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ArthurRosh
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Joined: 2011/9/26
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 Re:

Started by committment to daily morning quiet time and all-night prayer meetings

 2016/8/24 12:25Profile
dohzman
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Posts: 2132


 Re: Asbury Revival 1970

After I left Indiana and moved back to Ohio the Pastor(Ken AOG church) I sat under for several years(back in the late 80's) was a seminary student from Asbury during that revival. Some of the testimonies he shared were really amazing.


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D.Miller

 2016/8/24 15:40Profile
forrests
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 Re: daily morning quiet time and all-night prayer meetings

Quote:
by ArthurRosh on 2016/8/24 9:25:41

Started by committment to daily morning quiet time and all-night prayer meetings.



Are we hungry and willing enough to pay the price to see it again? Lord, help us!


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~ Forrest

 2016/8/24 15:41Profile
dohzman
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 Re:

They tried to shut it down, Pastor Ken did end up with his doctorates but also had to leave the denomination he was in and go to the AOG because of the manifestation of tongues.


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D.Miller

 2016/8/24 20:28Profile
AbideinHim
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 Re: Asbury Revival 1970

A Revival Account Asbury 1970
By Editorial Staff
Published March 31, 2008

WILMORE, Kentucky – One morning in 1970, without warning, all heaven broke loose during Asbury College’s 10 a.m. chapel service.

“When you walked into the back of Hughes Auditorium … there was a kind of an aura, kind of a glow about the chapel,” said Dr. David Hunt, a Louisville physician who was then a student.

“I always have been reminded of the verse ‘Take off your shoes, for you are standing on holy ground.’ You just walked in and sensed that God had indeed sent His Spirit.”

The service, a routine meeting, was scheduled for 50 minutes. Instead, it lasted 185 hours non-stop, 24 hours a day. Intermittently, it continued for weeks. Ultimately, it spread across the United States and into foreign countries. Some say it is being felt even today.

This year marks the 21st anniversary of the landmark 1970 Asbury College revival, an unplanned, unled display of fervor that has been compared to the Great Awakenings of 1740 and 1800. This year is also the 41st anniversary of a strikingly similar revival Asbury experienced in 1950.

A bigger outbreak – a global revival, in fact – will begin soon, says David McKenna, president of adjacent Asbury Theological Seminary, in his new book, The Coming Great Awakening.

The revival might not start at Asbury, but it probably will begin on campuses, says McKenna, a noted author. He travels to many colleges and says, “I see the signs wherever I go.”

Those signs include a generation of students wounded by family breakdowns and searching for spiritual fulfillment. Much of the coming revival will be a delayed reaction, McKenna thinks, to what happened at Asbury College 20 years ago.

A Baptism of Love

On February 3, 1970, students and faculty members had shown up at the college’s chapel, Hughes auditorium, for what they assumed would be one more routine meeting.

Students were required to attend chapel services three times a week. Asbury, in Wilmore, a city of 4,300 about 16 miles south of Lexington, is an interdenominational Christian college whose roots are in the Wesleyan tradition of the Methodist church. (John and Charles Wesley, brothers, were 18th century revivalists.)

On that Tuesday morning in 1970, Custer Reynolds, Asbury’s academic dean and a Methodist layman, was in charge. President Dennis Kinlaw was traveling. Reynolds did not preach. Instead, he briefly gave his testimony, then issued an invitation for students to talk about their own Christian experiences. There was nothing particularly unusual about that.

One student responded to his offer. Then another. Then another.

“Then they started pouring to the altar,” Reynolds said. “it just broke.”

Gradually, inexplicably, students and faculty members alike found themselves quietly praying, weeping, singing. They sought out others to whom they had done wrong deeds and asked for forgiveness. The chapel service went on and on.

Asbury, like many evangelical organizations, held annual, scheduled “revivals” with guest ministers and services booked in advance. This, however, was not the same. No one had planned it. No one was leading it.

There was just a different feeling about that day,” said Marilyn Blackburn, who was the a junior at the college. She is now a substitute schoolteacher in New Jersey.

People didn’t want to leave she said. They were afraid they would miss something wonderful. J.T. Seamands vividly remembers. Seamands, now retired, was then a professor at adjacent Asbury Theological Seminary, which is a separate institution from the college. He and his wife, author Ruth Seamonds, were waiting for their daughter to come home from lunch.

Sandra Seamonds, an undergraduate at the college, was late. She burst through the door and exclaimed, “You simply wouldn’t believe what’s happening at the college,” according to J.T. Seamand’s book, On Tiptoe With Love.

She was right. Her dad didn’t believe. Eventually, he went to Hughes Auditorium to investigate. The 1,500 seat chapel was packed. When he entered, J.T. Seamands felt as if he had been baptized in an unaccountable spirit of love, he said. His skepticism vanished.

“I said to myself, ‘This is not of man,’” he recalled recently. “‘This is of God.’”

‘The Lord walked in’

Reynolds, the dean, called Kinlaw, the president, who was at a conference in western Canada. Kinlaw, like Seamands, had reservations about the revival. He returned to the campus two days later, in the wee hours of the morning. The meeting, he found, was still going.

“I was scared,” Kinlaw said.

That is, he knew he would be held responsible if matters got out of hand. At the same time, he didn’t want to intervene and quench an authentic move of God.

It was after 2 a.m., but Kinlaw walked to Hughes Auditorium and sat on the back pew. He was approached by a student who asked for his counsel. Though no one knew it, she said quietly, she had been a habitual liar. She needed to make reparations to people on campus she had wronged.

Soon Kinlaw, too, was convinced that the revival was legitimate. Later, a reporter asked him to explain the outbreak.

