  Within weeks, beer consumption dropped by over 9,000 cans a week.

On the Monday they started classes for believers.  More were converted then also.  A drunk man came from the pub to the believers class, seeking God. The believers also follow up each other, because they all know who is involved.

When Jesse passed through Weipa on his way to Arakun in the gulf of north west Queensland in August, he met an aboriginal lady from a community of 400 people in Mapoon, north of Weipa.  Her 34 year old son, looking wild, saliva dripping, and shaking, had been in a psychotic state receiving treatment for six years.  He’d been separated from his de-facto wife and children for that time.  The pastor saw them at the shopping centre so invited them to his place for healing prayer.  The son was frightened of the pastors, staring with wild eyes.  They bound spirits and cast them out.  When he went back to the hospital he was pronounced totally healed.  He now lives with his family and got married.

The mother asked for prayer also. She had asthma, a heart moniter, sugar diabetes, and a huge lump like a rock melon on her stomach.  The lump disappeared, and the arthritis, asthma, diabetes and blood pressure were all healed immediately, medically verified.  Later she came back to Weipa for meetings with a bus load of people, all seeking God because of those healings.  Most of that bus load were saved, and now a church as been started in Marpoon.  The previous church had been destroyed in the 1960s, and the people there had hated the gospel, till now.

Jesse caught the small plane from Weipa to Arakun.  Many were drunk there.  People ignored or hated the church, regarding Christianity as a religion for whites.  Only about 6 members went to the church.

One the first night of meetings at Arakun, about 50 came into the hall with another 40 people sitting around outside listening.  Noisy dogs came in.  An old man, deaf in his left ear and partially deaf in his right ear was totally healed.  Three weeks earlier, in a dream he had seen the dark skinned Jesse pray for his healing, and he knew he would be healed at that meeting.  Then, nearly all in the hall and some from outside gave their lives to Christ that first night.  Many were healed, including a man lame in his right leg.

Word spread fast.  Everyone knows what is happening in the community.  The next night the church was packed.  Crowds stood around outside.  By the end of the meetings, 170 aboriginals had given their lives to Christ for the first time.  Many were healed including people blind or partially blind and deaf.  Great joy filled the community.  Many were delivered from alcohol addiction.

One of the council officers in the building next door told the community leaders that Jesse and the pastor needed to go on casting out demons because so many people were being delivered of drunkenness and diseases.

Demons associated with suicide came out of a man who had tried to kill himself four times.  Now he is whole.  Everyone talked about the changes in the atmosphere of the community.  Then he returned to his de-facto wife and was married.  His witness brought large numbers to the Lord.

Back again at Weipa for meetings, the same things kept happening.  A young white lady in her twenties was delivered with loud cries and healed on the second night of the meetings in Weipa, to the surprise of the aboriginals who thought only aboriginals had demons.  The news spread like wildfire, and many more came for salvation, deliverance and healing.

The bus load from Mapoon north of Weipa – brought by the lady and her son who had been healed at the pastor’s home previously – returned full of saved, healed and delivered people, determined to start their church in their community.

Just as revival on Elcho Island in 1979-1980 sparked revival across Arnhem Land, and teams went out to many aboriginal communities, so this revival is touching many communities in north Queensland.  Pray for the mighty had of God to bring powerful revival to the land.

Revivals into 2000?

The year 2000 dawned with increasing reports of revival movements among the world’s 6 billion people.  The previous forty years saw the world’s population double.  What will the next 40 years bring?

Amid growing reports of social and physical upheavals, terrorism, the awful threat of nuclear holocaust, and the increase of epidemics of fatal diseases, reports of revivals continue to grow.  Independent churches in Africa, house churches in China, and grassroots communities in Latin America all experience amazing revival, amid persecutions.  Now revival reports continue to spread in the West also.  We too can cry out to God for mercy and revival as we humble ourselves, pray, repent and seek God.

This past century began with many thousands of prayer groups seeking God.  Revivals broke out across the globe, the best known being the mighty Welsh revival of 1904-5 which sparked so many other revival movements.  A year later prayer groups in Los Angeles saw the disturbing and powerful Azusa Street revival break out.  Both these revivals impacted countless lives in quite different ways.  Both issued in Spirit-filled evangelism and mission which spread around the globe.

The Welsh revival impacted 100,000 people for God.  Azusa Street touched thousands more from a little meeting in an old barn crowded when they had 500 people.  Yet the 500 million Pentecostal and charismatic movement in the world now usually acknowledges it’s roots in that revival.

Now a single crusade with Reinhard Bonnke may reach more than 500,000 people in Africa.  David Yonggi Cho’s church in Seoul, Korea, has over 800,000 and has impacted thousands more and planted other huge churches.  Over 100,000 people have encountered God recently in Toronto and more than 100,000 have made commitments to God in Pensacola.

Like the rippling waves from a boulder dropped into a pond, these waves of revival have spread worldwide.  And we have heard only a little of the amazing accounts of revival movements in China, Africa, Latin America, India or the island nations!

God said, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.”  The year 2000 and another millennium are now set to see that fulfilled more than ever before in history.

References

Riss, Richard (1995)  The Worldwide Awakening of 1992-1995.
http://www.grmi.org.renewal.Richard_Riss/history.html

Riss, Richard (1998) “Worldwide Awakening” in Renewal Journal #8: Awakening, page 31.

Waugh, Geoff (1998) Flashpoints of Revival.  Shippensburg: Revival Press.

© Renewal Journal #14: Anointing, renewaljournal.com

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1 Revival,   2 Church Growth,   3 Community,   4 Healing,   5 Signs & Wonders,
6  Worship,   7  Blessing,   8  Awakening,   9  Mission,   10  Evangelism,
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CONTENTS:  Renewal Journal 14:  Anointing

A Greater Anointing, by Benny Hinn

Myths about Jonathan Edwards, by Barry Chant

Revivals into 2000, by Geoff Waugh

Book Reviews:

The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition by Vinson Synan
The God Chasers, by Tommy Tenny
Primary Purpose, by Ted Haggard

See also: Immune to Fear: Anointing, by Reinhard Bonnke

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