Dr Rodney and Adonica Howard-Brown are pastors and revival evangelists.
Critics focus on the rip-roaring style of his revivalist “camp meetings”, but this US-based South African evangelist says all he’s interested in is God touching people’s lives.
The Holy Spirit wants to touch the lives of real people.
I don’t spend much time wondering about God’s ability
to do what he said he could do. I just trust him.
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On previous visits to Australia, Rodney Howard-Browne has attracted both crowds and controversy. But vigorous debate about his methods and the “phenomena” seen at his meetings has not kept thousands away. … The US-based South African evangelist spoke with Rob Buckingham about spiritual power, the simplicity of faith, and how it feels to be surprised by God.
Buckingham: Things took off for you number of years ago. Can you tell us what took place at that time?
Howard-Browne: We’d moved to America in December ‘87 and travelled wherever the doors opened. One pastor in upstate New York asked us to have two meetings a day and invited the whole congregation. So in April 1989 we went to [a town called] Clifton Park to a church with about 250 members.
I was amazed to see people so hungry for the things of God. On the Monday morning 60 people came to the morning service. This was amazing, especially in America at that time – there had been some major set backs with different major ministries crumbling, and people were disillusioned. Next day we had 100 people at the service – nearly a third of the church coming out on a Tuesday morning!
While I was teaching, just like I normally do, the praises of God just filled the room, and people started falling out of their seats. It looked like someone was sitting in the balcony and shooting people with an invisible gun. Some were crying, some were laughing, others were rolling on the floor. It took a little getting used to.
The presence of God literally filled that place. We saw an outbreak of a revival that now, this April, is nine years old. It’s gone around the world, touched the lives of millions of people, an it hasn’t subsided or stopped. It’s been a great adventure.
Buckingham: What are your reflections now on what took place back then?
Howard-Browne: I see it as an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It’s not like we weren’t expecting it. We were crying out to God to come and move; we just didn’t know how or when it was going to happen. So when it happened the way it did it totally took us by surprise.
Buckingham: Is there any change in what took place then compared to what’s happening now?
Howard-Browne: It’s just multiplied many times over. In the beginning it was 100 people and now it’s thousands. Whether we’ve been in China or Japan, Holland, Germany, Russia or the islands of the sea, it’s the same. People are the same and they have the same needs. The Holy Spirit wants to touch the lives of real people. There are many religions in the world, but religions will leave you empty because it’s man’s vain attempt to reach God. But Christianity is God reaching man through the person of Jesus Christ.
Buckingham: There are reports of physical healings at your meetings. Do these happen in every country?
Howard-Browne: It happens everywhere. We look at it this way. When people come to a meeting where the Holy Spirit is moving, whatever their needs are God will touch them at that point. Healing is just one of these. People come with cancer, arthritis, different diseases, and the presence of god touches them. Some are healed in their seat without even having hands laid on them, and it’s only later they find out that they’ve been healed.
Dolly, a little Alaskan native lady, came to our meetings in a wheelchair. She’d had arthritis for 18 years, the last five confined to a wheelchair and the final two years bedridden. She came as a last resort, asking God to please touch her. We laid hands on her, but we didn’t really pray that she’s be able to get out of the wheelchair, just that she’d get some joy and that God would touch her. I said, “Lady, what do you want to do?” She responded, “I want to get out of this chair.” So I said, “Well then, go ahead.” Then she climbed out of the chair and walked around the building and was totally healed of crippling arthritis. This happened back in 1991 and we’ve seen her subsequently. She’s still totally healed with no trace of arthritis in her body.
Buckingham: That’s physical healing. What about emotional healing? People can carry a lot of baggage around inside.
Howard-Browne: There are many examples. One is about a woman in North Dakota who was raped by a so-called friend. She contracted two venereal diseases, the worst the doctor said he’d seen. He told her that she’d never be able to have children.
This woman came to the meeting pretty traumatized – this had only happened weeks before. The power of God touched her, she fell on the floor and as she was lying there she felt like there was a fireman standing over her with a big fire hose washing her clean. For about two-and-a-half hours she felt this water washing her clean. When she got up she could remember the rape but it was like it happened to somebody else. God had totally removed the hurt from her. When she went back to the doctor there was no trace of the diseases. That was over five years ago. Today she’s married to one of the pastors of the church. They’ve had children with nothing wrong.
Buckingham: What about other stories?
Howard-Browne: An executive-type lady came to a meeting with a lot of deep hurt in her heart. About 20 years ago she’d had an abortion, and every time she was around things of God she felt guilty and condemned with thoughts like “God’s never going to bless you because of what you did.”
We prayed for her and she was overcome, lying there filled with joy. Laughing hysterically. Later she told us it was as if she was taken up to heaven to see a little girl dancing around, with Jesus standing to the side. The little girl said, “Look Jesus, Mummy’s laughing”. When that happened, she said it felt like a hand reached down inside her and pulled out all the hurt. When she got up from the floor she didn’t feel guilty any more. She knew that God had forgiven her and everything was all right.
Buckingham: Are these incidents isolated events?
Howard-Browne: No. People are healed from depression, a lot from fear, even from wanting to commit suicide. There’s so much pressure on people today. People feel like they can’t make it. So they come to the meetings. God touches them and sets them free. It’s wonderful to see.
Buckingham: Australians are quite different from Americans, and you minister in America a lot. How do you respond to that difference in your meetings when you come to Australia?
Howard-Browne: Because I’m a South African, I think it’s probably easier for me to respond than it would be for an American. I find the Aussies very direct, which I like. There’s no airs or graces, nobody’s pretending. I think maybe that’s why we’ve had such a great response in Australia.
Buckingham: You travel extensively around the world. That must be draining on you. How do you handle the pace?
Howard-Browne: Actually, I find the travel exhilarating, so that by the time I get to a new place I’m refreshed. We travel 46 weeks of the year, and it’s awesome to see people’s lives touched and changed. That’s the thing that’s refreshing. When we get tired, we try to take a break for two or three days.
Buckingham: Rodney, how do you describe your own relationship with God?
Howard-Browne: I would describe my relationship as very, very simple. I don’t understand some people when they always want to complicate God. I just see him as God – nothing is impossible to him. I have a very childlike faith that God honours his word. I don’t spend much time arguing about it or wondering about his ability to do what he said he could do. I just trust him.
Buckingham: How does your relationship with God impact your life personally?
Howard-Browne: Well, because nothing is impossible for him, I always want to believe him for big things. When you think that he made the heavens and the earth, then everything we come up with after that is really so small. I just think sometimes people make everything so difficult when there’s nothing too hard for God.
Buckingham: What about your relationship with others? How does your faith impact that?
Howard-Browne: I want God to do for them what he’s done for me. I’m not anything special or different. I’m just an ordinary person. But I know that if he can do great things for me, he can do great things for them.
Buckingham: How does your faith impact your care for the world around you?
Howard-Browne: When I see a need, my wife has to calm me down; she says, “You can’t do everything.” God leads you into areas where you can minister effectively to touch the needs of people. We all want to reach out and feed the poor or help those less fortunate than we are, yet because I’m busy doing what I’m doing, I can’t do it. So I try to find other ministries and get behind them. I don’t have to do what they’re doing: I just finance and support them.
Buckingham: What can people expect at your meetings this year?
Howard-Browne: Pretty much like two years ago, we’re going to focus on he person of Jesus – people being touched by the Lord and coming back to their “first love”.
Buckingham: What do you mean by “first love”?
Howard-Browne: “First love” is the love you have when you first give your life to Christ – the joy that you’ve just met him, that he’s set you free from sin, that all the guilt and condemnation is gone. It’s like a young guy and a girl; when they first fall in love, they’re just beside themselves.
It’s so easy as a child of God to get caught up in the daily grind, trying to please God, caught up in rituals and traditions. You end up losing that joy and peace. Revival is about people falling in love with Jesus all over again.
Anything can happen when people come back to their first love.
This is an edited version of an interview conducted by Rob Buckingham for use in On Being ALIVE and his weekly radio program “Rob Buckingham and Friends”. It was originally broadcast on 3MP on 29 March, 1998.
Reprinted with permission from On Being ALIVE Magazine, No. 4, May 1998, pages 30-34.
(c) 2011, 2nd edition. Reproduction allowed with copyright included in text.
You can’t help being affected by the climate of revival.
It may take a paradigm shift or two, but if you are open to God,
you’ll definitely get soaked by the revival rain.
It’s hard not to get wet in Argentina. In Australia it is relatively easy to stay dry. I’m not talking about the weather, but about the effects of Holy Spirit revival.
In October and November of 1996 I was one of twenty-five Australians who attended the International Institute conducted for the last seven years by Harvest Evangelism. Ed Silvoso, the Founder and President of Harvest Evangelism has visited Australia a number of times during the past five years and has introduced a strategy for reaching cities, regions and the nation called, “Prayer Evangelism.”
Argentina has been experiencing a revival for the last eleven years that has increased in impact each year. The struggling evangelical churches in Argentina prior to the revival would rejoice if one or two new converts were added to their churches in any single calendar year. These churches were always small and very segregated. They were generally hated by the Catholic Church and were often persecuted by the pro‑Catholic governments. This was the established status quo.
These evangelical/pentecostal churches had their share of dedicated and gifted leaders with every brand and emphasis in the protestant spectrum. They had good examples of everything: the right message, examples of fine theology and healthy spiritual ethos. Mission organizations from many nations had sown faithfully and persistently. But there was little power to impact the ruggedly proud and fiercely independent Argentine hearts. The cities and provinces remained seemingly impervious to their efforts.
Now things have changed. In more than sixteen city regions of the nation, the church overall is seeing consistent growth after the proportions of the parable that Jesus taught about seed and ground. Each year they are seeing “a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown” (Matthew 13:23). It is now customary for the whole church in a city to see an increase in people being added to the church of 100% per year.
We spent fifteen days in Argentina for three major reasons:
a) to attend the International Institute, a gathering of Christian leaders from every part of Argentina and most nations of South America,
b) to receive a commitment from wonderful South American Christian pastors and leaders to pray for a million hours for revival in Australia
c) to visit with leaders in some of the cities and gain some understanding of the practicalities of reaching whole regions for Christ.
Factors leading to revival
Our expectations were exceeded on every count. What I wanted to know was, “How did a fragmented unattached bunch of small churches ever begin to see revival?” There are probably many reasons: sovereign ones and human ones. I can’t do much about the sovereign matters, except be fully committed to them. I wanted to see what identifiable human factors may have led to the church in a nation seeing revival. Here are three that were observed.
1. Unity through relational networks has given the ministry of the church greater authority.
It’s hard to know who’s who in Argentina. Just looking at people in a crowded room would not give a clue as to who were the most anointed leaders, nor which “tag” they wore. I’m not implying that it was an insipid example of people striving to find their “lowest common denominator.” It was fiery and focused. It’s just that you couldn’t pick the Baptists from the Pentecostals. It seems that they have made a strong commitment to proclaim absolutes, not interpretations, when they come together.
As Ted Haggard says, “Inside the walls of our churches, let’s teach and practice the full menu of what we believe. …. outside the church we must focus on the absolutes. … The result is that the non‑Christian community hears the same basic absolutes from … a variety of churches.” What is similarly encouraging is that because the major leaders have not bought the western cultural value of status and importance, they have less to protect and therefore more to give away. We had the great joy and benefit of receiving and receiving. “Recibe! recibe! recibe” was often heard.
The other result is that the key leaders around the nation love each other enough to form a very strong relationship bond. They can give leadership to the church and help to acknowledge what God is saying and doing because they can speak with a voice that comes from being one in heart and soul.
In the cities, the pastors talk collectively about the church in the city. They actually think of themselves as one church even though they form different congregations with sometimes very different flavours. They give leadership to the church in the city from the perspective of a very jealously guarded unity. The pastors of the larger churches don’t dominate and operate independently and the pastors of the smaller churches don’t feel threatened. We saw it, heard it and felt it. It was the kingdom of God right enough.
This unity is not just for enjoyment value. It has given the church in a given locality greater authority. It is not to be measured in political or social terms, but spiritual. The powers of darkness have little power to blind the minds of unbelievers when the church operates in unity.
2. Uncompromised commitment to evangelism has created a sharper focus
Whatever the strategies to be used, the underlying strength comes from a heart to reach the people who are lost from God. There are meetings in the churches just about every night. There is very little emphasis on home groups and home group structures. Mostly people come to the meetings: teaching, prayer, evangelistic. The message is preached like any regular evangelical pastor would preach it in Australia. It would be more demonstrative of course as reflecting the culture, but there is no “secret” message associated with the revival.
People in Argentina are coming to Christ in one of two main ways:
They come in thousands to the altar rail of Carlos Annacondia crusades. This little dynamic Argentine exudes a measure of faith that has nothing to do with presentation, and everything to do with heart – from spending a lot of time in the presence of God no doubt.
People are also coming to Christ through the prayer supported lifestyle of the average members of the churches. So much of it is one to one. If anything this seems to be the growing edge.
As the pastors and intercessors knock out the enemy missile launching sites, the regular soldiers are able to take captives with much greater frequency; I wouldn’t say ‘automatically’, but I would say ‘more readily’. They can do this not because they have a level of faith much in excess of that of the average believer in Australia, but because they are focused on evangelism. It is their chosen lifestyle focus.
This focus allows all the activities of the church to be measured more objectively. We tend to measure programs on how they will affect the members. They tend to measure programs on how they will affect the non‑members. The ministry of evangelism gets the first second and third bite of the cherry in Argentine churches. People will sacrifice anything. The pastoral staff of a church all sold their cars at one time in order to make possible a particular evangelistic ministry. They mean business. That’s the bottom line.
3. A commitment to the harvest has uncovered important principles of prayer and spiritual warfare
South America in general and Argentina in particular have become synonymous with prayer and spiritual warfare. Sometimes this has been a bit controversial in its expression. I discovered something in Argentina that helped me to put this in a clearer context. Basically the principles of things like “spiritual mapping” have come from the experience of evangelism, not from a study of spiritual warfare.
No finer example of this process could be found than the experience of Baptist leaders Victor Lorenzo and his father Eduardo. They had begun to evangelize and found that they have had little impact in some places.
A typically ‘Australian’ conclusion would be to say that it was a ‘hard place’. These men would be more likely to say that ‘no harvest’ was not an option. When they looked for the reason for no harvest they began to find that the hardness was due to the exercise of some form of demonic power or influence. They would give themselves to dealing with the powers as the Bible describes those encounters. As a result, hundreds and even thousands of people were saved and added to the church.
There were places where successive attempts to plant churches had totally failed. When they began to deal with the spiritual forces of darkness that held these areas in bondage, the same attempts were successful. This evidence was compelling, but the process was even more enlightening. The spiritual warfare comes out of a bold commitment to preach the gospel, not out of a textbook on spiritual warfare.
This is the emphasis of the New Testament of course. Spiritual warfare is not a department of the church where people hive off and play with demons. Evangelism and spiritual warfare are the same thing. It’s just that they have discovered that evangelism is more than communication, it is warfare. The evangelists must be committed to the intercessors and the intercessors must be committed to the evangelists. The apostles and prophets must work together with the pastors and teachers and they must all work together with the evangelists. God is raising up these ministries within regions. Not only in South America, but on every continent.
Conclusion: Not exactly new, but very, very different !