“I said, ‘Well, you may not understand this,’” Kinlaw recalled, “‘but the only way I know how to account for this is that last Tuesday morning, about 20 of 11, the Lord Jesus walked into Hughes Auditorium, and He’s been there ever since, and you’ve got the whole community paying tribute to His presence.’

“It got real quiet,” Kinlaw said, chuckling at the memory of the reporter’s response.

Twenty years later, Kinlaw acknowledges that people might reasonably think the revival was the result of contagious emotions among students. It was after all, the Age of Aquarius, a time of runaway emotions of many kinds.

“There’s psychological factors involved,” Kinlaw agreed, “because we’re psyches…. But there’s something beyond that.”

One remarkable thing, given the youthfulness of the worshipers, he said, was that the marathon service was uncannily orderly. Worshipers did not become loud, did not speak out of turn, did not fall down on the floor in religious ecstasy.

The feelings were subtle yet, in their own way, overwhelming. Blackburn, the schoolteacher, said she had always been too meek. “I became aware that I needed more boldness in sharing my faith.”

The Revival Spreads

News of the revival spread in newspapers and on television. Strangers flocked to Wilmore to worship with the students. Asbury officials dismissed classes. By Thursday, a revival had broken out at the seminary, across the street from the college.

Leaders of other institutions read of the service in publications as far-flung as The Indianapolis Star, the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and heard of it by word of mouth. They invited Asbury students and faculty members to come and tell what was happening.

One of those who went out to speak was Blackburn, the woman who had been shy about her beliefs.

Wherever the Asburyians traveled, revival followed. By the summer of 1970, the revival had reached more than 130 other colleges, seminaries and Bible schools, and scores of churches, according to published accounts. It spread from New York to California, and even to South America.

When several Asbury students gave their testimonies at the Miridian Street Church of God in Anderson, Indiana, for instance, the church experienced a spontaneous revival that lasted 50 consecutive nights. According to old clippings from Indiana newspapers, the Anderson church soon became so packed that the services had to be moved to a school gymnasium. Up to 2,500 people a night flocked to the gym in hopes of being touched by God.

A Look at History

Putting the 1970 Asbury revival in proper perspective is not easy, although America’s history is peppered with similar phenomena.

The Great Awakenings of 1740 and 1800, for instance, helped change the course of American society by turning a rowdy frontier into the bedrock of Christianity. There also have been many revivals on American college campuses, dating back at least to 1795, when a famous one erupted at Yale.

“I would say that I think that revivals are here to stay in this country,” said David E. Harrell, an Auburn University historian who is perhaps the foremost secular scholar on the subject.

Several have struck Asbury. During a 1905 revival, E. Stanley Jones, an Asbury student, felt called to become a missionary, he later wrote. Jones has since been hailed as among the most influential missionaries of the century.

In February 1950, another spontaneous revival roared through Asbury College. At the same time, revivals touched Wheaton College in Illinois and other campuses. A smaller revival followed in 1958.

The 1970 Asbury revival seems slightly larger in scope than, say, the one in 1950, Asbury officials say. The 1970 movement lasted longer and spread farther. Still its primary explosion was shorter-lived and more localized than history’s biggest revivals, said Mark Knoll, a professor of history at Wheaton College and an expert on evangelical issues.

On the other hand, Harrell said, the Asbury revival occurred simultaneously with a massive neo-Pentecostal renewal in the 1960s and 1970s. The Asbury revival was not itself Pentecostal, in that there was no speaking in tongues or healing by faith. But if lumped with that charismatic movement and the “born-again” revivals of the mid-70s, the Asbury outbreak might be part of the most influential world-wide renewals of the century.

Really, said Noll, Harrell and other scholars, it is too early to gauge the revival’s true place. It often takes a generation or more for a religious renewal to be fully felt throughout society.

Learned Behavior?

Another complicated question is how such revivals happen.

“If you take a non-religious perspective, obviously, it’s sociological factors … learned behavior, patterned response,” said Randall Balmer, a historian of religion at Columbia University. His book on evangelicals, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, is being made into a PBS television series.

“If on the other hand,” Balmer said, “you are inclined to attribute it to the Holy Spirit, as the people involved are, then it’s a miraculous visitation.”

Pressed, Balmer said he wasn’t sure which view was correct. “I guess I’m not jaded enough to dismiss that it might be something, a work of the Holy Spirit,” he said. “At the same time, I think I recognize that the Holy Spirit works through specific cultural and sociological circumstances…. I honestly don’t know.”

Asbury in 1970 certainly was conducive to a revival. The college had a Wesleyan tradition and a history of unexpected revivals. Students were not strangers to the idea. A number had, in fact, been praying for an outbreak.

In addition, the campus was in an upheaval. There was the general distress of the times, and there were tensions specific to the college, stemming from a messy change in administrations a few years before.

Revivals often occur in times of discord.

A Coming Awakening?

That’s partly why McKenna, the seminary president, thinks a major revival could sweep college campuses in the 1990s. However, those campuses might as easily be in Eastern Europe, Africa or Latin America as in the United States.

Those societies, perhaps more than this country’s, he said, are suffering breakdowns of moral consensus and of institutions of authority. Today in this country, too, countless thousands of students have been hurt – by broken homes and childhood abuse.

“You’re really talking to a stressful, wounded group of young people,” McKenna said. “They become the ones who are needy and responsive.”

In December, 18,000 students from many different nations gathered at the University of Illinois for “Urbana 90” a triennial rally sponsored by InterVarsity Missions. McKenna thinks that the meeting might spark another Great Awakening, a multinational, multiethnic one. Some of its leaders might be the same people who were touched by the 1970 revival, who now are middle-aged and hold positions of church and college leadership.

