Much as I love studying the history of revivals, there is little to compare with actually seeing and experiencing God at work. This is where my studies get personal. All I have written on past revivals and moves of God in the North-East is based on studying the sources: reading books, articles and newspapers, scrolling through microfilm and talking to living witnesses. When it comes to what is happening in this area now I can write much of it from first hand experience.
Back in June 1994, reports began to appear in a number of newspapers about some strange goings on in an Anglican church in London. Apparently people were falling over, laughing and making strange bodily movements. It was dubbed the “Toronto Blessing” since something similar had been occurring for several months in a church near the airport in Toronto, and the leaders of Holy Trinity Brompton had been there before similar things began to take place here. Soon there were reports that this strange phenomenon was spreading - people were travelling to Holy Trinity Brompton, falling over and laughing, and then finding the same things began to take place when they returned to their own churches.
Nothing in what I read surprised me or disturbed me in any way. Twelve years earlier I had been part of a charismatic Baptist church in Lancashire when an American preacher called John Wimber came to town. Very similar things took place then and for some time afterwards. I saw plenty of people falling over while being prayed for. I remember one occasion when a decision was taken to pray for the deacons in the church and they were called to the front. Not one of them actually made it to the front of the church, each of them collapsing in the aisle as they went. I saw people laughing and shaking, but I also saw God doing powerful things in their lives. In later years I had been involved in prayer ministry at summer camps run by the international evangelist Peter Gammons, and on many occasions I had seen people falling over while being prayed for. I suppose having seen around a thousand people lying on the floor over a period of years, there was nothing in the newspaper reports from Toronto or London which could have shocked me; instead I was encouraged that God was at work in the land.
As the summer went on, the number of people travelling to Holy Trinity Brompton and the Toronto Airport Vineyard increased dramatically. People were going to get “The Blessing” and to take it back to their churches. While some Christian viewed the whole thing as sensual carnal indulgence, those who had laughed and jerked spoke of a new vitality to their life, of being refreshed and renewed. In the North-East there were reports of the “Toronto Blessing” at Kingsland Church in Newcastle, and then at New Life Fellowship in Alnwick. I spoke to a number of people who had been to those meetings and they were all enthusiastic about what was happening, and testifying about what God was doing in their lives.
In August, Ken Gott of Sunderland Christian Centre returned after visiting both Brompton and Toronto. He was a changed man, God had dealt with him profoundly. Meetings began to be held starting Sunday 14th August where people could be prayed for, and the same things which had been seen elsewhere began to be seen in Sunderland. People were being set on fire for God through what was happening to them, and they came back night after night to receive more. Word started to spread throughout the region about what was taking place, and the numbers at the meetings increased. I think it was on Tuesday 23rd August that my friends Andrew and Michelle Duff asked me if I wanted to come along to Sunderland with them. I believe that the decision to go has had a dramatic impact on my life.
Much of what I saw was like any charismatic meeting I’ve been to: lively modern choruses, Bible-based preaching and testimony. What was more unusual was that as people were sharing about what God was doing in their lives they were making some unusual movements and noises. Some people were having great difficulty in explaining what had been happening to them as they appeared to lose all co-ordination and in some cases found themselves unable to speak. Towards the end an opportunity was made for anyone who wished to receive prayer. I suppose I’d got into the routine of only getting prayed for if I felt ill, but we were encouraged to receive prayer to just receive more of Jesus, to let him have greater control over our lives and to allow the Holy Spirit to deal with any deep rooted sin. I certainly recognized that I needed more of the Lord in my life. Although I knew the Lord had brought me up to this region, I had gone through a difficult period, feeling more and more dry and frustrated, on what appeared to be an extended break from any form of ministry and unable to see how the Lord would work where He had placed me. I wanted the Lord to fill me again, to take greater control of me, and to see some of the joy and power I had known some years before.
Before anyone came to pray, we were encouraged just to wait on the Lord. As I knelt, I felt a release, something was happening inside me. The Lord was starting to soak some of the dryness in my life. I felt myself begin to laugh. I could not understand quite why I was doing this. I knew other people in these meetings had laughed, but I certainly wasn’t going to do anything just because other people were doing so. This was something real, and this was certainly the Lord (earlier on I had prayed to ask the Lord to protect me from any deception). The laughter was loud and wild, but I was just doing it without trying, I wasn’t focussing on it in any way, my focus was only on the Lord. After quite a while, when I had recovered in some way, I managed to stand to receive prayer. As I waited and simply focussed on the Lord and my desire for more of him in my life, I found I was starting to wobble and sway. Some people came to pray for me and my movements became more wild and erratic. It was hard to stand, but there was no way I was going to fall or let anyone push me over unless God did it. I felt like a reed blown by the wind as I bent and swayed in different directions as I just went with the flow of what the Spirit was doing. Eventually I went over sideways and found myself lying on the carpet half under a chair. I lay there for quite some time, twitching and giggling, just allowing the Lord to have His way in my life. It took quite a while before I managed to get from the floor and stagger to a seat.