There were some compelling conclusions for me. The first was the realization that there is really nothing there that’s mysterious or new. It is different but not new. The difference will be found in the measure.
While we tend to fill our shelves with books and tapes on prayer, they tend to fill heaven with bowls of incense (Rev. 5:8; 8:3,4).
While we tend to spend our time reading “fishing” magazines, they tend to spend their time boldly proclaiming the kingdom of God.
While we tend to skirt around the edge of our community picking up the few “strays” and adding them to the church, they tend to focus on “binding the strongman” (Mark 3:27) and robbing the whole house.
While we tend to languish in our cultural and ecclesiastical baggage, they tend to take seriously the matter of finding every way they can to become one, so that the world will know.
That’s exactly what is happening. The difference in Argentina is that they are so much further down the same road. They have put in the effort, and paid the price. They have very little excess baggage. They set aside non‑essentials. They have more energy for the main event on the program. The result is that the kingdom of God is coming not only to Argentina, but to the rest of the world. As they continue and as they pray for the nations of the world, their “faith is being reported all over the world” (Romans 1:8).
It’s hard not to get wet in Argentina. You can’t help being affected by the climate of revival. It may take a paradigm shift or two, but if you are open to God, you’ll definitely get soaked by the revival rain. In Australia we are still looking to the sky for rain. Our main danger is that when the rain comes we are just as likely to take out two umbrellas, a full length driz‑a‑bone and some gumboots just in case we might get wet. Wet theology and wet and crinkled church traditions are so messy. I wonder what the weather man will say on TV tonight? Praise the Lord !
Reprinted by permission from New Day, February 1997, pages 18-20.
(c) 2011, 2nd edition. Reproduction allowed with copyright included in text.
Dr Geoff Waugh reports on recent and current revival movements in the South Pacific nations of Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, as examples of radical and effective discipleship.
Transforming Revivals includes a chapter by George Otis Jr , Snapshots of Glory
Revivals in the South Pacific
Transforming revival continues to spread exponentially. The Sentinel Group (www.glowtorch.org) DVDs report on community transformation around the world, especially in Transformations I and II, and Fiji reports in Let the Seas Resound. This brief update describes recent revivals in the South Pacific islands, representative of revivals multiplying in the twenty-first century.
Vanuatu, South Pacific
Law School students at their Christian Fellowship (CF) in University of the South Pacific developed a powerfully discipling community through their CF, which led to effective evangelism, mission to many nations, and involvement in revival movements. Peer discipling with committed leaders encouraged personal growth and enabled powerful ministry.
The Lord moved in a surprising way at the Christian Fellowship (CF) in the School of Law in Port Vila, Vanuatu on Saturday night, April 6, the weekend after Easter 2002.
The university’s CF held an outreach meeting on the lawn and steps of the grassy university square near the main lecture buildings, school administration and library. God moved strongly there that night.
Unusual lightning hovered around in the sky that night, and as soon as the prayer teams had finished praying with those who rushed forward at the altar call, the tropical rain pelted down on that open field area.
God poured out his Spirit on many lives that night, including Jerry Waqainabete and Simon Kofe. Both of them played rugby in the popular university teams and enjoyed drinking and the night club scene. Both changed dramatically. Many of their friends said it would not last. It did.
A team of eleven from their CF visited Australia for a month in November-December 2002 involved in outreach and revival meetings in many denominations and as well as in visiting home prayer groups. They drove 6,000 kilometres in a 12-seater van, including a trip from Brisbane to Sydney and back to visit Hillsong.
South Pacific team on mision in Australia
The team prayed for hundreds of people in various churches and home groups – as in the cover photograph of this book. They led worship at the daily 6 am prayer group at Kenmore Baptist Church, with Calvin Ziru on guitar. That followed their own 5 am daily prayer meeting in the house provided miraculously for them.
Miracle House bought with “no money” (and sold later for $80,000 profit!)
Mission team at their Brisbane house
Philip and Dhamika George from Sri Lanka bought that rental house with no money and made it freely available. They had recently befriended a back packer stranger who advised them to buy a rental property because Brisbane house prices then began to increase rapidly in value. They had no spare money but their new friend loaned them a deposit of $10,000, interest free, to get a bank loan and buy the house. They sold the house two years later for $80,000 profit, returned the deposit loan, and used the profits for Kingdom purposes especially in mission.
The law students from the CF grew strong in faith. Jerry, one of the students from Fiji, returned home for Christmas vacation after the visit to Australia, and prayed for over 70 sick people in his village, seeing many miraculous healings. His transformed life challenged the village because he had been converted at CF after a wild time as a youth in the village. The following December vacation, 2004, Jerry led revival in his village. He prayed early every morning in the Methodist Church. Eventually some children and then some of the youth joined him early each morning. By 2005 he had 50 young people involved, evangelising, praying for the sick, casting out spirits, and encouraging revival. By 2009 Jerry was a lawyer and pastor of a church in Suva and had planted a new church in his village as well.
Simon, returned to his island of Tuvalu, also transformed at university through CF. He witnessed to his relatives and friends all through the vacation in December-January, bringing many of them to the Lord. He led a team of youth involved in Youth Alive meetings, and prayed with the leaders each morning from 4 a.m. Simon became President of the Christian Fellowship at the Law School from October 2003 for a year.
Pentecost Island, Vanuatu
In May 2003 a team from the CF flew to Pentecost Island in Vanuatu for a weekend of outreach meetings on South Pentecost. The national Vanuatu Churches of Christ Bible College, at Banmatmat, stands near the site of the first Christian martyrdom there.
Worship in the chapel at the Bible College on Pentecost Island, Vanuatu
Tomas Tumtum had been an indentured worker on cane farms in Queensland, Australia. He was converted there and returned around 1901 to his village on South Pentecost with a new young disciple from a neighbouring island. They arrived when the village was tabu (taboo) because a baby had died a few days earlier, so no one was allowed near the village. Ancient tradition dictated that anyone breaking tabu must be killed, so they were going to kill Tomas, but his disciple Lulkon asked Tomas to tell them to kill him instead so that Tomas could evangelise his own people. Just before he was clubbed to death at a sacred mele palm tree, he read John 3:16, then closed his eyes and prayed for them.
Tomas became the pioneer of the church in South Pentecost, establishing Churches of Christ there.
Mathias, a young man who repented deeply with over 15 minutes of tearful sobbing, is now the main worship leader in revival meetings. When he was leading and speaking at a revival meeting at the national Bible College, a huge supernatural fire blazed in the hills directly opposite the Bible College chapel in 2005, but no bush was burned.
Pentecost Bible College
Bible College Chapel on Pentecost Island, Vanuatu
By 2004, the Churches of Christ national Bible College at Banmatmat on Pentecost Island became a centre for revival. Pastor Lewis Wari and his wife Marilyn hosted these gatherings at the Bible College, and later on Lewis spoke at many island churches as the President of the Churches of Christ. Lewis had been a leader in strong revival movements on South Pentecost as a young pastor from 1988.
Every weekend the team from the college led revival meetings in village churches. Many of these went late as the Spirit moved on the people with deep repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and prayer for healing and empowering.
Pentecost on Pentecost
Grant Shaw accompanied Geoff Waugh to Pentecost Island in Vanuatu in September-October 2006. Grant grew up with missionary parents, saw many persecutions and miracles, and had his dad recounting amazing, miraculous answers to prayer as a daily routine. They often needed to pray for miracles, and miracles happened. From 14 years old Grant participated in mission teams travelling internationally in Asia. Then he attended a youth camp at Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship which has had revival since 1994. He then worked there as an associate youth pastor for 18 months before studying at Bible College in Brisbane. So he is used to revival – all his life! In Vanuatu he was getting clear words of knowledge, and seeing people healed daily in meetings and in the villages. That inspired and challenged everyone.
Raised from the dead
At sharing time in the Upper Room service in Port Vila the capital, Leah Waqa, a nurse, told how she had been on duty that week when parents brought in their young daughter who had been badly hit in a car accident, and showed no signs of life – the monitor registered zero – no pulse. Leah felt unusual boldness, so commanded the girl to live, and prayed for her for an hour – mostly in tongues – and after an hour the monitor started beeping and the girl recovered.
Grant Shaw with Leah Waqa
The mission trip continued on South Pentecost once more, based in the village of Panlimsi where Mathias was then the young pastor. The Spirit moved strongly in all the meetings. Repentance. Reconciliations. Confessions. Anointing. Healings every day. The healings included Pastor Rolanson’s young son able to hear clearly after partially deaf from birth. Rolanson leads evangelism teams, and helped lead this mission.
South Pentecost attracts tourists with its land diving – men jumping from high towers with vines attached to their ankles. Grant prayed for a jumper who had hurt his neck, and the neck crackled back into place. An elderly man no longer needed a walking stick to come up the hill to the meetings. Grant prayed for a son of the paramount chief of South Pentecost from Bunlap, a heathen village. He was healed from a painful groin and he invited the team to come to his village to pray for the sick. No white people had been invited there to minister previously.
The team, including the two Australians, trekked for a week into mountain villages. They literally obeyed Luke 10 – most going with no extra shirt, no sandals, and no money. The trek began with a 5 hour walk across the island to Ranwas on the eastern side. Mathias led worship, with strong moves of the Spirit touching everyone. At one point the preacher spat on the dirt floor, making mud to show what Jesus did once. Marilyn Wari, wife of the President of the Churches of Christ in Vanuatu, then jumped up asking for prayer for her eyes. Later she testified that the Lord told her to do that, and then she found she could read her small Bible without glasses.
Glory in a remote village
The team trekked through the ‘custom’ heathen village (where the paramount chief’s sons lived), and prayed for more sick people. Some had pain leave immediately, and people there became more open to the gospel. Then the team trekked for 7 hours to Ponra, a remote village further north on the east coast.
Revival meetings erupted there! The Spirit just took over. Visions. Revelations. Reconciliations. Healings. People drunk in the Spirit. Many resting on the floor getting blessed in various ways. When they heard about healing through ‘mud in the eye’ at Ranwas some came straight out asking for mud packs also!
One of the girls in the team had a vision of the village children there paddling in a pure sea, crystal clear. They were like that – so pure. Not polluted at all by TV, videos, movies, magazines, worldliness. Their lives were so clean and holy. Just pure love for the Lord, especially among the young.
Angels singing filled the air about 3 am. It sounded as though the village church was packed. The harmonies in high descant declared “For You are great and You do wondrous things. You are God alone” and then harmonies, without words until words again for “I will praise You O Lord my God with all my heart, and I will glorify Your name for evermore” with long, long harmonies on “forever more.” Just worship.
The Upper Room church continues to move in the Spirit and has seen strong touches of God in the islands, especially Tanna Island. They planted churches there in ‘custom’ villages, invited by the chiefs because the chiefs have seen their people healed and transformed.
During missions there in 2006, many young boys asked to be ‘ordained’ as evangelists in the power of the Spirit. They returned to their villages and many of those young boys established churches as they spoke, told Bible stories, and sang original songs inspired by the Spirit.
Solomon Islands
Powerful revival in the Solomon Islands back in 1970 spread throughout the South Pacific. Everywhere pastors and leaders when they sparked more revival, repentance, conversions and many healings and miracles.
The Lord also poured out his Spirit in fresh and surprising ways in New Georgia in the Western District of the Solomon Islands in 2003, and touched many churches in the capital Honiara with strong moves of the Holy Spirit. God’s Spirit moved powerfully especially on youth and children. This included many conversions, many filled with the Spirit, many having visions and revelations.
An anointed pastor from PNG spoke at an Easter Camp in 2003 attended by many youth leaders from the Western Solomons. Those leaders returned on fire. The weekend following Easter, from the end of April, 2003, youth and children in the huge, scenic Marovo Lagoon area were filled with the Spirit, with many lives transformed. Revival began with the Spirit moving on youth and children in village churches. They had extended worship in revival songs, many visions and revelations and lives being changed with strong love for the Lord. Children and youth began meeting daily from 5 pm for hours of praise, worship and testimonies. A police officer reported reduced crimes and that former rebels attending daily worship and prayer meetings.
Revival continues to spread throughout the region. Revival movements brought moral change and built stronger communities in villages in the Solomon Islands, including these lasting developments:
1. Higher moral standards. People involved in the revival have quit crime and drunkeness, and now promote good behaviour and co-operation.
2. Christians who once kept their Christianity inside churches and meetings now talk more freely about their lifestyle in the community and among friends.
3. Revival groups, especially youth, enjoy working together in unity and community, including a stronger emphasis on helping others in the community.
4. Families are strengthened in the revival. Parents spend more time with their youth and children to encourage and help them, often leading them in Bible readings and family prayers now.
5. Many new gifts and ministries are being used by more people than before, including revelations and healing. Even children receive revelations or words of knowledge about hidden magic artifacts or ginger plants related to spirit power and remove them.
6. Churches are growing. Many church buildings in the Marovo Lagoon have been pulled down to be replaced by much bigger buildings to fit in the crowds. Offerings and community support have increased.
7. Unity. Increasingly Christians unite in reconciliation for revival meetings, prayer and service to the community.
Western Solomon Islands
A team of law students from the University of the South Pacific CF in Port Vila, Vanuatu, visited Honiara and the Western Solomon Islands in mid-2003. Sir Peter and Lady Margaret Kenilorea hosted the team in Honiara. Sir Peter was the first Prime Minister of the independent Solomon Islands, and then the Speaker in the Parliament.
South Pacific team at the Kenilorea home
Dr Ronald Ziru, then the administrator of the United Church Hospital in Munda in the western islands hosted the team there, which included his son Calvin. The team had to follow Jesus’ instructions about taking nothing extra on mission because the airline left all their checked luggage behind in Port Vila! They found it at Honiara after their return from the western islands.
At Seghe and in the Marovo Lagoon the revival spread since Easter. Some adults became involved, also repenting and seeking more of the Holy Spirit. Many outpourings and gifts of the Spirit have emerged, including the following:
Transformed lives – Many youths that the police used to check on because of alcohol and drug abuse became sober and on fire for God attending daily worship and prayer meetings. A man who rarely went to church led the youth singing group at Seghe. Adults publicly reconciled after years of old rifts or strife.
Long worship – This included prophetic words or actions and visions. About 200 youth and children led worship at both Sunday services with 1,000 attending in Patutiva village where the revival began. They sang revival songs and choruses accompanied by their youth band.
Visions – Children saw visions of Jesus (smiling at worship, weeping at hard hearts), angels, hell (with relatives sitting close to a lake of fire, so the children warned them). Some saw Jesus with a foot in heaven and a foot on earth, like Mt 28:18 – “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” One boy preached (prophesied) for 1½ hours, Spirit-led.
Revelations – especially ‘words of knowledge’ about hidden things, including magic artefacts and good luck charms. Children show parents where they hid these things! If other adults did that there would be anger and feuds, but they accept it from their children. One boy told police that a man accused of stealing a chain saw (and sacked) was innocent as he claimed, and gave them the name of the culprit, by word of knowledge. The accused man returned to work.
Spiritual Gifts – teaching sessions discussed traditional and revival worship, deliverance, discernment of spirits, gifts of the Spirit, understanding and interpreting visions, tongues, healing, Spirit-led worship and preaching, and leadership in revival. Many young people became leaders moving strongly in many spiritual gifts.
These effects continued to spread throughout the Solomon Islands.