An Open Matter

In the end, it is impossible to say empirically what happened at Asbury College in 1970, or in the many great revivals throughout Western history. Or what will underlie any revival to come.

Experts say revivals result when cataclysmic religious, cultural and historical movements collide. Whether God is present in those collisions is less clear.

Noll, the Wheaton professor, said that the truest test of that is whether the revivals produce lasting changes in people’s lives. Super Bowls create mass excitement, he said, but they don’t alter human beings forever. Unfortunately, the long-tern effects of revivals on individuals have received little academic attention.

If permanent change is indeed the test, then the issue was decided long ago for many of the people who witnessed the Asbury revival.

“It was a real turning point, I think, where I sensed that God really desired more of a commitment on my part of my life to Him,” said Hunt, the doctor. “You stand in that kind of presence and that kind of awe … it’s very difficult, I think, for a mortal man not to really look and examine and say, ‘What does this God want of my life?’”

In the 1970 book One Divine Moment, Jeff Blake, then an Asbury history major, described the revival as a 20th century day of Pentecost. In the Bible, the day of Pentecost was when God poured out the Holy Spirit on His apostles and created the Christian Church.

Today, “I believe that’s true,” said Blake, now with Goodwill Industries of the Bluegrass. “It was the kind of moment that only God could create,” Blake said. “It’s just the kind of experience that lives on with you always.”

Blackburn, the formerly meek woman, agreed. “I changed,” she said. “I was different.” She remains awed that she was allowed to see with her own eyes the outpouring, she said. It left her confident that God is in control of the world and of her life.

Kinlaw, the Asbury College president, started that long-ago week as a doubter of the revival. He ended as a believer in the revival’s power and truth. He is a believer now.

“There was this sense of the divine presence that one doesn’t have often in his life,” he said. “And when you do have it, you never quite get over it …

“You know. You know. You know it in your bone marrow.”

This article was reprinted by permission from the Lexington Herald Leader.


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Mike

 2016/8/25 8:13Profile
AbideinHim
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Joined: 2006/11/26
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Louisiana

 Re: From www.calltoprayer.org

The Asbury College Revival 1970

Every great revival in history has been preceded by earnest prayer. It was so with the 1970 revival which is now referred to as the Asbury Revival, which started in the small community of Asbury, Kentucky, on the campus of Asbury College. The college is situated in the small town of Wilmore in the State of Kentucky, U.S.A., a town of 4,300 people about 16 miles south of Lexington. The college is an interdenominational Christian college whose roots are in the Wesleyan tradition of the Methodist Church.

In October 1969, J. Edwin Orr went to the campus of Asbury College to speak on the subject of revival. In one of the lectures he recounted the story of an earlier revival on the campus of the college. In the question and answer session which followed his address, a student enquired if the earlier revival had produced lasting results. The noted missionary and author E. Stanley Jones was sharing the podium with Orr during those days, and since Jones had been involved in a previous revival at the college, possibly brought about by his own prayers, Orr asked him to respond to the question.

Inspired by what the missionary reported, one female student, whose name has not been preserved, who was deeply concerned about the state of things at the college, asked five other students to join her in seeking the Lord for another move of the Spirit among them. They covenanted to get up half an hour earlier every day, pray and read the Bible, write down what the Holy Spirit told them to do, then do what they had been instructed to do, and share their experience. They agreed to do this for the thirty days of November, meeting together once a week, to check that they were all keeping the covenant, and obeying the Holy Spirit. Other groups had also been meeting for prayer, asking God to bring about spiritual awakening.

In December, all the students went back to their home churches. Then in January, after they had returned, it seems that the President of the college, Dennis Kinlaw, in what was termed the Great Experiment, suggested that the students should covenant together to discipline themselves in prayer and study of the Bible in a more serious way. The prayer group six decided that each one should ask another five students to join them in the same commitment for a further 30 days. They each did this, so there were 36 students praying, studying the word and obeying the Holy Spirit.

During this second period, some of them gathered for half nights or whole nights of prayer, asking the Lord to come and visit them in power. Each time the meeting ended, they looked at each other and asked, "Do you think He will come today?" Their faith was obviously increasing all the time..

The second part of the experiment ended on January 31st. On that day, the 36 stood on the platform at the front of the college chapel, called Hughes Auditorium, and shared what the experiment had done for them. They asked all the other students to join them in the experiment, and form further groups of six. They put slips of paper on each seat, so the students could respond.

They met as usual for their night of prayer on the following Monday, February 2nd, and before they finished, at about 2.30 in the morning of the 3rd, God told them He was coming that day, so they finished and went to bed. And on that day, He came, when the college came together for its assembly.

Students were required to attend chapel services three times a week. On that day, February 3, 1970, students and faculty members attended the college chapel for what they assumed would be one more routine meeting.

On that Tuesday morning in 1970, Custer Reynolds, Asbury's academic dean and a Methodist layman, was in charge. President Dennis Kinlaw was travelling to an appointment in Canada. Reynolds did not preach. Instead, he briefly gave his testimony, then issued an invitation for students to talk about their own Christian experiences. There was nothing particularly unusual about that. One student responded to his offer. Then another. Then another. Shortly before the assembly was due to end, another college lecturer spoke and said,"God is here." Then, looking at the dean, who was sitting in the front row, he said, "If you give an invitation, there will be a response." The dean gave the invitation, and there was a response One after another, they started pouring to the altar."

