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Asbury ‘Revival’ Spreads To More Christian Universities, Schools And Churches

by | Fri, Feb 24 2023

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As Asbury University’s outpouring of prayer and worship moves off campus to new locations in Kentucky, similar events are taking place at other American Christian Universities.

One is at nearby Eastern Kentucky University and The University of the Cumberlands from where campus minister Jacob Ratliff told The Christian Post that while he “would hesitate to call it a revival at this point,” he nevertheless was “seeing significant evidence of the Lord’s work.”

Continual services are taking place at Tennessee’s Lee University.

Christian filmmaker Alex Kendrick called it a ‘revival’ that’s been going for two weeks.

Lee’s campus pastor Rob Fultz described it as “a predominately spontaneous movement of prayer and a beautifully sacred movement that is ongoing.”

At Alabama’s Samford University hundreds of students have been taking part in nightly prayer and worship services that last well into the early hours of the morning.

Similar signs of ‘revival’ are evident at Cedarville University in Ohio, Regent University in Virginia and Baylor University and A&M University in Texas.

One student at A&M described their event as the “closest thing I’ve ever seen to [the book of] Acts.”

Cedarville president Thomas White said his university was experiencing “a special outpouring and sensing of the presence of the Lord that will be left to the historians to determine if it is a revival.”

The outpouring has also spread to a Tennessee school for students from kindergarten to Grade-12.

The Grace Christian Academy of Knoxville experienced an unplanned worship service where several middle school students held prayer, shared confessions and even made professions of faith.

The Asbury phenomenon has spurred some churches and other ministries to hold special services, including Pulse of Minneapolis which has a ministry focused on reaching out to young adults.

After church founder Nick Hall and other leaders visited Asbury they “felt led to change our regular, monthly college and young adult service to simply make space for God to move.”

“The elements were simply Bible, prayer, worship and repentance. We said we would stay as long as people were hungry. Hundreds of people flooded our space for 53 hours, non-stop. This movement certainly isn’t ending.”

Evangelist Anne Graham Lotz raised the idea in a recent blog post that the Asbury ‘revival’ could be a sign of Jesus’s return.

The daughter of Billy Graham quoted James 5:7: Therefore, be patient until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain.

After her nephew visited Asbury and witnessed “Christ being honored, God being glorified, the Spirit at liberty,” Ms. Graham Lotz posed the question:

“Could what [nephew] John-Paul observed be the beginning of the ‘latter rain’? An outpouring of God’s Spirit in one last great awakening before Jesus returns? Lord God, let it be so for the glory of Your great name, for the salvation of our nation, for the revival of Your people.”

Jon Erwin the director of Christian movie Jesus Revolution which is being released on Friday (February 24) told The Christian Post that he never dreamed his film about the Jesus Movement which has been called the greatest spiritual awakening in American history, would open in cinemas in the midst of another wave of revival moving at college campuses across the US.

“I just think there’s a divine hand on the timing of the film,” he said.

He pointed out that a similar revival at Asbury University in 1970 played a big part in the Jesus Movement in the 1970s.