Solomon Islands Mission
In the Solomon Islands the revival team of 15 from Vanuatu and 6 from Brisbane visited villages in the Guadalcanal Mountains, three hours drive and seven hours trekking from Honiara, and held revival meetings in November 2006 especially to encourage revival leaders. They walked up mountain tracks to where revival is spreading, especially among youth. Now those young people have teams going to the villages to sing, testify, and pray for people. Many gifts of the Spirit are new to them. The team prayed for the sick and for anointing and filling with the Spirit. They prayed both in the meetings and in the villages.
Revival in Guadalcanal Mountains
Revival in the Guadalcanal Mountains started at the Bubunuhu Christian Community High School on July 10, 2006, on their first night back from holidays. They took teams of students to the villages to sing, testify, and pray for people, especially youth. Many gifts of the Spirit were new to them – prophecies, revelations (e.g., about where magic stuff is hidden) healings, and tongues.
Choiseul Island
Gideon, Grant and Geoff participated for five days in the National Christian Youth Convention (NCYC) in the north-west at Choiseul Island – 2 hours flight from Honiara. Around 1500 youth gathered from across the nation, many arriving by outboard motor canoes.
The group coming from Simbo Island in two canoes ran into trouble when their outboard motors failed. Two of their young men swam from noon for nine hours in rough seas to reach land and get help for their stranded friends. The following day they arrived with a repaired outboard motor minus their food which they had to throw overboard in the rough seas.
The Friday night convention meeting saw a huge response as Grant challenged them to be fully committed to God. Most of the youth came out immediately so there were hundreds to pray for.
The anointed worship team led the crowd in “He touched me” for nearly half an hour as prayer continued for them, including many wanting healing.
Here is Grant’s description of that youth crusade night:
We were invited to speak for their huge night rally. Geoff began and God moved on the young people in a special way. Then he handed it over to me at about halfway and I gave some words of knowledge for healing. They came forward and we prayed for them most of them fell under the Spirit’s power and all of them testified that all the pain left their body. After that, I continued to speak for a bit and then gave an altar call for any youth who choose to give their lives fully to Jesus, no turning back!
Most of a thousand youth came forward, some ran to the altar, some crying! There was an amazing outpouring of the Spirit and because there were so many people Geoff and I split up and started laying hands on as many people as we could. People were falling under the power everywhere (some testified later to having visions). There were bodies all over the field (some people landing on top of each other).
Then I did a general healing prayer and asked them to put their hand on the place where they had pain. After we prayed people began to come forward sharing testimonies of how the pain had left their bodies and they were completely healed! The meeting stretched on late into the night with more healing and many more people getting deep touches.
It was one of the most amazing nights. I was deeply touched and feel like I have left a part of my self in Choiseul. God did an amazing thing that night with the young people and I really believe that he is raising some of them up to be mighty leaders in Revival.
A young man healed that night returned to his nearby village and prayed for his sick mother and brother. Both were healed immediately. He told about that the next morning at the convention, adding that he had never done that before.
The delegation from Karika, in the Shortland Islands further west, returned the following Monday. The next night they led a meeting where the Spirit of God moved in revival. Many were filled with the Spirit, had visions, were healed, and discovered many spiritual gifts including discerning spirits and tongues. That revival has continued, and spread.
Transforming Revival
An unusual pattern of discipleship has emerged in whole villages in the South Pacific during the 12st Century. Applying the principles of 2 Chronicles 7:14, complete village communities have experienced not only revival but ecological and social transformation. Mentors and leaders from among their own people have led them into radical repentance, reconciliation, and communal commitment to Jesus as Lord in all of life.
The following stories of community transformation from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu come from pages 58-70 of A Manual for Healing the Land by Vuniani Nakanyaca and Walo Ani, 3rd edition, 2009, published by Toowoomba City Church, Australia, reproduced by permission. Reports by Harry Tura from Vanuatu are added here.
Fiji
The twenty-first century has already seen many village communities transformed. Rev Ratu Vunaiani Nakauyaca describes community transformation in Fiji. The most powerful events in this ongoing revival are the direct results of repentance, reconciliation and unity,
One of the first instances of this occurred in 2002, when Chief Mataitoga of Sabeto village (between Nadi and Lautoka) had a dream from the Lord. The village had a lot of social problems as well as enmity and divisions. As a result of the dream, he called his people together to pray and fast to seek God for answers and healing. Over a period of two weeks, many of the clans spent time with the Chief to sort out their differences. They had meetings every night and God brought about reconciliation and unity in the church and village, many relationships being healed.
There had only been one church in the area until the Pentecostal revival of the 1960s which spread across the cities and towns and into the rural areas during that period. Because of the rejection of the Pentecostal experience by some people, many villages had two churches, one Methodist and one Pentecostal. This caused division between friends and family, with many people not communicating and carrying bitterness and resentment for decades.
When Ratu Mataitoga directed his people to come together as one, there was a move of the Holy Spirit with real repentance and forgiveness, and unity in the village was restored. The long term results of this action were only revealed with the passing of time. Productivity of the soil increased and long absent fish varieties returned to the reef. Mangroves that had died and disappeared have begun to grow again. The mangroves are very important for the ecology, providing shelter and breeding grounds for all kinds of fish, crabs, etc. all of which were part of the staple diet of these villages.
Healing the Land
The Healing the Land (HTL) Process, as it is now officially recognized, was really started on the initiative of Pastor Vuniani Nakauyaca. For him it was a personal journey that resulted from an accumulation of various events.
The Pacific Prayer movement had a desire to see that prayer, repentance and reconciliation were carried out where necessary on location – where missionaries had been killed or where tribal conflict had taken place. These were all based on a bottom-up or grassroots approach to bring healing and reconciliation.
Vuniani had visited Argentina and seen the beneficial results of reconciliation with the British over the Faulklands war. He also visited Guatemala to see the Almolonga transformation (see Transformation Series DVD/Video). This was a singularly dramatic community change. Jails and public bars closed, land fertility increased and crop production levels had to be seen to be believed.
What he saw brought a deeper desire in his heart to see this happen in Fiji, to give room for God to bring about community and national transformation in similar ways to what he had seen overseas. He saw the need to appropriately respond to the circumstances and use the spiritual tools available to see the nation transformed.
Nuku Village
After returning to Fiji, he called some people together to seek God for solutions. They felt they should begin at Nuku, and this took place 1-10 April, 2003. Nuku is about 65 kilometres north of Suva, on the main island of Viti Levu.
The inhabitants of Nuku had been suffering feuds, infertility, mental illness and social problems for decades. The water of the stream that flowed through the village had been polluted since a day 42 years previously, the water and banks being filled with slime. At that time, children were swimming in the stream when the water suddenly turned white and they all ran for their lives. Fish died and grass died. Vuniani, as a child, was swimming in the river when this happened, so he knew the background story. It was believed that the polluted water caused blindness, infertility, madness and even death.
Vuniani and the team went up to Nuku to activate the Process. The key Scripture they went with was 2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land”.
They had two weeks of prayer meetings, the Methodist, Assemblies of God and Seventh Day Adventist churches being represented. They spent time studying Bible references on defilement and Healing the Land. This lead them to repent and confess their sins and the sins of their forefathers, in the same way as Nehemiah did. These included killing and cannibalism, idolatry, witchcraft, bloodshed, immorality
They went to the high places in the area to cleanse them of the sinful acts that had taken place there. The elders confessed sins of their forefathers. Reconciliation first took place within families, then clans and finally within the tribe. The chief of the area led a corporate prayer of repentance with the whole tribe.
On the third day of the Process, some women came running and shouting into the village, announcing that the water in the stream had become pure again. It is still pure today.
Nuku village had been heavily populated, but because of feuds and disputes, people were chased out or just left and went to live in other villages. Deputations were sent out to these to apologise for the past offenses. A matanigasau (traditional apology) was sent to two villages, inviting the people to return if they wished.
The whole community now count themselves as very blessed. The productivity of the land has increased. The stream water is pure and since that time shrimps and fish have returned to the waters. The fertility of the banks and agriculture has radically improved. Some people have even reported that the water has demonstrated healing properties.
Nabitu Village, East of Nausori, Viti Levu
What occurred in this village was very much a follow on from what was happening around the country at the time. There was a split in the tribe and there were a lot of unresolved issues. During a business meeting in the local church, which was situated right in the middle of the village, a fist fight broke out. There was always a heaviness in the village, like a hovering dark cloud. This affected people negatively and there were not a lot of jobs available.
On the advice of chiefs, the people came together on their own initiative for a time of corporate repentance. A lay preacher in the Methodist Church facilitated the Process. There was instantly a change in the atmosphere. The heaviness that had been there had lifted and everyone could feel it. The division in the church was healed.
The lesson learned from there is that satan’s hold over people and places is tenuous to say the least. It only takes one man to lead many into forgiveness and healing. Satan has to leave, along with the oppression and curses.
Vunibau (Serua Island) in the mouth of Navua River
The HTL Process in this place was scheduled over a 14 day period. During the Process the mixture of elements was poured out onto the sand on the beach. Later that day, an elderly lady and her son went fishing on the beach. They cast the net out but when they tried to haul it back in, it seemed to be stuck. They thought that perhaps it had been caught on a stump or rock, but they found that the net was actually so full of fish that they could not pull it in.
They started walking back to the village to tell everyone, and the lady was following her son walking along the beach. Wherever his footprints were in the sand a red liquid appeared. As she walked in his footsteps she was healed of migraine, knee ailments and severe back pain, all of which she had suffered for many years. This healing has been permanent. As soon as they returned to the village she told the whole community what had happened.
All the people rushed down to the beach to see this phenomenon, including the HTL team that was still there at the time. To their amazement, right on the spot where the elements had been poured onto the sand, there was blood coming out of the sand and flowing into the sea. A backslidden Catholic man gave his life to the Lord on the spot. Photos were taken. Vuniani was called from Suva (about an hour away) and he also witnessed the blood coming out of the sand. This actually happened twice.
It was understood to be a confirming sign from the Lord that He was at work in the reconciliation and healing Process. 1 John 5:6-7, “There are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water and the blood.”
This was similar to the miracle of the healing of the waters in Nuku, which was also recognized as a sign of God’s cleansing and healing that was taking place amongst the people. God is authenticating what He is doing.
At Vunibau many other signs quickly followed. Large fish returned to their fishing grounds. On one occasion, considerable quantities of prawns came ashore so that people could just pick them up. Crabs and lobsters have also returned, and they have been able to sell the large lobsters for up to $25-$30 each.
After this sign of the blood, Pastor Vuniani recalled the scripture in Acts 2:19 where the Lord had spoken through the prophet Joel that “I will grant wonders (signs) in the sky above, and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire and vapour (pillars) of smoke” (NASB). He wondered what would come next after the sign of the blood and felt that the next sign would be fire.
Nataliera, Nailevu North
In Nataliera village there were four churches. There was no communication between their members, affecting even closely related families within the village. Traditional witchcraft was still being practised and there were about eight sorcerers there. In addition, there had been many more deaths than would be normal.
After forgiveness and reconciliation, the members of these four churches would meet every Wednesday for prayer and fasting. On the first Sunday of every month, the four congregations would combine for one large gathering. An Eco Lodge, previously closed, is now prospering after the HTL Process.
For many years the fishing on the reef had become lean. Large fish were very scarce and for many years the catch had only ever comprised “bait fish” – the very small ones. Much of the coral reef was dead and what was left seemed to be dying.
After reconciliation, on two separate occasions fire was seen to fall from the sky onto the reef. After this, large fish returned in abundance. The coral is now regenerating and new growth can be seen in abundance.
When stormy weather strikes and the boats can’t go out, the women pray and large fish swim in close to the shore and become trapped in a small pond so that the women are able to just wade in and catch them. When women from neighbouring villages heard of this, they tried praying for the same provision, but without the same result.
Draubuta, Navosa highlands, north of Sigatoka
Vuniani’s son, Savanaca, was working with two teams in the highlands. While they were there, pillars of smoke descended on the villages. This was seen by many neighbouring villagers who described it as thick bloodstained smoke. This sign was seen at almost exactly the same time as fire was seen to fall on the reef at Nataliera.
In this area there were many marijuana plantations. The Nadroga council had been trying to prevent the plantings. During the HTL Process, a deputation of marijuana growers approached the team and asked what the Government would do for them if they destroyed their crops. They had a list of demands which they presented to the team.
The marijuana crop was large, and estimated to be worth about $11 million. There were 9 growers involved. The team leaders told the farmers that it was their choice, that they should obey God and trust Him for their livelihood, without any promises from anyone to do anything for them. If they could not, then they should not participate in the Healing Process.
By the time the Process had finished, the people had destroyed the crop as part of the reconciliation Process. After the HTL ministry, a total of 13,864 plants were uprooted and burnt by the growers themselves. There were 6,000 seedlings as well.
These are a few of the many miraculous events that have occurred in Fiji since 2001. Every week, more such events are happening as the forgiveness, reconciliation and HTL processes are being experienced.
Burning idols
Papua New Guinea
Rev Walo Ani and his wife Namana describe community transformation through Healing the Land in Papua New Guinea.
Karawa Village
It was a very exciting week in August 2006 where we saw the Lord move mightily in the lives of the village elders, chiefs, church leaders and the people. A group of dedicated young people’s prayer ministry team started praying and fasting from 1st of July for the HTL Process. We witnessed repentance, forgiveness and reconciliations between family and clan members, and between individuals.
The Lord went ahead and prepared the hearts of people in every home as we visited. They were ready to confess their sins and ask for forgiveness from each other and reconcile. In some homes, members of families gave their hearts to the Lord. Visitation of homes took two days. On the third morning, after the dedication of the elements of salt, oil and water, the village elders and chiefs publicly repented as they identified with sins of their forebears; and each of them publicly gave their clans to the Lord.
Three dinghies and a big canoe with people all went in different directions up several rivers and along the nearby coast to anoint specific places for cleansing that were defiled through deaths and killings in the past.
That night there was a time of public confession and renouncement of things that were a hindrance in the lives of the people around a huge bonfire. It was a solemn night; the presence of the Lord was so powerful that people were coming forward and burning their witchcraft and charms publicly. No one could hold back, even the deacons and church elders, village elders, women and young people were all coming forward. Young people started confessing their sins and renouncing and burning drugs, cigarettes and things that were hindering their lives from following Christ.
A young man, who had murdered another young man about 11 years ago, came forward and publicly confessed his sin and asked for forgiveness from the family of the murdered man. That was a big thing; there was a pause and we waited and prayed for someone from the other side to respond. Only the Lord could do this. The younger brother of the man who was killed came out finally, and offered forgiveness. We could hear crying among the people; it was a moving moment where God just took control. Mothers, brothers and members of both extended families became reconciled in front of the whole village. We could sense the release upon both families and village. It was an awesome time; the meeting went on into the early hours of the next morning. At the end of all this at about 2am the pastor stood up and said the prayer to invite Jesus into the community.
The village is not the same; you can sense the release and freedom of Christ in the lives of the people. The Holy Spirit is still moving in people’s lives and they are coming to their pastor for prayer. Recently, a young man surrendered two guns to the pastor. News of what God has done and is still doing has spread to neighbouring villages. God birthed a new thing in our area and I believe that many more villages will see the transforming power of God because they are hungry and desperate to see change in their communities.
There is abundance of fruit and garden food and two harvests of fruit on the orange trees have been observed so far.