Throughout the auditorium, students began kneeling in their seats or in the aisles. Some turned the first row of seats into an altar, crying out to God to meet them as he had met so many others. It quickly became apparent to those present that chapel would not end on time that morning. Recognizing what was happening, the school authorities cancelled the lessons for the morning. The Holy Spirit had begun to work in the hearts and lives of the students.

Gradually, inexplicably, students and faculty members alike found themselves quietly praying, weeping, singing. They sought out others to whom they had done wrong deeds and asked for forgiveness. The chapel service went on and on. The original service, a routine meeting, was scheduled for 50 minutes. Instead, it lasted 185 hours non-stop, 24 hours a day. Intermittently, it continued for weeks.

On the Tuesday, the session continued on into the afternoon with the students remaining in the chapel kneeling around the altar. Gradually more and more people found themselves joining in the prayers, and the number of those praying in the Hughes auditorium grew to 1,200. On this first day of the revival, several hundred people committed their lives to Christ.

For many, the thought of eating had left their minds completely, and the huge prayer meeting continued on into the evening. By midnight, although the number of those who were praying had fallen by half, many remained praying through the night. On Wednesday morning at 6 o'clock, 75 students were still praying in the hall. and through the day it filled again as all lectures were again cancelled for the day. The time was filled with praying, singing, confessions and testimonies.

Dr. David Hunt, a Louisville physician, who was then a student, said, "When you walked into the back of Hughes Auditorium, there was a kind of aura, a glow about the chapel." "It reminded me of the verse 'Take off your shoes, for you are standing on holy ground.' You walked in and sensed that God had indeed sent His Spirit."

"There was just a different feeling about that day," said Marilyn Blackburn, who was a junior at the college. "People didn't want to leave," she said, "They were afraid they would miss something wonderful."

The news of what God was doing at the college spread across the street to Asbury Theological Seminary. Many of the students had been feeling a burden of revival for some months, so they held an all night prayer meeting there. The very next morning, the seminary chapel service took on a similar form to the college nearby. Students and lecturers came forward to make humble confessions for all kinds of sins. The next day and for the rest of the week all classes were cancelled. By the weekend, the seminary and college meetings were merged, so that the whole campus communities seemed absorbed in only one thing; getting right with God, and doing His will.

J.T. Seamand, whose daughter was a student at the college, went to Hughes Auditorium to investigate. The 1,500 seat chapel was packed. When he entered, Seamands felt as if he had been baptized into a spirit of love. His scepticism vanished. "This is not of man," he said to himself. "This is of God. The Lord had truly walked in"

On the first two days, no sermon was preached, but instead the time was filled with praying, singing, confessions of sin, and testimonies of personal blessing. "A beautiful spirit of unity prevailed over the whole auditorium."

News of the event spread quickly through the neighbourhood. Friends of the school, together with many spiritually hungry people, soon arrived, hoping to share in the blessing. On Wednesday, the number of visitors rose to 1,300. Yet, there was still no evangelistic message given. The only people who spoke were those students who had been converted in the first two days and who now wanted to tell how God had dealt with them. Yet, even at such times there were usually over a hundred students on their knees in silent prayer. One particular student, who had been present when the revival had begun, did not leave the hall for a total of 48 hours. The power of the Holy Spirit had overwhelmed him, and sustained him.

Within a few days, visitors had arrived at the college from all over Kentucky. Indeed, they came from many places in North America, including California, Florida and Canada. And every one of them was able to share in the stream of blessing. A wave of cleansing and a spirit of prayer gripped all those who joined in the large prayer meetings which ensued.

Even people who were unable to be present began to share in the blessing. Requests for prayer and intercession arrived by letter and over the phone. As a result, a network of intensive prayer soon spread. Other colleges and theological seminaries started to send messages of greetings and requests for prayer, as they sought to share in the work of the Spirit, which the students at Asbury had experienced.

On the evening of the first day, Reynolds, the dean, called Kinlaw, the president, who was at a conference in western Canada. The following day Kinlaw phoned the college from a public phone box. His testimony is amazing. The awareness of the Lord's presence at Asbury College was so strong that it travelled along the telephone wire for over a thousand miles to where Dennis Kinlaw was in a public telephone box in Canada. He felt encompassed by God, and had a sense of apprehension lest he should grieve the Holy Spirit, and an incredible sense of unworthiness at being connected with holy things.

Two days later, he returned to the campus in the early hours of the morning. As he approached Wilmington, the sense of the Lord's presence increased. It increased more when he went on the campus, and even more so as he came near the auditorium He walked up the steps very slowly, feeling very unworthy. "You don't enter the Lord's presence casually," he said.

The meeting, he found, was still going on.It was after 2 a.m., and he sat on the back pew, away from everybody else, not being sure what to do. He was approached by a student who asked for his counsel. Though no one knew it, she said quietly, she had been a habitual liar. She needed to make reparations to people on campus she had wronged.

When a reporter asked him to explain what had happened, he said, 'Well, you may not understand this, but the only way I know how to account for this is that last Tuesday morning, the Lord Jesus walked into Hughes Auditorium, and He's been there ever since, and you've got the whole community paying tribute to His presence.'

"One remarkable thing, given the youthfulness of the worshippers, he said, was that the marathon service was uncannily orderly. Worshippers did not become loud, did not speak out of turn, did not fall down on the floor, but just prayed and confessed, praised God and gave testimonies of what He had done for them.

The Revival Spreads

News of the revival spread in newspapers and on television. Strangers flocked to Wilmore to worship with the students. Leaders of other institutions read of the revival in publications as far-flung as The Indianapolis Star, the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, or heard of it by word of mouth.

(For the substance of the following report, I am indebted to Dr Kurt Koch.)

