REVIVAL BEGINS WITH PRAYER

A NEW LEARNING
In the late 1960’s Bill McLeod pastored a church of two hundred people in Saskatoon that caught a spirit of prayer. Prayer became the most important activity of their church life. They poured out their hearts to God to send revival to them and their city. In 1971 God sent revival. It went on for months and involved countless other churches and moved to ever large venues to accommodate people night after night. In the years that followed the revival movement moved to every province and every US state having similar life changing results. Families were reconciled. Destructive habits were abandoned. But it all began with concerted prayer because praying people take God seriously.

I believe many in evangelicalism have concluded that to see crowded churches in North America we have to redesign, reorganize, renovate, restructure, rebuild, retrofit, and reshuffle. So we spend money on capital items when we should be spending time in prayer so that God will send revival and people will crowd into any kind of facility where God is busy. Over the decades as we modernized and contemporized our church programming I noticed that we became satisfied with less and less corporate prayer. Then along came the testimony of one pastor Jim Cymbala and the Brooklyn Tabernacle and his first books and videos that inspired thousands of Christian leaders as though Cymbala had stumbled on something revolutionary. Jim was a brand new pastor at his first church in Brooklyn which had only twenty members until one day there was standing room only at prayer meeting and until today when it is deemed a mega church. In his book called Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire Cymbala provides a one-word answer: prayer. He tells how passionate, persistent prayer transforms individuals, revives churches and revitalizes communities.

Instead of losing hope we need to go back to the biblical basics.
Communication with God through prayer is one of the foundational and unchanging essentials of a life with God.

See Bill McLeod's website
See Brooklyn Tabernacle site