A hunger for prayer has risen among the young people. Straight after HTL Process young people from one of the clans started a prayer group which is still going on. Two other clans started prayer groups after a lot of struggle to get going over the years. The HTL team was the main support behind “Kids Games” which were held December 2006 in the neighbouring village of Keapara.
The studies were on Joseph and when they came to the section on forgiveness the Lord moved in a powerful way and revival started among the children. They stood and asked for forgiveness from their parents. There was crying and reconciliation between children and parents.
The Lord is arresting the hearts of the young, the old and the children and there is no holding back.
Makirupu Village
Makirupu is about 2 hours drive east of Port Moresby, with a population of about 600. The United Church was the established church there and CRC and AOG have also planted churches there in recent years which caused a lot of offences between families.
The Lord moved in a mighty way convicting people of land disputes, immorality and fornication, fear of witchcraft and sorcery (fear was at its peak when the HTL Process began), lies, gambling, stealing, marriage problems, witchcraft, sorcery and charms and many other issues. Miracles of healing started from day one; people who were deaf began to hear, their ears were healed.
The presence of the Lord was very heavy in the church. I asked if there was anyone to repent on behalf of the young people and the young girl who had committed fornication and adultery with the last pastor came forward, trembling and crying, confessing, repenting and asking for forgiveness from God and the whole village. The people were amazed at what God was doing. Only He could do that. The girl who had denied outright what she had done 18 months ago was arrested by God’s presence and could not hide any more. A Sunday School representative came forward and repented and asked for forgiveness. A former deacon could not hold back. He came forward and confessed that he had been the messenger boy for the pastor and the girl and he said sorry to the Lord for denying Him.
Because of this incident 18 months ago, all the young people had left the church but when the air was cleared, the next day all the young people came and the church building was full to capacity. The fear of the Lord entered the hearts of the people. That same night the anointing elements were mixed and the mission land was anointed, cleansed and rededicated to God. It was an awesome time. The AOG pastor also asked for forgiveness from the United Church for leaving the church and causing division. He and his wife and all his church members were part of the prayer warrior team right from day one of the Process. A couple of days later the CRC members started joining us and by the end of the Process all three churches were united to see change in the community. The prayer warrior team grew from 7 to 40. Praise God!
The next day news of what had happened had reached everyone in the village and the nearby villages and more people came for the meetings. They were hungry to hear the Word of the Lord. The next few days people were seeing signs and wonders, something they had never experienced before. Revival had started and the fear of God came upon the people. Also on the third day the village chief invited Jesus into the community.
On the last day the whole village gathered at the spot where the village was started some five or six generations ago. Anointing oil was mixed and all the chiefs and village elders were anointed and reinstated. After that, groups of people and prayer team took oil to certain places defiled because of bloodshed in the past on garden land. They anointed these places while deacons took oil to the boundaries of the village and the beach and dedicated the land back to God.
After lunch everyone came back to the village and started a bonfire. Church deacons and leaders were the first ones to come forward with confessions of adultery, immorality and witchcraft. Families with land disputes came out and reconciled with people they had taken to court. Young people came out with charms and magic and burnt them in the fire. A mother came out with her ten-year-old daughter and confessed she had handed down her sorcery and magic to her and said she was sorry, asking for forgiveness from God. Both were prayed for. Husbands and wives reconciled, artifacts of magic and idolatry were burnt. God was doing His cleaning up in the lives of the people.
The next day we had a time of celebration and you could see the release and freedom in people’s lives, singing was coming from their hearts and joy was bubbling over. The Lord had again touched people’s hearts and His presence was so evident that the people did not want to stop celebrating, although it was getting dark and there was no light.
The land and the people are being healed. The day after the Process a couple of men went crabbing and caught bigger and more crabs than usual. A week later a lady went to her garden to find that the bad weed which had been a problem to most gardens had started to wither and die. She went back to the village and told everyone. The fear that had gripped the hearts of the people had also been broken in prayer and now women are going to their gardens on their own – something they could not do before. A few days after the HTL Process, men began to go fishing and to their surprise they were catching more and bigger fish than before.
There has been a case of instant healing of a patient with a stroke after the AOG pastor and his wife shared with her family about Roots and Foundations and how curses come into lives. The whole family confessed, repented and reconciled with each other. The pastor’s wife had some of the oil that was mixed in the village the week before and began anointing the lady while they prayed. To their surprise, she was healed instantly. She began to speak and eat on her own. The pastor said he had never experienced anything like this before. The presence of the Lord was so great they all started worshipping Him and time was not an issue anymore. Praise God for this miracle!
During the Process, the pastors of the AOG, the United Church and an Elder of the CRC church, standing on behalf of the pastor, all repented of all the offences and misunderstandings between them in the past. So now the three churches have decided to have a combined service once a month in the middle of the village.
The young people from all three churches are already having combined prayer meetings and they are in the process of building a big shelter in the middle of the village for the combined church services.
The villagers reported there has not been any stealing since the men were employed. There has also been increase in their garden produce, fruit and nut trees. The people are able to see their own produce come to maturity and sell it, whereas in the past it would have been stolen.
Makirupu and one of the nearby villages are known for getting floods during heavy rains. One month before we got there, it had been raining heavily but the Lord has kept the floods away. This is an answer to the people’s prayers. However, the other village got the floods and we got to see some of the houses still surrounded by floodwaters when we were there. It surely is amazing!
Kalo Village
Kalo is the village where about 126 years ago in 1881, four Cook Island missionaries and their families were killed. The killings were led by the chief of one of the clans.
The outcome of the talks is that the leaders of this clan called all their families together, from far and near to come and start the repentance and reconciliation Process. This was supported by the pastor and all the Church and clan leaders of Kalo. It was a moving occasion and the leaders agreed to proceed with the HTL Process and a bigger reconciliation event with the relatives of the Cook Island missionaries present in the near future.
Healing The Land in Vanuatu
Pastors Walo Ani and Harry Tura report on transforming revival in Vanuatu.
Hog Harbour, Espirito Santo
The island was named Espiritu Santo because that is the island where over 400 years ago in May 1606 Ferdinand de Quiros named the lands from there to the South Pole the Great Southland of the Holy Spirit.
In April 2006 the Fraternal, under the leadership of Pastor Raynold Bori, conducted protocol discussions with the Hog Harbour community leaders and explained to them what the Process involves. In May 2006 six pastors from Luganville did the HTL Process and God’s presence came on the people that week.
Here are some of the stories of Healing the Land in a village of 800 people:
Married couples were reconciled.
Schools of big fish came to the shores during the reconciliation.
A three year old conflict, bloodshed and tribal fighting that could not be stopped by the Police, ended and reconciliation was made.
The presence of the Lord came down on the village.
In June of 2006, 12 pastors from the Luganville Fraternal were invited by the Litzlitz village on Malekula Island to do the HTL Process there. These Pastors spent three weeks teaching and doing the Process during which many instances of reconciliation and corporate repentance were witnessed. Village Chiefs and the people committed their community to God.
One year later the President of Vanuatu re-covenanted the Nation to God on the island of Espiritu Santo.
Litzlitz Village, Malekula Island
The presence of the Lord was so real and manifested and many miracles were seen such a people healed, dried brooks turned to running streams of water, fish and other sea creatures came back to the sea shores in great number and even the garden crops came alive again and produced great harvests.
Miracles happened three days after the HTL Process:
The poison fish that usually killed or made people sick became edible and tasty again.
The snails that were destroying gardens all died suddenly and didn’t return.
As a sign of God’s transforming work a coconut tree in the village which naturally bore orange coconuts started bearing bunches of green coconuts side by side with the red ones.
A spring gushed out from a dried river bed and the river started flowing again after the anointing oil was poured on it when people prayed and repented of all the sins of defilement over the area.
A kindergarten was established in the village one week after the HTL Process took place.
Crops are now blessed and growing well in their gardens.
Vilakalak Village, West Ambae Island
A lot of things had been transformed such as people’s lives had been changed as they accepted Christ and were filled with the Holy Spirit for effective ministries of the Gospel of Christ. The Shekinah glory came down to the very spot where we did the process of healing the land during the night of July 1. That great light (Shekinah glory) came down. People described it as a living person with tremendous and powerful light shining over the whole of the village community, confirming the Lord’s presence at that specific village community area. On the following day people started to testify that a lot of fish and shell fish were beginning to occupy the reefs and they felt a different touch of a changed atmosphere in the village community.
The lands and garden crops then started to produce for great harvests and coconut crabs and island crabs came back in great abundance for people’s daily meals these days. The people were very surprised at the look of the big sizes of coconut crabs harvested in that area. I went there a month later to see it. You can’t believe it that the two big claws or arms were like my wrist when I compared them with my left wrist. That proved that the God we serve is so real and He is the owner of all the creatures.
Lovanualikoutu, West Ambae
They saw many miracles of people restored to the Lord and witchcraft destroyed. The Chief said the sinner’s prayer on behalf of the community one night and they all surrendered their lives to the Lord as he invited Jesus into the village.
A team of people swam out to sea with the anointing oil to worship there and dedicate the sea and reef back to God. The day after the team’s departure from the village a pastor who went out spear fishing saw a large migration of fish. He in fact reportedly speared two fish together at one stage. When he reported this to the Chief there was dancing and rejoicing under the cocoa trees where the Chief and some young people had been working.
During the reconciliation when the Chief began to speak, a light shower fell from the sky. There were no clouds but only a sky full of millions of stars. Surely God was in this Process! The prayer team continues to see visions and witness miracles of more reconciliation and repentance. Harvests from sea and land have begun to be more abundant than ever before witnessed.
Dedicating the sea to God
The reports of transforming revival confirm that God’s purposes for us include far more than personal, family, or church renewal and revival. They also include community transformation, including social and ecological renewal and revival.
These accounts of transforming revival continue to multiply in the twenty-first century, calling us all to deeper repentance, reconciliation, renewal and revival.
Celebrating with a feast
(c) 2011, 2nd edition. Reproduction allowed with copyright included in text.
Transforming Revivals transform ecology (the land) as well as individuals, churches, communities, and even nations. They are the literal fulfilment of God’s promise: If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land (2 Chronicles 7:14).
The first chapters of this book survey transforming revivals in Australia and the South Pacific islands – selected from my book South Pacific Revivals (2nd edition, 2010).
Then in Chapter 5 this book expands to cover global transforming revivals researched and documented by George Otis Jr and the Sentinel Group. See their website.
As you read these stories, you too can pray for revival, including asking God to touch you in new ways. This is God’s purpose right now, everywhere. God promised to pour out his Spirit on everyone – not just on good people, and not only on church people. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would fill us with power to be his witnesses.
That can happen as you read this book. I pray that it will.
Some photos from the book
South Pacific Mission Team in HoniaraMissioon Team with Sir Peter & Lady Margaret KeniloreaSir Peter & Lady Margaret KeniloreaRev Ratu Vuniami Nakauyaca reports on Fiji transformationsFiji artifactsIdols destroyed in FijiRev Walo Ani reports on PNG and VanuatuDedicating the ocean to GodCali, ColumbiaAlmolonga, GuatemalaAbundant harvests in AlmolongaJesus is Lord of AlmolongaAlgodao de Jandaira – transformed after 24 years droughtBaptised in the damSteve Loopstra with Vitoria who had dreams about the unknown townEneas & Simnone Araujo, pastors at Valentina Baptist Church in Joao Pessoa, north east BrazilGeorge Otis Jr
George Otis Jr reports on global transformation in one chapter here, and in many books and the Sentinel Group Transformation DVDs – www.glowtorch.org
Book Review: Flashpoints of Revival & Revival Fires
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Review from the Foreword by Dr C. Peter Wagner (1998)
Geoff Waugh and I agree that our generation is likely to be an eye witness to the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit that history has ever known. Many others join us in this expectation, some of them sensing that it will come in the next few years.
I have heard more reports of revival‑like activity in the past three years than in the previous thirty. This has caused revival to be a more frequent topic of Christian conversation than I have ever seen. There is an extraordinary hunger for learning more about how the hand of God works in revival.
That is a major reason why Flashpoints of Revival is such a timely book. Christian libraries are well stocked with detailed accounts of certain revivals as well as scholarly analytical histories of revival. But I know of no other book like this one that provides rapid‑fire, easy‑to‑read, factual literary snapshots of virtually every well‑known revival since Pentecost.
As I read this book, I was thrilled to see how God has been so mightily at work in so many different times and places. I felt like I had grasped the overall picture of revival for the first time, and I was moved to pray that God, indeed, would allow me not to be just an observer, but rather a literal participant in the worldwide outpouring that will soon come. As you read the book, I am sure you will be saying the same thing.
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Comments on Flashpoints of Revival
Geoff Waugh’s comprehensive and up-to-date book provides a global perspective of the unexpected and transforming work of the Holy Spirit. Read, be inspired and encouraged. Rev Dr John Olley
The first time I read this book, I couldn’t put it down. Not only were the stories researched with clear and concise data, but they provide an account of revivals that blew my mind away. An inspirational read. Romulo Nayacalevu, Fiji
This work is of great significance. It is a comprehensive overview of the major revivals during the last three centuries. Churches and Christians around the world will benefit greatly from this timely contribution. Rev Prof Dr James Haire
It will be a compendium for historians and others interested in the subject for a long time to come. I doubt if there is a resource quite like it for logical progression and comprehensive treatment. Rev Tony Cupit
It is very informative and up to date concerning revivals both past and present. I am confident that this book will be well received by many scholars and historians. Rev Dr Naomi Dowdy
This is a great reference book providing information of when, where and how God has touched regions and people groups with his manifest presence over history. Many of these events are included and reported on providing the reader with an overview and insight into when revival has broken out and its impact on people, church and society. Martin Mitchell (Amazon)
Historian Dr Richard Riss (left with wife Kathryn) has written books on revival including A Survey of 20th-Century Revival Movements in North America (1988) and Images of Revival (1997). His doctoral research at Drew University included study of the current revival awakening.
During the course of my study of revivals over the past twenty‑three years, one of the things that has fascinated me is the extent to which they are misrepresented. These misrepresentations are usually widely believed, creating stumbling blocks which prevent many people from partaking in the forgiveness, love, joy, refreshing, healing, reconciliation, character development, and other benefits which are freely available through a move of God of this kind.
Jonathan Edwards wrote of this phenomenon in connection with the outset of the Great Awakening, which began at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts in December of 1734. In the introductory portion of his Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, he said that the Great Awakening was being “exceedingly misrepresented by reports that were spread . . . [to] distant parts of the land.” These reports were spread by other Christians, many of whom were in positions of leadership in the churches. Edwards wrote that, “When this work of God first appeared, and was so extraordinarily carried on among us in the winter, others round about us seemed not to know what to make of it, and there were many that scoffed at and ridiculed it; and some compared what we called conversion to certain distempers. “Because people really didn’t understand what was happening, they began to say negative things about it.
These bad reports spread throughout the entire country, and this had a lasting effect on peoples’ willingness to accept that what was happening was a work of God. He wrote, “A great part of the country have not received the most favorable thoughts of this affair, and to this day many retain a jealousy concerning it, and prejudice against it.” Unfortunately, when people begin to become predisposed against something, it is no longer an easy matter for them to benefit from it, and they will sometimes attempt to put a stop to it.