After three days and three nights of prayer, two of the students rose to their feet and declared that they felt a responsibility towards other colleges in the land. While Mark Davis went to Greenville College, Wayne Anthony felt called to visit Azusa College. And so the missionary work of Asbury College began. The college's own report described quite clearly how the students decided after 72 hours of prayer that they should spread the blessing further for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. These messengers were supported by the unceasing prayers of those who remained. In the meantime, requests for prayer were coming in, not only from all over North America, but also from other places throughout the world. Soon after the departure of the first two messengers of the gospel, other teams followed. On their return, like Paul and Barnabas in Acts 15: 4, "They declared all that God had done through them." Colleges visited by the teams reported revivals among their own students similar to that experienced at Asbury College itself.

By the evening of the fourth day, some 1,600 people were gathered together in the great auditorium at Asbury. There were students there from many other universities and colleges. But, it was not curiosity which had drawn them. Each one had been driven by a desire to meet with God. The college staff appointed one of their members to act as public relations officer between themselves and other institutes of further education. On top of this, reporters began to arrive from various newspapers and from Christian magazines. The special characteristics of the revival were all on the same plane: a spirit of worship, prayer; thanksgiving; supplication and intercession. The intensity of their prayers was the key to the answers they received from heaven.

On the Sunday following the commencement of the revival, instead of attending their usual places of worship, many of the inhabitants of Wilmore went to the college's auditorium. They were irresistibly drawn to this fresh fountain of the blessing of God.

What an experience it was for the visitors when they heard the students testifying of the manner in which the Lord had saved them. At the end of the service, more than a hundred people from the community went forward and began to seek God. The whole front area of the auditorium was filled with people praying, confessing, weeping, praising and being reconciled with one another. No event in years had solved so many problems as that one time on Sunday at the college.

Invitations were received from all over the country. One of the teachers told the students of all the requests they had received. The response was enormous. Of the one thousand students at the college, some four to five hundred volunteered to go out and work on the teams. The first wave of blessing was carried into 16 different States through the work of the missionary teams in this first week. And several thousands of people were converted as a result of their labours.

To keep track of the overall picture, the teams' movements were traced with coloured pins on a map of the United States. Yet, unusual as it may seem for Americans who love to quote impressive figures, the number of those converted was not recorded. Instead, they gave themselves to a far more rewarding task. The college, by means of the radio, brought into being a great network of prayer. By the end of the first week 16 other colleges had joined in the scheme. Later, the number increased fivefold. Such a rate of growth within a single week is almost impossible to grasp. Thousands of people caught up in the streams of blessing issuing from one college.

By the end of the first week, some 12,000 people had come from all over the country to visit the college in order to share in the outpouring of God's Holy Spirit. A minister from Pennsylvania, described how he and his own church had been gripped by the spirit of the revival in Asbury. His life and his ministry had been utterly changed.

The students themselves had continued in prayer for a total of 168 hours. Classes had been discontinued during this time, and they only began again on the Wednesday of the week following the first outpouring. Yet, whenever the students were free, they would make their way to the chapel, for the spirit of prayer at the college was not quenched.

Newspaper reporters were amazed at the results. One of them wrote, "What is wrong with these students? .All of a sudden, they have adopted a different attitude towards the opposite sex. A wave of inner cleanliness has swept away the sexual licentiousness. The militant spirit is gone. Instead of charging through our towns like wild animals, throwing petrol bombs and assaulting our citizens and police, here in the small town of Wilmore, a quiet spirit of prayer and communion with God reigns. While the peace of the nation is being disturbed by political and social unrest, here, in this student revival, the atmosphere has been cleared as if by the presence of God."

After three weeks, the students were still meeting together every day to pray. Throughout the day hundreds of students could be found on their knees in intercession and prayer. Each evening, visitors from all over the United States crowded into the large auditorium which, in spite of its 1,500 seats, was unable to contain all who came. Irrespective of their denomination, everyone shared in this new manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Questions of doctrine and liturgical differences no longer mattered. Only one thing was important: getting right with God and conforming to His will."

After the first six weeks of the revival, Arthur Lindsay, reported, 'More than a thousand evangelistic teams have already gone out. On top of this, the neighbouring theological seminary has also given birth to several hundred teams.'

Wherever the students from Asbury travelled, revival followed. By the end of May, the revival had reached more than 130 other colleges, seminaries and Bible schools, and two thousand witness teams had gone out from the college and the seminary. To this must be added the hundreds of teams that went out from the colleges and churches that were touched by the Spirit of God through the witness of those sent out from Asbury, including the church in Anderson, Indiana, mentioned below.

When several Asbury students gave their testimonies at the Miridian Street Church of God in Anderson, Indiana, the church experienced a spontaneous revival that lasted for 50 consecutive nights. According to old clippings from Indiana newspapers, the Anderson church soon became so packed that the services had to be moved to a school gymnasium. Up to 2,500 people a night flocked to the gym in hopes of being touched by God. Testimonies abounded of criminals being converted; alcoholics being delivered; divided families being reunited, denominational boundaries disappearing; whole schools turning to the Lord, and whole communities being transformed.

By the first week of May, teams of people from this church had visited scores of churches in thirty one states and in Canada. Wherever they went, the power of the Holy Spirit was evident, with thousands making commitments to Christ. In Huntington, West Viginia, the Spirit worked so powerfully that the meetings continued every night for two weeks.

