A Revival in America Answered My Prayers for Europe

Look at history! Revivals rarely stay put.

Two weeks ago, I flew nearly 5,000 miles from Rome to Kentucky to witness a revival, something I have prayed for, for years. As someone who left my homeland of Brazil to serve in Italy as a missionary for the past decade, I have continually asked God to make himself known again across the continent.

The videos I watched, the stories I heard, and the time I spent myself at Asbury University, led me to believe that what God had done in Asbury was not for Asbury alone. After all, David Thomas, a local UMC pastor, the person who had taught me most about revivals, was playing a critical role in shepherding this one.

Back at a student chapel at Asbury seminary in 2016, Thomas shared about a trip to an island off the coast of Scotland to interview 11 eyewitnesses who had experienced the Hebrides Revival:

They described something more essential: a kind of spiritual posture that was found among some who were the catalytic core—a spirit of urgency and audacity, an attitude of brokenness and desperation, a manner of prayer that could be daring and agonizing. These friends in the Hebrides referred to it as travailing prayer, “like the Holy Spirit groaning through us,” they said, like a woman … in labor, like Paul in Galatians 4:19 travailing as if in the pangs of childbirth that Christ might be “formed in you.”

Thomas went on:

And … ever since I looked into the eyes of those people who once saw what you and I so long to see, I’ve become convinced that the real beginnings, the true native soil of awakening is the plowed-up hearts of men and women willing to receive the gift of travail.

It was the first time I heard someone putting into words what I and other friends have been experiencing as ...

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from Christianity Today Magazine
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