In the concluding remarks of the same work, Edwards referred again to “the innumerable misrepresentations which have gone abroad” concerning the revival that began in his church. He stated that because of this, it had been necessary for him to go into great detail about what God was actually doing within the context of the beginning of what we now know as the Great Awakening.
One of the reasons that people misunderstand revival is that it tends to create a great deal of chaos and disorder. Normal church programs are usually suspended. People are caught up in the things of God. They often fall to the ground or make unusual noises; they weep or laugh or act as though drunk. This was as true for the Great Awakening as it was for any other revival (for details, see Images of Revivals).
During the Second Awakening in America, Charles Finney said some of the same things about misrepresentation of what God was doing. He lamented in his Memoirs that “it has been common for good men, in referring to those revivals, to assume that although they were upon the whole, revivals of religion, yet . . . they were so conducted that great disorders were manifest in them, and that there was much to deplore in their results. Now all this is an entire mistake.”
This is a very common phenomenon during revivals. People will assume, based upon misleading reports, that there is a great deal of mixture in them and that there is “much to deplore in their results.” Yet, one could be a perfect leader and still encounter storms of criticism; this is exactly what happened to Jesus Christ.
A little bit later, Finney wrote, “Until I arrived at Auburn, I was not fully aware of the amount of opposition I was destined to meet from the ministry; not the ministry in the region where I had laboured, but from ministers where I had not labored, and who knew personally nothing of me, but were influenced by the false reports which they heard.” Finney found it amazing that his critics would believe so many of the reports that they had heard.
However, there is a sense in which this phenomenon is not surprising at all. The spread of false reports and negative attitudes with respect to a work of God is a sure sign that it is genuine, because it indicates that the enemy is at work, attempting to discredit it.
The temptation to belittle the work of God is greatest among those who might have a tendency to feel that they would have something to lose if people were allowed to partake in it. There are strong temptations to jealously even among Christian leaders. Those who yield to such temptations are in danger of undermining the work of God by belittling the very thing that is bringing life and blessing to those who love Him.
God, in His wisdom, has His own reasons for allowing false reports to arise concerning His work. The stumbling blocks will therefore inevitably come, but woe to those through whom the stumbling blocks come.
The following summary indicates characteristics common to revivals and awakenings.
Characteristics of Revivals and Awakenings
1. How Awakenings Arise
a. They always emerge against a backdrop of very serious spiritual decline or intense spiritual dryness.
b. They are the product of intense prayer.
c. When people pray for reawakening, God seems to give the answer to their prayers in places that they least expect it.
d. At the beginning of an awakening, there is often an exhilarating sense of expectancy.
e. Revivals are often brought about by telling people about the revivals of the past.
f. There is often a specific point in time at the outset of an outpouring of the Holy Spirit at which God’s presence is suddenly recognized by the people. The power of God falls spontaneously.
g. Revivals of this kind seem to emerge at the same time in many different places.
2. Who becomes involved?
a. The Lord breathes new life into the Church.
b. He brings multitudes of new believers into His body.
c. Those who are already Christian enter more deeply into the fullness of salvation.
d. People recognize a similarity of the revival to any previous revivals they have experienced.
e. Backsliders are reclaimed.
f. People often come out of curiosity or skepticism and become believers.
g. There are conversions of ministers.
3. The Spread of the News
a. At the outset of revival, there is very little organization.
b. Advertizing is largely by word of mouth.
c. People are sometimes drawn to the scene of revival by an irresistible power.
d. People come from miles away.
e. People flock from everywhere.
f. There are crowds.
g. It is contagious.
h. There are often secular newspaper accounts of an awakening.
4. Conviction of Sin, Righteousness, and Judgment
a. Revival is characterized by widespread repentance and brokenness.
b. There is a great deal of meditation upon God’s character.
c. There is an awakening of conscience.
d. There is conviction of sin.
e. People are given an immediate revelation of God’s glory and of their own sinfulness and inadequacy before him.
f. In some cases, people for blocks around are confronted with their own sin and God’s majesty.
g. People suddenly become deeply convinced of their lostness.
h. An awesome fear of God and His judgment comes upon everyone.
i. Revivals bring the individual face to face with the eternal questions of one’s nature and destiny.
j. People suddenly become aware of the terrors of hell.
k. This is accompanied by deep distress over one’s wickedness.
l. The urge to pray, especially for salvation, is irresistible.
m. There are sometimes manifestations of shaking or trembling.
n. There are often strange manifestations of emotion in people in response to these experiences, including laughter, weeping, barking or yelping, and roaring.
o. People therefore seek forgiveness from God through Christ’s shed blood.
p. They then find redemption in His blood; they are given assurance of forgiveness of sin and of salvation.
q. This is accompanied with joy and peace.
r. Even the skeptical and stubborn will also grieve over their sins until they find assurance.
5. Freedom & Reconciliation
a. God frees people from bondage to sinful habits, bad attitudes, and emotional disturbances, breaking the power of ‘cancelled sin,’ as Charles Wesley put it.
b. Old prejudices are changed radically.
c. Broken homes are reunited.
d. There is widespread reconciliation.
e. There comes a depth of love for one’s brothers and sisters in Christ beyond measure.
f. People receive a fresh sense of the unity of believers in all times and places.
g. It puts an end to cursing, blasphemy, drunkenness and uncleanness in a town. There is a cessation of fighting, clamor, bitterness, and so forth.
h. Rather, joy and peace become predominant in a place that has experienced an awakening.
6. Heaven Upon Earth
a. People become so preoccupied with the things of God that they don’t want to talk about anything else.
b. There is an unusually vivid sense of God’s presence, and of joy, love and peace.
c. There are sometimes manifestations of laughter and speechlessness.
d. There is a completely different, refreshing atmosphere where God is present.
e. People experience heaven upon earth.
f. Meetings are often of protracted length. Time passes very quickly.
g. There is a feeling of release, or freedom in the Spirit.
h. People feel refreshed. There is a new lilt to everyone’s steps.
i. People suddenly have an intense enthusiasm about the things of God.
j. There is considerable praise to God.
k. There is singing in the Spirit of such harmonies as are almost never heard on earth.
l. There is dancing in the Spirit.
m. There are manifestations of spiritual gifts.
n. Children prophesy.
7. Ministry During Divine Visitations
a. God often raises up people as instruments for bringing about revival who have few natural talents and abilities.
b. Women and lay people find a greater place for leadership in revival.
c. His Word goes forth in power.
d. The Lord anoints with the Spirit the preaching, teaching, counselling, and music such that it has an ability to penetrate the hearts of the people.
e. There is always considerable revelation upon God’s Word, which takes on a new freshness.
f. People in a revival are almost invariably orthodox theologically on the great basics of the Christian faith. There is a great emphasis upon the Bible and its teachings.
g. There is a great stress usually laid upon the suffering, cross, blood and death of Jesus Christ.
h. People fall under God’s power.
i. People begin to laugh or cry, or develop characteristics similar to drunkenness.
j. Physical ailments are sometimes healed.
k. These phenomena are accompanied by the healing of shattered lives.
8. Enthusiasm for God’ Precious Word
a. The Bible comes alive for people
b. There is always a deep thirst for the Word of God.
c. People hang upon every word that is preached.
d. There are phenomenal increases in the sales of New Testaments and Bibles.
e. Those who are used of God in bringing about revival receive far more calls to preach than they can ever answer, and are harried mercilessly.
9. Beyond Superficialities
a. A spirit of sacrifice is often prevalent in a revival.
b. People spend whole nights in prayer.
c. Revival usually produces a zeal for the saving of the lost and, there, for missions.
d. God brings revelation.
e. People gather together to share in the faith for mutual upbuilding.
f. Superficial profession, baptism and church membership pale in significance, with an emphasis being placed upon spiritual life, of which the former things are merely tokens.
g. Old institutional forms often begin to seem inadequate to people who are experiencing an awakening.
10. The Rise of Impurities
a. Human frailty is inevitably an ingredient in any revival.
b. It is case for amazement even to seasoned preachers and evangelists to see what happens during seasons of awakening.
c. Belief in the imminent coming of Christ has characterized every movement of awakening since the first century. This has often led to the setting of dates for Christ’s return.
d. Those who try to mold a revival to their own tastes or control it are usually swept aside.
e. Because so many young, inexperienced converts are involved, there will be many extravagances.
f. There is a temptation to spiritual pride, and to take ones own imagination for impressions from God.
g. In a revival, there will always be some who violate Biblical truth.
h. Belief that they alone are instrumental in the accomplishment of God’s purposes often characterizes both individuals and groups experiencing revival.
11. Controversy During Outpourings of God’s Spirit
a. There are always bad reports about what goes on in a revival, both true and false.
b. Many people remain aloof for this reason.
c. A revival is always accompanied with a great deal of controversy.
d. There is always intense opposition and persecution.
e. There is reproach upon every revival.
f. Revival always involves an advance of God’s kingdom in spiritual warfare against the strongholds of Satan.
g. The enemy will attempt to hinder the work of God at all costs.
h. Satan attempts to discredit revival by mimicking God’s work.
12. The Decline of an Awakening
a. A revival will crest to a high point and then decrease.
b. After a revival crests, offenses will come.
c. Many people will feel ill will instead of good will toward the leaders of a revival.
d. They will begin to disapprove of what they formerly approved.
e. They will fasten upon bad reports, true or false, in order to justify their changes in attitude.
f. Many of those who were more or less convinced will be afraid or ashamed to acknowledge their conviction of faith.
13. The Long Term Effects
a. A new flood of hymns and scriptures set to music gains widespread circulation and use.
b. It has lasting, profound effects upon the lives of many of the people involved.
c. It spawns great ministries which then thrive well past the time of the revival.
d. There is a tremendous impact on society and many social reforms are effected.
Being aware of these characteristics can help us avoid the extremes of blindly accepting everything in a revival as from God or of resisting and quenching the Spirit by opposing what God is doing, even if the impacts of the Spirit are overwhelming.
Used with permission from the Awakening E-mail and Second Wind.
Dr Mike Brown, of Global Resource Ministries International, taught at Brownsville Assemblies of God in Pensacola, Florida. He wrote the Pensacola Update report in December 1996 when the revival had been going for a year and a half with over 60,000 commitments to Christ. Over 100,000 conversions were reported in 5 years.
I thought it would be appropriate to send you a 1996 revival update. We can then join together in giving thanks for these glorious days of visitation in which we are living. Who knows what God will do in 1997 ‑ if we seek Him with all our hearts, walk humbly before Him, and are careful to obey His Word? The possibilities are staggering.
With no attempt to be systematic or to follow any chronological order, let me give you some of the highlights from the last few months. (This would have come sooner, but with the intensity of the revival schedule, the relocation of our ministry offices ‑ and family! ‑ to Pensacola, and the raising up of our ministry training school, it was almost impossible to get out a timely update.) Here is just a small glimpse of what has been happening (and as I write, it is sometimes difficult to hold back the tears of joy).
Youth Revival
The Spirit continues to fall among the young people ‑ dramatically. One Saturday night service, multiplied hundreds of students, from grade school to college, were called to the front of the church. There were far too many to put on the platform, so they filled the front area. When we prayed for them in mass, the Spirit fell on them in awesome power, and most of them collapsed to the floor, consumed with God’s presence. After we continued to worship and intercede for our schools (‘God, give us our schools!’), we were about to dismiss the young people back to their seats when, suddenly and unexpectedly, some of them began to weep and wail in intercession.
Soon, most of them were caught up with the burden for their lost generation ‑ and the weeping and intercession became intense. There was no formal preaching that night, but the altars were filled with lost and backslidden people. If there ever was a service to attend, it was Saturday night, 12 October, 1996 (The video is called Intercession for Our Schools).
During a Thursday night youth service with about 700 in attendance (this is the one night that the teens have their own meeting), conviction fell during the worship. One of the Brownsville young people had a word about some of the kids having sinful, idolatrous things in their possession. There were about 300 kids visiting that night.
Spontaneously, they began to throw dozens of packs of cigarettes on the platform, then condoms, then joint paper, then joints (and, apparently, other drugs), then diet and prescription pills. The pile was so big that it filled a large, kitchen‑size garbage bag! When the sheriff of the county, who happened to be in the main sanctuary that night, heard what was happening in the youth chapel, he was escorted over to see things first hand. His comment? ‘This is what will change America!’ Several weeks later, his daughter was saved in one of the services. Yes Lord!
Depth of Conviction
It seems that everything is increasing in intensity: the levels of praise, worship, and warfare, sometimes breaking out spontaneously and continuing for long periods of time; the numbers of souls responding to the altar calls; the depth of conviction. It is very common to see repentant sinners and backsliders drop their heads when you look at them ‑ even when you’re trying to encourage them with a gentle smile. They’re too ashamed of their sins ‑ until they know they have all been washed away.
At other times, even after my daytime teaching sessions for leaders and hungry believers, the Lord’s presence has been so heavy that people have tried to make it out to their cars, only to collapse on their faces, or on their backs, or to their knees on the grass outside. It is a sight to see!
On one such day, the Spirit began to move on the line outside (they line up as early as 4 am now, or even sleep in the parking lot at night so as to be the first on line), and people began to fall under the power and repent of sin right there in the public lot ‑ without anyone even praying for them. You can’t contain revival in a building!
One night, three young black women made their way to the altar, all of them shaking, and the middle teenager literally being carried down by her friends. She was coming forward to get saved and was under such conviction that her friends had to support her as she tried to walk, her arms draped over the other girls, much like an injured football player is helped to the sidelines. That’s the way to come to the Lord ‑ utterly helpless and dependent.
Another night, early in his message, Steve Hill had a word for an unsaved young man named Scott. The Lord revealed his desperate condition to Steve, so he urged him to get right that night. At the end of the altar call ‑ to which, we learned later from Scott’s brother, he did not respond ‑‑ Steve had a word for a military man that had resisted God all his life. He told him to respond now. At that moment, a young man came rushing forward to surrender his life to the Lord. It was Scott, the military man. Talk about being singled out by the Lord!
A few weeks ago, two lesbians who had been living together and using drugs for years got right with God, ending their sinful relationship. Their baptismal testimonies the week following were glorious. One of the women had previously been married, and she had brought her son into the home with this other woman to live with them. (She confessed this with great sorrow at her baptism.) The night she got saved, she went home and told her son what happened. He said, ‘My prayers have been answered!’
Transformed lives
At this point, you might be wondering, ‘Well, what happens to all these people who get saved? Are they going on with God?’ Yes they are. Of course, I can’t account for every single one, but I can account for many. In fact, some of them are coming to our School of Ministry beginning next month!
To give you one case in point, a man from Chicago named Mark was an alcoholic for seventeen years, with a terrible family life as a result. He was dramatically saved and instantly delivered right in his home, watching a 700 Club report on the revival.
That was in September. When I saw him in November, he looked so different. He was in the midst of a 40 day fast; his marriage and home were transformed; his brother and wife were wonderfully touched; and he and his brother had brought their construction crew to Pensacola with them (they own a construction company). The whole crew got saved! Some of these men are now candidates to attend our school.