Those remaining at the college prayed for the teams and heard their reports on their return. Wherever teams went, the revival spread. The college remained a centre of the revival with meetings continuing at night and weekends, along with spontaneous prayer groups meeting every day. Hundreds of people kept coming to the college to see this revival and participate in it. They took reports and their own testimonies of changed lives back to their churches or colleges. And so the revival spread. The little town of Wilmore, Kentucky became the centre of a network of revival that brought spiritual life and blessing to untold thousands of people in thousands of communities all over the land.

Looking back, in retrospect, it can be said that the 1970 Asbury Revival, in which many were impacted and converted throughout the nation and even other countries, was one of the 'greatest revivals' of the twentieth century, a time of deep working of the Holy Spirit in which thousands of lives were radically transformed.

And the movement can be traced back to one student gathering five others, who took prayer and obedience seriously, and who covenanted together to discipline themselves in prayer and study of the Bible. When people do this, something is bound to happen, for prayer is the most important activity in which any child of God can be engaged.

For, as Wesley Duewel wrote, "The most wonderful thing is that it can happen again. God is no respecter of persons or places or institutions. The price of self humbling, of disciplined seeking God's face may seem great, but it will be eternally worthwhile."


_________________
Mike

 2016/8/25 10:35Profile
AbideinHim
Member



Joined: 2006/11/26
Posts: 5185
Louisiana

 Re: From www.calltoprayer.org

The Asbury College Revival 1970

Every great revival in history has been preceded by earnest prayer. It was so with the 1970 revival which is now referred to as the Asbury Revival, which started in the small community of Asbury, Kentucky, on the campus of Asbury College. The college is situated in the small town of Wilmore in the State of Kentucky, U.S.A., a town of 4,300 people about 16 miles south of Lexington. The college is an interdenominational Christian college whose roots are in the Wesleyan tradition of the Methodist Church.

In October 1969, J. Edwin Orr went to the campus of Asbury College to speak on the subject of revival. In one of the lectures he recounted the story of an earlier revival on the campus of the college. In the question and answer session which followed his address, a student enquired if the earlier revival had produced lasting results. The noted missionary and author E. Stanley Jones was sharing the podium with Orr during those days, and since Jones had been involved in a previous revival at the college, possibly brought about by his own prayers, Orr asked him to respond to the question.

Inspired by what the missionary reported, one female student, whose name has not been preserved, who was deeply concerned about the state of things at the college, asked five other students to join her in seeking the Lord for another move of the Spirit among them. They covenanted to get up half an hour earlier every day, pray and read the Bible, write down what the Holy Spirit told them to do, then do what they had been instructed to do, and share their experience. They agreed to do this for the thirty days of November, meeting together once a week, to check that they were all keeping the covenant, and obeying the Holy Spirit. Other groups had also been meeting for prayer, asking God to bring about spiritual awakening.

In December, all the students went back to their home churches. Then in January, after they had returned, it seems that the President of the college, Dennis Kinlaw, in what was termed the Great Experiment, suggested that the students should covenant together to discipline themselves in prayer and study of the Bible in a more serious way. The prayer group six decided that each one should ask another five students to join them in the same commitment for a further 30 days. They each did this, so there were 36 students praying, studying the word and obeying the Holy Spirit.

During this second period, some of them gathered for half nights or whole nights of prayer, asking the Lord to come and visit them in power. Each time the meeting ended, they looked at each other and asked, "Do you think He will come today?" Their faith was obviously increasing all the time..

The second part of the experiment ended on January 31st. On that day, the 36 stood on the platform at the front of the college chapel, called Hughes Auditorium, and shared what the experiment had done for them. They asked all the other students to join them in the experiment, and form further groups of six. They put slips of paper on each seat, so the students could respond.

They met as usual for their night of prayer on the following Monday, February 2nd, and before they finished, at about 2.30 in the morning of the 3rd, God told them He was coming that day, so they finished and went to bed. And on that day, He came, when the college came together for its assembly.

Students were required to attend chapel services three times a week. On that day, February 3, 1970, students and faculty members attended the college chapel for what they assumed would be one more routine meeting.

On that Tuesday morning in 1970, Custer Reynolds, Asbury's academic dean and a Methodist layman, was in charge. President Dennis Kinlaw was travelling to an appointment in Canada. Reynolds did not preach. Instead, he briefly gave his testimony, then issued an invitation for students to talk about their own Christian experiences. There was nothing particularly unusual about that. One student responded to his offer. Then another. Then another. Shortly before the assembly was due to end, another college lecturer spoke and said,"God is here." Then, looking at the dean, who was sitting in the front row, he said, "If you give an invitation, there will be a response." The dean gave the invitation, and there was a response One after another, they started pouring to the altar."

Throughout the auditorium, students began kneeling in their seats or in the aisles. Some turned the first row of seats into an altar, crying out to God to meet them as he had met so many others. It quickly became apparent to those present that chapel would not end on time that morning. Recognizing what was happening, the school authorities cancelled the lessons for the morning. The Holy Spirit had begun to work in the hearts and lives of the students.

Gradually, inexplicably, students and faculty members alike found themselves quietly praying, weeping, singing. They sought out others to whom they had done wrong deeds and asked for forgiveness. The chapel service went on and on. The original service, a routine meeting, was scheduled for 50 minutes. Instead, it lasted 185 hours non-stop, 24 hours a day. Intermittently, it continued for weeks.

On the Tuesday, the session continued on into the afternoon with the students remaining in the chapel kneeling around the altar. Gradually more and more people found themselves joining in the prayers, and the number of those praying in the Hughes auditorium grew to 1,200. On this first day of the revival, several hundred people committed their lives to Christ.

