‘No Celebrities Except Jesus’: How Asbury Protected the Revival

While tens of thousands flocked to campus, school officials met in a storage closet to make decisions that would “honor what is happening.”

The shofars didn’t start until Saturday. With them came the would-be prophets seeking to take center stage at the Asbury University chapel where students had been praying and praising God since Wednesday morning; the would-be leaders who wanted to claim the revival for their ministries, their agendas, and celebrity; and the would-be disrupters, coming to break up whatever was happening at the small Christian school in Kentucky with heckling, harangues, and worse.

But by Saturday, Asbury University was ready.

The school had not planned an outpouring of the Spirit. But when something started to happen in the middle of the first week of February—the middle of the semester, a few days before the Super Bowl—an impromptu mix of administrators, staff, faculty, friends, and university neighbors quickly mobilized. They gathered in a storage closet off the side of Hughes Auditorium and then repurposed a classroom to facilitate and support whatever it was that God was doing.

As word spread, the crowds came, and debates raged online about whether this was a “real” revival, these men and women worked untold hours to make sure that everyone who sought God had food and water and restrooms and everyone was safe. Part of the story behind the story of the revival is the almost invisible work that went into protecting it.

“There were 100 people volunteering at any one time, just to make these services work on the fly,” Asbury University president Kevin Brown told CT. “There was a classroom that got redeployed into almost a command center. If you walked in, there were flow charts on the wall and the whiteboards were covered with information. There was a volunteer check-in station. … It was ...

Continue reading...

from Christianity Today Magazine
Umn ministry