You may have heard the testimony of Robert Lowell, the wealthy businessman who was radically converted when we came to the revival at the beginning of 1996 to pull his wife out. The whole family has been touched, and in the Fall, one of their daughters got married to an Iranian Muslim, her fiancé who had also been saved in the revival. They got married on a Saturday afternoon and were in church that night. That’s revival! Why? They had so many unsaved friends and relatives with them that they couldn’t miss the opportunity to bring them to the evening meeting. At the end of the altar call, the young bride turned to her lifelong close friend (and member of her bridal party), asking her if she wanted to give her life to Jesus. I could only weep as I saw the two them make their way to the altar, dissolving in tears as they knelt side by side. What a wedding present! A good number of weeks later, I asked the bride what happened to her friends. She told me that all of her unsaved friends in the bridal party (along with one tragically backslidden girl) got right with God that week ‑ and all of them were on fire. What can you say?
The life and death urgency of the hour has been underscored to us when we hear of lost sinners getting saved, and then suddenly dying one or two days later. And there was no warning that they were sick or in ill health. They got saved, and then they were gone. This has happened several times now.
Even more striking was the case of a man who was in the meeting, felt conviction, and ran from it, ending up at the pool hall playing pool with three of his drinking buddies. But the conviction there was even more intense, so he left his three friends and returned to the church, giving his life to Jesus at the end of the night. It was just in time. He found out later that, shortly after he left the pool hall, the three friends drove off in their Chevy Corvette which was almost totally disintegrated moments later after a 100 mile per hour crash. Two were killed instantly; the third critically injured. This man would have been among them, had he not responded to the Spirit’s pull. He was literally snatched out of the fire!
Interest in the revival has increased. In recent months, the Pentecostal Evangel ‑ the international magazine of the Assemblies of God ‑ devoted 15 pages to the revival, the Dallas Morning News ran a front‑page story about the outpouring in its Sunday morning edition (by the way, it was the front page of the main section of the paper, not the religion section), and Charisma Now aired a powerful TV special on the revival. Denominational leaders in the Church of God, Southern Baptists, and United Methodists (among others) have been wonderfully touched, and our recent ministers conference was attended by leaders from about forty nations. This is in addition to the large number of leaders ‑ ranging from 300‑500 ‑ who attend every week. And best of all, the fire is spreading!
Fire is spreading
A Southern Baptist testified to a dramatic rise in spiritual hunger in his church since he attended the meetings. His son, the youth pastor was living in compromise and hardness ‑ until God sternly dealt with him and totally turned him around. Back at the pastor’s church, after a special series of meetings ended, congregants showed up at the church anyway, even though the services had ended. They were so hungry for the Lord that they climbed into the building through a hole in a broken window. And these are Southern Baptists!
Friends of mine from Phoenix visited Pensacola and went back ignited. The Spirit began moving freely in the services, the power of God fell in unprecedented ways for that fellowship, people began repenting, some of then fasting and gathering for 6 am prayer, the young people got turned on and starting witnessing to all their friends, winning some of them to the Lord. Such stories are common now around the country!
One Spanish‑speaking youth pastor from Texas with a teens group averaging 8‑10 kids returned from Pensacola on fire, and he and his wife began preaching repentance to their group. Six weeks later they were running 120 kids in the meetings! And in many cities, where disunity and lack of cooperation had been the rule, pastors are now gathering together in sizable numbers for special leadership meetings, repenting with many tears, confessing their sins, and committing to pray and cry out … That’s the key!
One of my former students, an associate pastor in a Messianic congregation, showed the children at the congregational school the video featuring eight year old Whitney Lane sharing her burden for the lost ‑ until she breaks down crying. He invited the kids who wanted a similar burden to come forward for prayer and then, to his amazement, the younger kids there (ages 5‑8 especially) began to weep, sob, and shake ‑ for forty‑five minutes! A number of them had visions of heaven, hell, and Jesus, some of them dramatic. He arrived home with a plastic bag full of the tissues these little ones had soaked with their tears. Jesus is moving in the land!
And here’s a personal illustration of the love of God. A Filipino pastor from Chicago felt that he just had to attend the revival services. He arrived at the church by way of Orlando on 10 December, only to find out they we were in the midst of a break until 3 January. He was totally crestfallen, coming back the next day with the hope that the services would somehow resume. Of course, they did not; but the revival itself continues. He then received an out‑of‑the‑blue invitation to speak in Toms River, New Jersey that weekend. It was there that he learned that the very next day ‑ this past Monday ‑ I would be speaking at a special ministers’ gathering in – you guessed it! ‑ Toms River. So, from Chicago to Orlando to Pensacola to Orlando to Toms River ‑ he got in the river! You can’t limit the goodness of God.
Finally, I should mention that there seems to be an increase in powerful healings these days, and this too is often taking place outside of Pensacola. A well‑respected pastor in Wisconsin, a man whose church has been in the midst of an outpouring since visiting us in June, told me personally about the documented healing of a baby born blind. She is fine today, after receiving prayer from the leaders in that church. Isn’t God awesome?
When God starts moving, everyone falls into place: The hungry press forward and are filled, the lost are drawn in and the backsliders drawn home, the laborers are raised up and thrust out ‑ and the critics criticize! What else could we expect?
Actually, we ought to pity those who cannot recognize the glorious fruit of tens of thousands of radically changed lives because of a little shaking (as if God’s presence makes mountains and houses shake ‑ but not people!) or falling (as if it is illogical or unscriptural for someone to be overcome by God’s power). They reject the Spirit because they don’t like the style. Pity their souls and pray for those whom they mislead. We don’t want anyone to be left out.
A few months ago the Lord said to me that soon it will be an embarrassment to be associated with the critics. Day by day, the truth of that word is becoming clearer and clearer. I would hate to find myself standing in the path of a divine tidal wave, shaking my skeptical fist and shouting, ‘That’s not God!’
Please hear my heart: We are literally on the verge of seeing the Spirit’s fire sweep through whole public schools, ignite whole regions, and shake our nation from bottom to top. Young and old will meet their God, and the nation could very well be transformed. For the first time in my life, real revival across America is within range. Let’s press in without compromise until the whole country is ablaze. It really is time. As Steve Hill often cries out at the altar calls, What are you waiting for?
Reviews: Building a Better World by Dave Andrews, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit & Surprised by the Voice of God both by Jack Deere, Secrets of the Argentine Revival, by R Edward Miller
Dr Robert McQuillan wrote as editor of the Australian national Assemblies of God monthly magazine, the Australian Evangel. He describes revival in Pensacola, Sunderland and Argentina.
Suddenly the name is on the lips of almost every minister wanting fresh fire renewal along with the question: ‘Where’s Pensacola? I hear incredible revival is happening there.’
Indeed it is! It’s called ‘the Brownsville harvest’. As I compile this article I have before me a fax from Evangelist Steve Hill in Pensacola, Florida, dated 24 June, 1996, which reads: ‘The revival here is more intense than ever before. The pace is ever increasing ‑ with no end in sight.’
People continue coming from all over the United States and the world. Over 26,000 received Christ as Saviour in the first year! Within two years over 60,000 have recorded commitments to Christ.
Suddenly the Wind …
It was Father’s Day in June 1995 when the evangelist preached at the Brownsville AOG 2,300‑seater church. The pastor, John Kilpatrick (46), had just lost his mother to cancer and, feeling emotionally drained, had requested his longtime friend Steve Hill to take the Sunday service.
As Evangelist Hill (42) gave the altar call, the Holy Spirit fell and a thousand people streamed forward. There was the distinct awareness of a wind blowing across the auditorium. Some folk shook violently, others did carpet time.
John Kilpatrick was suddenly aware of the tangible presence of the Holy Spirit, more so when Steve Hill laid hands on him and claimed, ‘More, Lord’ Recently Kilpatrick told Charisma magazine’s editor, J Lee Grady, ‘When I hit the floor, it felt like I weighed 10,000 pounds. I knew something supernatural was happening. God was visiting us.’ He was ‘out’ for around four hours ‘feeling heavenly glory resting on him like a heavy blanket.’
The devil’s work? Not according to Steve Hill who calls himself a missionary evangelist, having spent seven years on the Argentinian mission field. He commented, ‘I don’t try to explain the manifestations. I look for what God is doing in people’s lives.’ When as many as 1,000 people get converted a week and lives are dramatically changed, Hill is convinced this is the Lord’s work, not Satan’s!
Prophesied by Cho
News of the Brownsville revival ‑ incidentally, Pensacola is in the northwestern part of Florida ‑ began filtering across the world around October 1995. The Pentecostal Evangel reported that in 1991 Dr David Yonggi Cho was praying for America while holding meetings in Seattle, Washington. Suddenly the Lord told him to get a map. He did so and the Holy Spirit directed him to point his finger at the Florida panhandle and to the quiet city of Pensacola.
Dr Cho then prophesied, ‘I am going to send revival to the seaside city of Pensacola and it will spread like a fire until all of America has been consumed by it.’
The word spread to Pensacola ministers. Serious about revival, John Kilpatrick, described as a gentle‑natured pastor, had church members commence praying on Sunday nights, particularly for their own city and its political leaders, the school system, and leaders of every denomination. Their prayer, and Dr Cho’s prophetic word, are being fulfilled!
The events of that Father’s Day service have occurred repeatedly night after night since, along with amazing healings, miracles, restored marriages and wonderful salvations. Healings are even happening without the laying on of hands and prayer. Sometimes distressed couples, including those divorced, have gone forward for salvation not knowing their partner or former partner was doing the same thing. Gloriously saved they have then found each other again and been restored.
God’s Chain of Grace
The spectrum of those being saved is a wide one ‑ crack dealers to troubled teenagers to Satan worshippers to those in shaky marriages to strippers to the hard working poor to the wealthy. People get saved, then bring their friends and family who also become converted. Steve Hill refers to it all as ‘God’s chain of grace.’
And the fire has spread in the Bible Belt! Many from other denominations, including Methodists and Baptists, attend the five nights a week meetings and in several cases the revival fires have now erupted in other church sanctuaries. ‘Swimming in the river of God’ has become a popular Brownsville theme that has been readily taken up by other ministers and churches.
Nowadays if you want to attend a 7 pm Brownsville AOG service, you’ll need to queue up at 3.30 pm in the afternoon! You’ll be among visitors from the States, Canada, Korea, Australia, Uganda, Brazil, UK … 400,000 had attended ‘the Pensacola Outpouring’ by the April 1996 count. The town itself has only a population of 80,000.
Charisma reports that the church ‑ ‘nondescript and just blocks from bingo parlours and a topless lounge in a Southern city best known for beaches and seafood’ ‑ spends $150 a night on drinking water, $4,000 a month for child care, and $4,000 per month for extra car park security as some services run to 3 am.
Notable Differences
What’s different about the ‘Brownsville harvest,’ compared to the ‘Toronto’ blessing and ‘Sunderland’ revival?
In the main, it is probably the fact that the emphasis has been on salvation from the start with signs and wonders secondary. The church has been serious in its praying for revival and that’s what it’s received.
Also, much weeping in repentance and heavy conviction at the altar is another dominant feature.
Thirdly, neither John Kilpatrick or Steve Hill are particularly anxious to leave the church to be special speakers around the world. They are totally, as Steve Hill puts it, ‘committed at the Brownsville revival.’ In fact Hill, who was only supposed to minister once at the Father’s Day service, but has been there since, has moved his family from Texas to Brownsville.
Despite the overwhelming nature of all that has happened and the growing worldwide publicity, the Brownsville assembly remains humble and mystified as to why the Spirit has visited them in this way. But they are rejoicing in the Lord at the results which haven’t stopped coming since the fire fell.
AOG Approved
Many American AOG ministers, previously critical of the recent move of the Spirit and sceptical about the ‘Pensacola Outpouring’ have had a change of heart since attending the Brownsville church, and doing unexpected extended carpet time. Visiting with a determination that there was no way they would fall on the floor, they found themselves overwhelmed by the presence of God and getting up from the altar as long as three hours later. Dramatically changed, their own churches are now swimming in the river of God.
Assistant General Superintendent, Charles Crabtree, was a speaker at the April Pensacola Harvest Revival Ministers’ Conference in Brownsville and was visibly touched by all that was happening there. General Superintendent Thomas Trask is a godly man who definitely desires spiritual revival, and reports indicate that what is happening at Brownsville is warmly endorsed by the AOG Executive Presbytery, Springfield.
The Pensacola fire is spreading, impacting the Assemblies of God in particular; and those who are thirsting for more of God and old time revival are experiencing it.
Australians can learn!
Adrian and Kathy Gray, senior pastors Mount Annan Christian Life Centre, Campbelltown (NSW), where the river of God has been flowing mightily for some time, have just returned from Pensacola. They write:
One of the most outstanding harvest revivals of our time is taking place in Brownsville. A number of things stand out very clearly about this revival church:
* As a whole it is very focused on what the Lord has called them to do ‑ build up the saints and win the lost.
* They are definitely some of the most passionate people in revival that we have been among.
* The prayer, intercession and travail that occurs during the altar times is among the most intense that we have seen anywhere in the world. Literally hundreds receive Christ every night.
Those receiving Christ are encouraged to do three main things:
* Come back to the revival meetings each night.
* Bring their family and friends.
* Follow the Lord into the waters of baptism.
Over 4,000 people were in the first meeting we attended. A powerful service; over 200 people came to Christ and 32 were water baptised. Every night, 14 year‑old Charity sings Mercy Seat and people run to the altar. Unbelievable! We are expecting this harvest anointing to ‘come home with us’ as we are particularly hungry for God to begin such a revival in our church.
Australians can learn a tremendous amount from the way the Lord is pouring out his presence in this church. Our nation is ready for revival so let’s keep a spirit of faith, expect the harvest, and pray, ‘More, Lord!’
Moving Into the Harvest Challenge
These are still exciting days! Let’s not drop this current move of God as some churches have done, let’s not fail to embrace it either as some have done, and let’s not keep it in-house as a local bless me club, but see it spill out in evangelism to win thousands into the kingdom.
John Kilpatrick & Lindel Cooley
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Sunderland, England:Renewal moves into Harvest
Joy magazine reports that Sunderland Christian Centre (SCC) is experiencing a new and more powerful wave of the Holy Spirit as the church enters the second phase of the move of God.
Along with an amazing explosion of prayer, the church is experiencing some outstanding healings.
A New Emphasis
Senior pastors Ken and Lois Gott feel the Lord is allowing them to model the new emphasis ‑ prayer, mercy and mission to the unchurched ‑ just as they modelled the renewal.
After more than 19 months of nightly revival meetings with visitors flocking from around the country and the globe, SCC began gearing meetings to accommodate a new kind of guest. The building which saw nightly renewal meetings is now used twelve hours a day, seven days a week, as people stream in from the local community where previously there had been little impact.
‘We built an eight‑foot fence to keep the violent street kids out,’ said Ken Gott, ‘but six months into the renewal God saved key people from the local community. Jim Richardson was a major player in the local criminal underworld but God ‘arrested’ him in a renewal meeting ‑ literally knocking him flat on his back! Now he’s on staff.’
Going for the Worst
‘Elaine Arkley, dramatically healed and saved during the renewal, is now running a drop‑in mission. The workers cannot keep up with the numbers flocking to find food and, more importantly, the Saviour,’ adds Ken.
Around 260 people are being accommodated at SCC in this manner, but this is not church as they have known it before. Those coming are being fed, helped and cared for by a church fired by a vision of mission and mercy.
Of course, the church is having to adapt, but, like General Booth of the Salvation Army, they are going for the worst of sinners. And some truly remarkable conversions are taking place.