For many, the thought of eating had left their minds completely, and the huge prayer meeting continued on into the evening. By midnight, although the number of those who were praying had fallen by half, many remained praying through the night. On Wednesday morning at 6 o'clock, 75 students were still praying in the hall. and through the day it filled again as all lectures were again cancelled for the day. The time was filled with praying, singing, confessions and testimonies.

Dr. David Hunt, a Louisville physician, who was then a student, said, "When you walked into the back of Hughes Auditorium, there was a kind of aura, a glow about the chapel." "It reminded me of the verse 'Take off your shoes, for you are standing on holy ground.' You walked in and sensed that God had indeed sent His Spirit."

"There was just a different feeling about that day," said Marilyn Blackburn, who was a junior at the college. "People didn't want to leave," she said, "They were afraid they would miss something wonderful."

The news of what God was doing at the college spread across the street to Asbury Theological Seminary. Many of the students had been feeling a burden of revival for some months, so they held an all night prayer meeting there. The very next morning, the seminary chapel service took on a similar form to the college nearby. Students and lecturers came forward to make humble confessions for all kinds of sins. The next day and for the rest of the week all classes were cancelled. By the weekend, the seminary and college meetings were merged, so that the whole campus communities seemed absorbed in only one thing; getting right with God, and doing His will.

J.T. Seamand, whose daughter was a student at the college, went to Hughes Auditorium to investigate. The 1,500 seat chapel was packed. When he entered, Seamands felt as if he had been baptized into a spirit of love. His scepticism vanished. "This is not of man," he said to himself. "This is of God. The Lord had truly walked in"

On the first two days, no sermon was preached, but instead the time was filled with praying, singing, confessions of sin, and testimonies of personal blessing. "A beautiful spirit of unity prevailed over the whole auditorium."

News of the event spread quickly through the neighbourhood. Friends of the school, together with many spiritually hungry people, soon arrived, hoping to share in the blessing. On Wednesday, the number of visitors rose to 1,300. Yet, there was still no evangelistic message given. The only people who spoke were those students who had been converted in the first two days and who now wanted to tell how God had dealt with them. Yet, even at such times there were usually over a hundred students on their knees in silent prayer. One particular student, who had been present when the revival had begun, did not leave the hall for a total of 48 hours. The power of the Holy Spirit had overwhelmed him, and sustained him.

Within a few days, visitors had arrived at the college from all over Kentucky. Indeed, they came from many places in North America, including California, Florida and Canada. And every one of them was able to share in the stream of blessing. A wave of cleansing and a spirit of prayer gripped all those who joined in the large prayer meetings which ensued.

Even people who were unable to be present began to share in the blessing. Requests for prayer and intercession arrived by letter and over the phone. As a result, a network of intensive prayer soon spread. Other colleges and theological seminaries started to send messages of greetings and requests for prayer, as they sought to share in the work of the Spirit, which the students at Asbury had experienced.

On the evening of the first day, Reynolds, the dean, called Kinlaw, the president, who was at a conference in western Canada. The following day Kinlaw phoned the college from a public phone box. His testimony is amazing. The awareness of the Lord's presence at Asbury College was so strong that it travelled along the telephone wire for over a thousand miles to where Dennis Kinlaw was in a public telephone box in Canada. He felt encompassed by God, and had a sense of apprehension lest he should grieve the Holy Spirit, and an incredible sense of unworthiness at being connected with holy things.

Two days later, he returned to the campus in the early hours of the morning. As he approached Wilmington, the sense of the Lord's presence increased. It increased more when he went on the campus, and even more so as he came near the auditorium He walked up the steps very slowly, feeling very unworthy. "You don't enter the Lord's presence casually," he said.

The meeting, he found, was still going on.It was after 2 a.m., and he sat on the back pew, away from everybody else, not being sure what to do. He was approached by a student who asked for his counsel. Though no one knew it, she said quietly, she had been a habitual liar. She needed to make reparations to people on campus she had wronged.

When a reporter asked him to explain what had happened, he said, 'Well, you may not understand this, but the only way I know how to account for this is that last Tuesday morning, the Lord Jesus walked into Hughes Auditorium, and He's been there ever since, and you've got the whole community paying tribute to His presence.'

"One remarkable thing, given the youthfulness of the worshippers, he said, was that the marathon service was uncannily orderly. Worshippers did not become loud, did not speak out of turn, did not fall down on the floor, but just prayed and confessed, praised God and gave testimonies of what He had done for them.

The Revival Spreads

News of the revival spread in newspapers and on television. Strangers flocked to Wilmore to worship with the students. Leaders of other institutions read of the revival in publications as far-flung as The Indianapolis Star, the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, or heard of it by word of mouth.

(For the substance of the following report, I am indebted to Dr Kurt Koch.)

After three days and three nights of prayer, two of the students rose to their feet and declared that they felt a responsibility towards other colleges in the land. While Mark Davis went to Greenville College, Wayne Anthony felt called to visit Azusa College. And so the missionary work of Asbury College began. The college's own report described quite clearly how the students decided after 72 hours of prayer that they should spread the blessing further for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. These messengers were supported by the unceasing prayers of those who remained. In the meantime, requests for prayer were coming in, not only from all over North America, but also from other places throughout the world. Soon after the departure of the first two messengers of the gospel, other teams followed. On their return, like Paul and Barnabas in Acts 15: 4, "They declared all that God had done through them." Colleges visited by the teams reported revivals among their own students similar to that experienced at Asbury College itself.

By the evening of the fourth day, some 1,600 people were gathered together in the great auditorium at Asbury. There were students there from many other universities and colleges. But, it was not curiosity which had drawn them. Each one had been driven by a desire to meet with God. The college staff appointed one of their members to act as public relations officer between themselves and other institutes of further education. On top of this, reporters began to arrive from various newspapers and from Christian magazines. The special characteristics of the revival were all on the same plane: a spirit of worship, prayer; thanksgiving; supplication and intercession. The intensity of their prayers was the key to the answers they received from heaven.