This change of direction is in line with many prophecies given before and during the current move which predicted a wave of renewal giving way to a compassionate ministry of love, healing and salvation to the desperate and needy.
Visitors to the church are no longer guaranteed to find renewal meetings every night of the week but those still travelling from all over the world are seeing first hand a model of renewal moving on into the harvest.
Denominational Reconciliations
Extraordinary scenes of reconciliation took place in SCC during a recent meeting led by Lois Gott and attended by hundreds of church leaders.
Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Salvationists, Messianic Jews, Congregationalists, House Church, Brethren and Pentecostals prayed for each other and confessed their past arrogance and lack of love for one another.
An Anglican vicar, tears flowing, led a prayer for national revival and announced prophetically that ‘the civil war (among Christians) is over.’
Pentecostals, particularly, repented of their arrogance in believing they ‘had it all’ and acknowledged the debt they owed to other denominations, especially the Anglicans ‑ it was Church of England vicar Alexander Boddy who was used to spark off the 20th century Pentecostal revival in Sunderland in 1907!
More Reconciliations
Also, at the recent 1,000 delegates prophetic conference other reconciliations took place in an atmosphere charged with an awesome sense of God’s presence.
A large group of Germans were called up to the front to be prayed for and Lois Gott, on behalf of the English, asked their forgiveness for the bloodshed of World War II. Amid many tears and embraces, they in turn confessed the sins of their forefathers. A Messianic Jewess who had had relatives killed in the holocaust also embraced them. Christians from the north and south of Ireland also prayed for each other.
Amazing worship was accompanied by rich, anointed singing from the platform, and many were in tears as they sang inspirational new songs along with some wonderful old hymns exalting what Christ has done in the past and anticipating what he is about to do in revival power.
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Argentina Revival Fires: Hungry for the Spirit
When Argentina’s Claudio Freidzon stood before a crowd of over 65,000 in Buenos Aires’ Velez Sarsfield stadium it was like a dream come true. As a boy he had dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player; being a pastor had been the furthest thing from his mind. Now, walking onto the field for a gospel crusade, he had the wonderful opportunity of scoring a few goals against the devil! Six hours of revivalist fervour would see many salvations and Holy Spirit miracles, healings and manifestations.
Claudio Freidzon is among the foremost figures of the extraordinary revival that has been taking place in Argentina since 1992. He has also been a catalyst for the current worldwide revival ‑ as the saying goes, ‘Before there was Toronto or Sunderland, there was Argentina.’ More than 850,000 people have attended his crusades. As well as many healings from a whole range of sicknesses, countless lives have been dramatically changed ‑ restoration of families has been a highlight in this revival, children pray for one another, and youngsters prefer to visit hospitals rather than play ball.
Almost giving up
But success did not come easily for Claudio. When he and his wife, Betty, commenced ministry they set up both church and home in the one usable room in a dilapidated building. At night they replaced the chairs with their bed and a cot for the children. Those trying days proved a desert experience for Claudio which led him to a spiritual hunger and discovering complete dependence on the Holy Spirit. He says, ‘The only fountain is God himself. The only solution comes from heaven.’
With a congregation of just seven for seven years, he was on the point of giving up. But God wouldn’t let him. He recalls:
‘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.’
Craving for the Touch of God
A new book, Holy Spirit, I am Hungry for You, tells how Claudio Freidzon went on to hunger from the depths of his soul for the touch of God that would enable him to reach the masses. Desperate, and churning and aching inside as with hunger for natural food, Claudio desired and craved for the bread of life. He was to discover that heart attitude is of primary interest to God and that through developing our relationship with him, the Holy Spirit is free to inspire any committed Spirit‑hungry Christian to do great exploits in Jesus’ name.
In his search for more of God, Claudio Freidzon visited Orlando and requested that Benny Hinn pray for him. The evangelist did so, praying that the anointing of the Holy Spirit would rest on the Argentinian’s life and ministry and that God would do a great work through him in that nation.
The rest is history! Claudio Freidzon began holding incredible rallies, presenting the message of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit and revival swept the country. What began as a personal work of the Holy Spirit in his own life because of his spiritual hunger affected others. Today he pastors a prosperous church of over 4,000 members and is bringing spiritual life to hundreds of thousands both in Argentina and in other nations.
Claudio Freidzon sees the Argentine revival as a sovereign move of God who provided the river to be followed. Traditional style worship forms were changed dramatically and today there’s a great emphasis on joy and freedom in the Spirit. Evidently people come dancing down the street on their way to church. Another emphasis is on holiness and less gossip in Christians’ lives!
AOG Superintendent Testifies
Argentina’s AOG superintendent, Jose Manuel Carlos, recalls a visit he made to Claudio Freidzon’s church:
‘My wife Isabel and I wanted to see for ourselves what was taking place, for we had heard so many things about the King of Kings Church.
We left our car not far from the church. As we started walking towards the building, we noticed our legs trembling. We thought it was just suggestion due to the comments we had heard. When we entered, the place was packed and there were still people waiting outside.
‘An usher recognised us and took us to the front row. People were standing, singing, jumping and hugging each other in unity. When Pastor Freidzon asked, “Do you want to receive more?” a “Yes” broke out from the people like the sound of many waters. Immediately he shouted, “Receive!” and half the congregation fell to the ground laughing, some of them with an expression of drunkenness.
‘He then called to the platform some 50 children and asked, “Do you want to receive from God?” When they said “Yes,” he prayed with lifted hands and all of them fell to the floor as if asleep and with smiles on their faces!
‘I could not find a logical explanation for what was happening and prayed to God: “Lord, if this is of you, please let me know.” At that moment Claudio had begun to walk among the people and pray for them. When I opened my eyes, I saw my wife was falling to the floor as he laid hands on her.
‘He then embraced me and prayed: “Father, bless this servant of yours.” At that moment, something covered me from head to toe. I had a pleasant feeling of dizziness and felt flooded by a deep joy. I couldn’t shake it off; I don’t think I wanted to either! What I was experiencing was so precious that I didn’t want to move, lest I should lose it. Isabel and I had such a great feeling of joy that night we couldn’t sleep. I prayed in tongues until dawn.
‘My ministry has been blessed by this anointing of the Holy Spirit that flows through Claudio’s ministry. My own church increased from 400 members to 800 in only six months. My children were changed. My two daughters, aged 15 and 17, were baptised in the Holy Spirit and called to the ministry. The elder sister has started her studies at the Bible institute and the younger, who is finishing school, is also planning to train for the ministry.
‘This change began to happen one night as Pastor Freidzon prayed for them. My eight‑year‑old son, who is very fond of playing soccer, has stopped playing and is praying and seeking after God as never before.
‘I thank God for this precious ministry that changes lives, ministers and churches and, I dare say, will affect our country.’
Holy Spirit, I am Hungry for You (Kingsway, 1996), is encouraging, challenging reading, especially for those wanting to serve God in a powerful way.
(Adapted with permission from a Joy article. Additional material from Alpha)
Reviews: Building a Better World by Dave Andrews, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit & Surprised by the Voice of God both by Jack Deere, Secrets of the Argentine Revival, by R Edward Miller
Dr Paul Pillai was the Founder and Director of India Inland Mission, which plants churches among Hindus and has orphanages and a Bible College of 600 for training evangelists and pastors. Formerly a Hindu lawyer, Paul was converted when healed through an Indian Christian’s prayer.
We thank God for his faithfulness in our mission work and the many signs and wonders admit much persecution and danger. It is difficult to write about them all because it is a story of 30 years in unknown places where churches are established now.
One village did not have drinking water, only salt water. We prayed for pure water and the Lord provided pure water. The whole village came to Christ.
The chief in another village became blind for there years. His eyes were opened through our laying on hands and praying. The village came to Christ.
Another village suffered from constant attacks of a tiger from the nearby forest. No police or gun men could spot it to shoot it as it came at unexpected times around midnight. Some of our team members preached the gospel in that village and went around the village seven times and claimed the protection of the village by the circle of the blood of Christ. Since then for over eight years the tiger has never returned. Before that, every week someone used to be attacked and killed. No more now.
At another place a witch doctor had cursed a man and his animals because of enmity. The man’s seven milking buffaloes stopped giving milk. Our workers rebuked the curse in the name of Jesus. Suddenly the buffaloes started giving milk. Half of the villagers came to know Christ through that.
A large gathering came to hear the gospel in another village. A militant Hindu group organised a riot against it and tried to stop the meeting. Our people started praying together in the spirit. Suddenly thunder and lightning came. The leader of the gang which attacked us became totally blinded. That stopped the riot and the meetings continued for five days. On the fifth day the leader of the riot who was blinded came forward for healing. Jesus healed him and he accepted Christ and was baptised as a believer in Christ.
In one place during the monsoon season the Lord stopped the rain for three days just in the area of our tent and surrounding places. People were amazed at this. This was at a time when all other places were flooding with rain. Even buildings were washed away. Our tent meetings went on at the top of a mountain. Many were healed, delivered from demons, and touched by the Holy Spirit. Hundreds were convicted of their sins and accepted Christ.
In central India a whole tribe came to Christ through our work by the simple open door the Lord gave through a ministry of deliverance. The daughter of the tribal chief became insane through demon possession. The Lord used our mission team to deliver her from that. The chief and the tribe accepted Christ as their only Lord.
A fire broke out in a village where about 10,000 people lived in small huts almost wall to wall with thatched rooves and mud walls. We established a church with ten believers in that village. There was no fire engine or help available for the villagers. Smoke filled the whole air. The people could not see anything anywhere except thick smoke. Our pastor and our believers called the whole village to stand around the village to call upon God in the name of Jesus to stop the fire. Thousands prayed. Our pastor kept shouting through the microphone to keep calling upon the name of Jesus. The fire started in the morning about 8.30 am. The smoke filled the village till five that evening. All that time people were calling upon Jesus. Then the pastor declared that the Lord would clear the smoke and that no lives would be lost. The smoke went away. The villagers found only two huts burnt where the fire started. The other houses were not destroyed. No one was hurt. The village accepted Christ.
During a pneumonic plague the whole nation was in panic. The plague started in Surat where we had a ministry for 20 years. The people ran out of the town in thousands. Many prominent leaders of several villages came to our church and asked our people to pray as they heard about the power of Jesus from us. The believers fasted and prayed. The plague was stopped completely in that town. God’s people have prayed in thousands, and we continued to pray for the protection of the land from the plague.
These are a few of the things I have remembered. We never kept a record of these events. Only the Lord keeps track of these things. The Lord continues to do many thing for his glory. Indian Inland Mission workers all over north India see many things like that. They work with native people who are very simple in their faith in the living God.
‘If you believe you will see the glory of God’ (John 11:40).
1000 orphans in Bethel Home and 500 students in
Grace College at Indian Inland Mission
Note:
Paul stayed with us in Brisbane and spoke at the Renewal Fellowship. He has taken teams to hundreds of villages and towns, starting churches. One time their tent was burned down by fantasists who tried to kill them. Paul’s arm was broken but then angels (appearing as fine young men) miraculously moved the team to a safe place and told them that the Lord would send them back there. He did. They started a home church there and it grew.
A small team from the Renewal Fellowship in Brisbane visited and spoke at Grace College in New Delhi on our way from mission with Raju Sundas in Nepal to Philip and Dhamika George’s family pastoring in Sri Lanka.
Reviews: Building a Better World by Dave Andrews, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit & Surprised by the Voice of God both by Jack Deere, Secrets of the Argentine Revival, by R Edward Miller
Dick Eastman is international president of the global movement, Every Home for Christ. This article was published in Charisma as ‘The Days of God’s Visitation’.
Ch 3: People of the Trees Pygmy tribe of 6,000 saved in 3 years
Ebola area miracles
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I ’ve made 11 trips around the world in the last 15 months, and I’ve witnessed God’s hand at work. Nothing in the history of world evangelism compares with what is happening today.
When our three-man team arrived at an encampment called Boteka, located on the Momboyo River in the heart of Zaire’s equatorial rain forest, it seemed to me that we stood on the edge of nowhere. In less than 24 hours, though, I knew we would be right in the middle of it.
My colleague Wes Wilson and I had joined with Dia Mbwangi, the French African director of Every Home for Christ (EHC), for this unique journey to see with our own eyes the miraculous harvest of souls being reported among the Pygmies. Five years ago, there had been almost no believers deep in that part of the rain forest. Now we understood the number of Christians had surpassed 300,000. Could this be possible?
If it was true, this was one more indication of the amazing work of the Holy Spirit being reported around the world in recent months.
We almost never made it to the rain forest. While trying to obtain our visas back in the United States, the ever-smiling clerk at our local visa office begged Wes and me not to go into the region. She explained that the State Department had issued serious warnings about that area, primarily because of instances in which outsiders had been kidnapped and murdered. And besides, she said, the worst diseases in the world came from that region.
We soon discovered she was right. In fact, a few days later I would learn the deadly Ebola virus had resurfaced just south of our destination. The Momboyo River, along which we planned to journey, was a stone’s throw from the famed Ebola River from which this dreaded virus acquired its name. The AIDS virus too is thought to have come from a nearby region.
Apparently we were heading straight into a ‘hot zone,’ a medical term for an area in which a deadly virus is active and transmittable. More importantly, we were heading into a spiritual hot zone where satanic activity has ravaged humanity by the spiritual virus of sin for centuries. Yet, as we would soon discover, the cure – Christ Himself – was setting multitudes free in one of the most remote locations on earth.
Every tree for Christ
When our workers first went into the Pygmy regions of the equatorial rain forest in 1992, the trip required an 11-day, motorized canoe trip up the mighty Zaire River (formerly the Congo River), and an additional journey of several days down any number of smaller rivers, such as the Momboyo. Then workers had to travel by canoes up tiny tributaries and creeks until they reached the remote areas where the Pygmy peoples live.
Fortunately, when Wes and I arrived in Kinshasa, Zaire, and linked up with Brother Dia, we were able to enlist a pilot to fly us deep into the forest, dropping us off at a small, grass landing strip near an encampment called Boteka. There we were able to obtain a 40-foot canoe with two outboard motors from a Belgian Catholic mission. This made it possible for us to journey even further up the Momboyo River to another encampment called Imbonga.
From Imbonga, we traveled 20 miles directly into the forest until we arrived at our ultimate destination, a Christian village called Bosuka, made up of hundreds of Pygmy converts.
And what an arrival it was! Hundreds of Pygmies lined the footpath as we neared Bosuka, joyously dancing and waving palm branches while singing in their dialect a song they had written themselves: ‘Jesus is Lord, and He’s coming back soon!’
The fact that these Pygmies were a part of an actual village was something of an anomaly. Pygmies are generally nomadic peoples who traditionally do not live in permanent villages. This was clearly a Christian phenomenon, the result of a transformation in the hearts of thousands of Pygmies who were turning to Jesus en masse after an EHC evangelistic campaign.
We had learned that these people actually lived in the trees. In the initial progress reports that came back to us from Brother Dia in the forest, he explained that he was unable to say specifically how many ‘homes’ were being reached because Pygmies are ‘tree people’.
With his customary humor, Dia wrote on one report that he had now launched an ‘Every Tree Crusade,’ a modification of EHC’s standard ‘Every Home Crusade’ strategy. Instead of pursuing our long-standing ministry goal of reaching ‘the last home on earth with the gospel,’ Dia wrote: ‘We will not stop until we reach the last tree on earth!’