On the Sunday following the commencement of the revival, instead of attending their usual places of worship, many of the inhabitants of Wilmore went to the college's auditorium. They were irresistibly drawn to this fresh fountain of the blessing of God.

What an experience it was for the visitors when they heard the students testifying of the manner in which the Lord had saved them. At the end of the service, more than a hundred people from the community went forward and began to seek God. The whole front area of the auditorium was filled with people praying, confessing, weeping, praising and being reconciled with one another. No event in years had solved so many problems as that one time on Sunday at the college.

Invitations were received from all over the country. One of the teachers told the students of all the requests they had received. The response was enormous. Of the one thousand students at the college, some four to five hundred volunteered to go out and work on the teams. The first wave of blessing was carried into 16 different States through the work of the missionary teams in this first week. And several thousands of people were converted as a result of their labours.

To keep track of the overall picture, the teams' movements were traced with coloured pins on a map of the United States. Yet, unusual as it may seem for Americans who love to quote impressive figures, the number of those converted was not recorded. Instead, they gave themselves to a far more rewarding task. The college, by means of the radio, brought into being a great network of prayer. By the end of the first week 16 other colleges had joined in the scheme. Later, the number increased fivefold. Such a rate of growth within a single week is almost impossible to grasp. Thousands of people caught up in the streams of blessing issuing from one college.

By the end of the first week, some 12,000 people had come from all over the country to visit the college in order to share in the outpouring of God's Holy Spirit. A minister from Pennsylvania, described how he and his own church had been gripped by the spirit of the revival in Asbury. His life and his ministry had been utterly changed.

The students themselves had continued in prayer for a total of 168 hours. Classes had been discontinued during this time, and they only began again on the Wednesday of the week following the first outpouring. Yet, whenever the students were free, they would make their way to the chapel, for the spirit of prayer at the college was not quenched.

Newspaper reporters were amazed at the results. One of them wrote, "What is wrong with these students? .All of a sudden, they have adopted a different attitude towards the opposite sex. A wave of inner cleanliness has swept away the sexual licentiousness. The militant spirit is gone. Instead of charging through our towns like wild animals, throwing petrol bombs and assaulting our citizens and police, here in the small town of Wilmore, a quiet spirit of prayer and communion with God reigns. While the peace of the nation is being disturbed by political and social unrest, here, in this student revival, the atmosphere has been cleared as if by the presence of God."

After three weeks, the students were still meeting together every day to pray. Throughout the day hundreds of students could be found on their knees in intercession and prayer. Each evening, visitors from all over the United States crowded into the large auditorium which, in spite of its 1,500 seats, was unable to contain all who came. Irrespective of their denomination, everyone shared in this new manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Questions of doctrine and liturgical differences no longer mattered. Only one thing was important: getting right with God and conforming to His will."

After the first six weeks of the revival, Arthur Lindsay, reported, 'More than a thousand evangelistic teams have already gone out. On top of this, the neighbouring theological seminary has also given birth to several hundred teams.'

Wherever the students from Asbury travelled, revival followed. By the end of May, the revival had reached more than 130 other colleges, seminaries and Bible schools, and two thousand witness teams had gone out from the college and the seminary. To this must be added the hundreds of teams that went out from the colleges and churches that were touched by the Spirit of God through the witness of those sent out from Asbury, including the church in Anderson, Indiana, mentioned below.

When several Asbury students gave their testimonies at the Miridian Street Church of God in Anderson, Indiana, the church experienced a spontaneous revival that lasted for 50 consecutive nights. According to old clippings from Indiana newspapers, the Anderson church soon became so packed that the services had to be moved to a school gymnasium. Up to 2,500 people a night flocked to the gym in hopes of being touched by God. Testimonies abounded of criminals being converted; alcoholics being delivered; divided families being reunited, denominational boundaries disappearing; whole schools turning to the Lord, and whole communities being transformed.

By the first week of May, teams of people from this church had visited scores of churches in thirty one states and in Canada. Wherever they went, the power of the Holy Spirit was evident, with thousands making commitments to Christ. In Huntington, West Viginia, the Spirit worked so powerfully that the meetings continued every night for two weeks.

Those remaining at the college prayed for the teams and heard their reports on their return. Wherever teams went, the revival spread. The college remained a centre of the revival with meetings continuing at night and weekends, along with spontaneous prayer groups meeting every day. Hundreds of people kept coming to the college to see this revival and participate in it. They took reports and their own testimonies of changed lives back to their churches or colleges. And so the revival spread. The little town of Wilmore, Kentucky became the centre of a network of revival that brought spiritual life and blessing to untold thousands of people in thousands of communities all over the land.

Looking back, in retrospect, it can be said that the 1970 Asbury Revival, in which many were impacted and converted throughout the nation and even other countries, was one of the 'greatest revivals' of the twentieth century, a time of deep working of the Holy Spirit in which thousands of lives were radically transformed.

And the movement can be traced back to one student gathering five others, who took prayer and obedience seriously, and who covenanted together to discipline themselves in prayer and study of the Bible. When people do this, something is bound to happen, for prayer is the most important activity in which any child of God can be engaged.

For, as Wesley Duewel wrote, "The most wonderful thing is that it can happen again. God is no respecter of persons or places or institutions. The price of self humbling, of disciplined seeking God's face may seem great, but it will be eternally worthwhile."


_________________
Mike

 2016/8/25 11:10Profile





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