The settlement of a Pygmy village – established around a church – was something unique and unusual in the forest. Yet it had happened in only about 14 months. In fact, out of a tribe of 6,000 Pygmies in the region, 4,000 had come to a knowledge of Jesus, including the Pygmy chief of the area and his entire clan of some 40 relatives.
While in the forest, we heard other amazing reports. In one neighbouring area where 32 Pygmy fellowships had been planted 36 months earlier, a remarkable 300 additional fellowships had been established even deeper in the forest, the result of Brother Dia challenging the leaders of those fellowships to each plant at least one new church by the year 2000. To our amazement, they exceeded the goal by almost tenfold – and they did it four years early!
The Healing Stone
One month after our trip into Africa’s equatorial rain forest, I travelled to the other side of the world to witness a similar miracle in a mountainous region of the Solomon Islands chain. In a rain forest deep in the interior of the island of Malaita, 11 Christian villages had emerged in just three years.
Our workers in one area had tried several times, unsuccessfully, to witness about Jesus. A huge stone – called ‘the healing stone’ by the people of the region – seemed to be a visible stronghold keeping the people of the area held in some kind of demonic grasp. Almost daily, chiefs from several villages brought their sacrifices of chickens and pigs to the huge stone.
A two-man mission team decided to camp out on an adjacent mountain overlooking the stone to fast and pray for seven days. Early on the seventh day, clouds began gathering above the area.
A Kwaio priest from a nearby village made his way to the giant stone to offer a sacrifice. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning streaked out of the ominous black clouds and struck the stone with such force that it split in two. Half the stone rolled down the steep mountain. Panic-stricken, the priest dropped his sacrifice and ran for his life.
Several village priests, who earlier had rejected the gospel message, now were filled with fear. One of them invited our evangelists to return and tell them again about Jesus.
Soon, many villagers, with their chiefs, had received Christ. On their own they burned their huts to the ground as an act of repentance and moved to a nearby Christian village that had been established only 36 months earlier.
A Season Called ‘Afterward’
My journeys into the rain forests of Africa and the Solomon Islands were part of some eight trips I made around the world in a 12-month period, mostly in preparation for writing my latest book, Beyond Imagination, which documents some of the amazing miracles occurring in world evangelization today.
These global journeys a year ago, followed by three additional trips around the world in a 60-day period while preparing this article, convinced me of several significant trends that indicate the church of Jesus Christ may have entered God’s ‘afterward’ season.
That expression is found in Joel’s ancient prophecy: ‘And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions’ (Joel 2:28, NIV). The prophet adds, ‘And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’ (v. 32).
Of course, the initial fulfillment of this prophecy was the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the early church. However, there is also a strong biblical sense that this promise likewise foretells a great end-time harvest and awakening in the very last days.
I believe the church may be on the threshold of this exciting ‘afterward’ time. Certainly the body of Christ is closer to the fulfillment of Jesus’ Great Commission than many believers are aware.
Nothing in the history of world evangelization compares with what’s happening today. Recently, missions researcher David Barrett told me that he is preparing for publication an updated version of his highly regarded, 1,000-page World Christian Encyclopedia, published by Oxford University Press in 1982. So vast has been the progress of world evangelization since the first publication, Barrett says the revision will require three volumes, each as lengthy as the original.
Every Home for Christ has a strategic vision to systematically take a clear, printed gospel message (or recorded message for illiterates) to every family in a nation. EHC can testify that the recent acceleration of the harvest has been dramatic.
In the 36-month period from 1989 to 1991, an encouraging 1.3 million decision cards were received in our offices. But as exciting as that number was, in a similar 36-month period from 1993 to 1995, the ‘decision for Jesus’ responses jumped to 3.7 million.
Specific evangelistic advances in some previously restricted nations illustrate this dramatic acceleration. For example, only a decade ago, in the once ‘closed’ nation of Nepal, anyone caught witnessing to or responsible for converting a Hindu to Christ could be put in prison for several years. In fact, in the early to mid-1980s, as many as 200 Christians were incarcerated at one time in Nepal for this reason.
Then, a miracle involving democratic reforms came to this Hindu nation, not unlike what transpired in the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Suddenly there were opportunities to communicate the gospel much more openly.
Until that time, our evangelists in Nepal had been conducting home-to-home visits in a cautious way; now workers were able to witness freely. Within a few short years our Kathmandu office had received more than 200,000 written decision cards, each requesting a four-part Bible-correspondence course.
Especially exciting has been the formation of hundreds of small church-fellowships called Christ Groups in Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist villages as the result of these house-to-house campaigns. At the time of this writing, a remarkable 4,730 Christ Groups have been formed in villages and towns in Nepal, and some have grown into sizable congregations. In addition, the original goal of reaching every home in every village of this Hindu land by 31 December, 2000, is expected to be completed four years early – as this is published.
Campus Crusade for Christ has seen a remarkable harvest in response to the showing of the Jesus film, which is now in 342 languages. Campus Crusade staff estimate that more than 732 million people have seen the film in 16 years, and the acceleration has been especially dramatic in recent months.
The Christian Broadcasting Network also reports amazing results. Network founder Pat Robertson notes that it took CBN almost 20 years to see 1 million people pray to receive Christ; in the last five years, however, that number increased close to 50 times, to some 50 million responses.
Even preeminent evangelist Billy Graham is seeing an increase. In the spring of 1996, his organization presented a one-hour global television broadcast with an estimated potential audience of 2.5 billion people in more than 200 countries. Of the 450 million pieces of follow-up literature prepared, most were used up almost immediately after the program.
Other isolated examples of church planting activities clearly indicate dramatic increases. Varanasi, India, for example, has been a known Hindu stronghold for generations. As recently as five years ago there were no churches in that city of 1.5 million people. Today there are at least 230 churches with an estimated 5,000 worshipers.
In Cambodia, where almost all religious expression was wiped out during the notorious ‘killing fields’ of the Khmer Rouge two decades ago, an average of one new church is being established every week – just among the churches related to the Khmer Evangelical Church. This group alone has a goal of 300 new churches by the year 2000.
In the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, a church in Tashkent that began with just a handful of believers nine years ago has grown to more than 3,000 believers. They’ve also planted 46 additional churches across Uzbekistan. The main congregation in Tashkent is said to be growing by as many as 100 new baptized believers every month.
The Force of United Prayer
No doubt a major reason for this incredible acceleration of global harvest is the amplified and intensified increase of united prayer sweeping the globe today. David Barrett says there may be as many as 170 million Christians worldwide involved in praying every day for spiritual awakening and world evangelization.
Of this number, Barrett says there may be up to 20 million believers who see intercession as their primary ministry. Barrett further believes there may be as many as 10 million prayer groups meeting regularly with a primary purpose of praying for global spiritual awakening.
Showing the possible sweep of this movement, Barrett suggests there are approximately 1,300 separate prayer-mobilization networks organizing believers to pray for God’s work globally. Highly focused prayer that strategically targets satanic strongholds–which some, such as professor C. Peter Wagner, define as ‘warfare prayer’- has also dramatically intensified in recent years and even more so in the last 36 months.
The global Praying Through the Window events in 1993 and again in 1995 targeted prayer to the under-evangelized and least-reached peoples of the so-called 10/40 Window, a geographic region between 10 degrees and 40 degrees latitude north of the equator, stretching from West Africa across the Middle East to East Asia. More than 20 million Christians participated in the first campaign in October 1993, and 249 teams made prayer journeys to the region. Two years later, an astounding 35.3 million intercessors participated, representing 143,447 churches, and 407 prayer teams journeyed into the 10/40 Window.
I immediately saw fruit from this highly focused prayer effort. Before the first 10/40 Window focus in 1993, our EHC campaigns were being conducted in 70 countries. In the next 24 months the number grew dramatically to 108.
In the past, it was considered a miracle for EHC to begin four or five new national initiatives in a single year. But to average more than one new national work per month for two years was unheard of! And many of these were begun in nations within or bordering the 10/40 Window.
The strategic prayer also impacted our church-planting efforts. In India, for example, over the 36-month period before the first Praying Through the Window campaign, EHC saw the formation of three Christ Groups every day, an average of 90 per month. Though this number was encouraging at the time, in the six months after the 10/40 Window focus, that number increased beyond 500 percent to more than 15 per day.
I recently heard another confirming testimony from a Middle Eastern worker with Operation Mobilization, based in Atlanta. In the two years before the 1993 prayer campaign, this man had carefully visited hundreds of families, witnessing to them and offering evangelistic literature. Yet not one person showed interest in knowing more about Jesus. However, in the 24 months after Praying Through the Window, a remarkable change occurred.
In the very same region where the man’s previous efforts had been unsuccessful, more than 2,000 Muslims prayed to receive Christ! He’s convinced that targeted, warfare prayer made the difference.
Signs and Wonders
Perhaps as significant as any factor associated with the current global work of the Holy Spirit is the obvious amplified and intensified increase of miracles throughout the world. What God did in establishing the New Testament church 20 centuries ago is clearly taking place today in increasing ways.
For example, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ recently wrote his ministry partners about the ‘astounding phenomenon of dreams and visions confirming the reality of Christ, particularly among Muslims.’ According to Bright, thousands of letters from Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East responding to a radio program aired throughout the region, described dreams in which Jesus appeared to them saying, ‘I am the way.’ When these Muslims heard the radio broadcast, they suddenly understood what they had experienced in their dreams and requested more information about Jesus.
I have received similar testimonies from our home-to-home evangelism outreaches in Muslim areas. In North Africa, an EHC worker in a city of 1 million people tried to give a Muslim man a booklet about Jesus. The man tore it up and threw it in the evangelist’s face, threatening to kill him.
The following morning at sunrise, the worker was startled by a knock at the door of his tiny apartment. To his amazement, the same young Muslim stood before him asking for another booklet.
‘Where did you get my address?’ the worker asked.
‘Oh, the voice in the night told me your address,’ the Muslim responded. He then described a remarkable encounter in which ‘a voice with no body’ explained that he had torn up ‘the truth’ earlier that day when he ripped apart the booklet. The voice then told the young man where the EHC worker lived and explained that if he got another booklet and believed its message, he would have eternal life.
The next morning the young man obeyed the voice and joyously received Christ. Recently he finished a six-month Bible training course and is now a full-time missionary.
Signs and wonders are occurring among other peoples, too. Recently, on a journey to India, I talked with Jacob George, an EHC worker also serving Wycliffe Bible Translators. Jacob and his wife, Susan, had gone to evangelize the Konda Dora tribe in southeast India in 1979. Yet not a single member of this tribe had responded to the gospel in 10 years.
A breakthrough occurred when Jacob’s assistant, a believer named Devadas, visited the Konda Dora village of Sopha. This village was steeped in witchcraft, and Devadas soon learned that sickness had prevailed throughout the population for two years. No amount of sacrifices to their Hindu gods brought relief.
Devadas told them Jesus Christ could heal them, but the Hindus were skeptical. On a subsequent visit, however, the village leader declared, ‘You’ve been telling us about this person called Jesus. What must we do to believe in Him?’
Devadas instructed them to remove all their Hindu charms from around their waists, arms and necks, and place them in a pile in the middle of the village. He also told them to bring all their objects of Hindu worship from their homes and place them in the pile.
All the fetishes were burned that day in a huge bonfire. Within several days every sick person in the village was healed, and 50 villagers gave their lives to Christ.
Soon, the impact spread to four neighbouring villages, and a church was established at Sarsu Podar, the largest of the four. Eighty people now attend this growing congregation. In addition, hundreds of Konda Dora people have turned to Jesus, and 11 villages have embraced Christianity.
Recently, a Buddhist monk high in the mountains of Myanmar (formerly Burma) was worshiping a statue of the Buddha when he heard a voice plainly declare, ‘Go find Jesus!’ So clear was the voice that the monk went immediately to his superior and told him: ‘I must leave today. The Buddha has told me to go find Jesus!’
‘Who is this person called Jesus?’ the superior asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ the monk replied, ‘but the Buddha has said I must find him!’
As the monk entered a neighboring town, he was amazed to see a poster on a wall that said simply, ‘Come see Jesus!’ It was an invitation from Campus Crusade for Christ to a showing of the Jesus film that very evening.
By nightfall the monk had ‘found’ the Saviour. And today he knows it wasn’t the Buddha who spoke to him but God Himself.
These are indeed amazing days. God is moving by His Spirit, creating hunger for genuine spiritual awakening in the hearts of His children everywhere, and setting in motion the greatest global ingathering of souls in the history of the church. Truly, the work of the Holy Spirit today -touching even the uttermost parts of the earth – is beyond imagination.
Examples
* The feared Wa people of northern Myanmar rejected Buddhist statues sent as a peace offering by the government and requested 100 Bibles and Christian missionaries instead. The chief of the tribe of 3 million, a headhunter, recently became a Christian and was baptized – asking to be immersed 100 times, once for each head he had hunted.
Source: Discipling a Whole Nation
* Fugong County, in China’s Yunnan Province, has so many believers that it is known as ‘Christ County,’ with about 90 percent of its 70,000 people professing faith in Christ. Impressed with the falling crime rate and other social benefits, local government authorities are actually encouraging people to believe.
Source: World Pulse, April 1996
* In 1900, South Korea was considered ‘impossible to penetrate’; the country did not have a single evangelical church. By 1986, the country was 20 percent Christian; by 1992, 40 percent. The church doubled to 12.5 million members in only six years, from 1986 to 1992. In 1986, South Korea had 25,000 churches. By 1992, the number had swelled to 37,200. There are 7,000 churches in Seoul, including nine of the 21 largest congregations in the world.
Source: Youth With a Mission
* Hoping to derail an October 1996 crusade in an unreached area of India, a local Hindu faction cut off the town’s electrical supply. But evangelist Sadhu Chellappa brought along a generator to power the lights and 32 loudspeakers, and in the absence of any competing noise, his voice was heard throughout the town of 6,000 people. More than 150 people now attend a newly planted church there.
Source: Discipling a Whole Nation
* Ten house churches have been started among Khmer refugees in eastern Thailand along the border with Laos and Cambodia in the last year. A Khmer believer, Sunthon Rawang, is training the 250 believers to start churches among their people on the other side of the border. Christians have been praying for God to multiply the number of Khmer believers and for the success of Sunthon Rawang.
Source: Advance
* Before 1990, there were very few Christians in Saudi Arabia. Since Desert Storm, more than 3,000 Saudi Muslims have come to Christ.
Every day our workers visit more than 200,000 homes. We have reached over 1.4 BILLION homes in the last 64 years, and seen over 101 million people respond to the gospel! Just last year alone we reached over 77 million homes! We continue to hear amazing stories and testimonies of this work and have exciting pictures and videos from the field.
How we do it
Every Home for Christ has created a strategy for reaching every home on earth with the gospel. We use local indigenous workers with face-to-face evangelism whenever possible, and when it’s not, substantial gospel literature for both adults and children in the local language and dialect are left at the home. Each response is followed up, and many times results in individuals – and even entire families, giving their hearts to Jesus. Every Home for Christ disciples new believers, and channels them into local churches. If there is no local church, we establish Christ Groups — small fellowships of believers that are then nurtured and discipled in their spiritual walk.
Reviews: Building a Better World by Dave Andrews, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit & Surprised by the Voice of God both by Jack Deere, Secrets of the Argentine Revival, by R Edward Miller
Transforming Revivals, by Geoff Waugh