There was music playing - not the band, but a tape. They were playing some of the songs which the Lord had been using in Toronto, but the band hadn’t learnt them yet, so they played the tape instead. Things continued this way for the first few weeks of meetings. I could see Andrew Duff lying on the floor with his leg in the air. Andrew had hurt his leg while at a Good News Crusade camp a couple of weeks earlier, and one of his legs was in plaster. As he rolled around his plastered leg hit the floor with quite a thump. Other people were in all manner of different positions, shrieks of laughter and groans could be heard around the building. When I tried to walk, I found it difficult to do so - I was staggering about. If anyone came near me to pray for me, I was back on the floor laughing again. As someone who never drinks, I have no knowledge of what it is actually like to be drunk, but I guess that I got some idea in those meetings at Sunderland. I suppose there must have been some reason for people at Pentecost to suppose that the disciples were drunk - the kind of behaviour I was seeing and exhibiting could certainly have met with that accusation. Eventually we managed to get back to the car, with Michelle driving (fortunately she rarely exhibits any unusual manifestations after being prayed for, God touches her in other ways), arriving home around 1am. I was still staggering as I made several attempts to get the key into the lock.
The Lord had done something in my life, there had been a real release and a change. One thing that became very clear was that there was nothing wrong in getting prayed for again and again - it was not a case of being filled with the Spirit once and staying full - it doesn’t work, people leak! The force of the expression in the scripture is continuous - keep on being filled with the Spirit. Get prayed for at any opportunity, you can never have enough of God. A few days later I went back to Sunderland again and similar things happened. Word was spreading and more people were coming to the meetings. In fact people were travelling quite a distance, and then going back to their own churches and seeing similar things happening there.
God deals with different people in different ways. With me I felt the Lord pushing me back into something I hadn’t looked at for a long time - church history. This was always one of my greatest strengths when I did my Theology degree in the mid-eighties. I have described myself as a theologian of the Third Testament - in the same way the first two testaments are accounts of God’s dealings with and working through Israel and the early Church respectively, the Third Testament is what the Lord has done since through His people. It is church history, but focussed on the acts of God and people’s relationship with God, rather than facts and dates. Seeing what was happening I wanted to look again at what the Lord had done in the past, and I found that most of the things I was seeing had happened before. In the Primitive Methodist revivals in Weardale in the 1820s people travelled many miles over the fells “to receive the blessing”, falling to the ground and trembling, many of them “being so filled with the fulness of God that they lay on the floor speechless”. After they caught the “holy flame” they would travel back to their own communities to spread the fire. While they linked what was happening with a theological position concerning entire sanctification, what was happening differed hardly at all from what was taking place in Sunderland 180 years later (though it was probably far more difficult trekking over the fells from Middleton in Teesdale to Nenthead to receive the blessing, than flying from the UK to Toronto). Wherever I looked there were manifestations in meetings where God moved in power: when Wesley came to Newcastle, in William Booth’s meetings in Gateshead, in Alexander Boddy’s and Stephen Jeffreys’ meetings.
Most of these occurrences took place during what the books have called revival. There were times when many people were becoming Christians, often when the gospel was being pioneered into new area. At Sunderland however, it was mainly the church which was being affected. Some non-believers were in the meetings and a number got saved, but the vast majority of people were already Christians. It couldn’t be regarded as revival in the classical sense. The term refreshing came to be used, as the best description for what was happening. Dried out Christians were receiving a soaking from the Holy Spirit - many were extremely dry, and needed plenty of soaking.
My trips to Sunderland became frequent. When I could not obtain a lift, I made my own way using public transport (a journey of around an hour using bus, metro and train). God was doing something in my life - though he was causing me a few problems in my church. I was part of an extremely traditional AoG Pentecostal church formed in the wake of Stephen Jeffreys’ campaigns in the 1920s, and the position of the leadership was that God does not do this kind of thing (no-one else from the fellowship had actually been to any of the meetings). They believed this type of enthusiasm has nothing to do with God and everything to do with the flesh. Yet when Stephen Jeffreys came to Sunderland in 1927, one report says he laid his hands on a lady and she fell back “in a swoon”, laying “back in a chair moaning and in a state of semi-conscious upheaval”. Though it was certainly not part of the recent tradition of the church, it was certainly there in some of the most powerful moments of its origin.
The meetings at Sunderland settled into a pattern of running six nights a week, with every Monday off, and the visitors increased, often travelling great distances to receive from the Lord. In the Autumn of 1994, John Arnott from the Toronto Airport Vineyard came to speak at SCC. There were long queues across the car park 90 minutes before the service was due to start. When the doors opened, around 1300 of us squeezed into a building intended for no more than 700. We were packed like sardines into row, and there was almost no possibility of leaving your seat during the meeting. The prayer time at the end was like a party. We had learnt that if someone was trying to get up, all you needed to do was pray and they would collapse in a heap again. People were almost attacking one another with blessings, though in the most good humoured way. Certainly much of this was somewhat fleshly, but probably no more so than much of what goes on in traditional churches all the time.
Fairly early on in the meetings I was asked by David McRae one of the worship leaders if I would like to be involved with the music. Much as it was something I would have liked to do, I felt that it was not something I could do whilst remaining as a member of a church which opposed the renewal. At the time the Lord made it clear to me that it was not right for me to leave the fellowship I was in. It was quite a number of months later, that he released me from that situation, and I started meeting with some friends who had left a different church. About 9 months into the renewal I began to play synthesizer in meetings at SCC and in a number of the conferences, and continued on average about twice a week until the end of the renewal meetings in December 1996. Being on the platform put me in an excellent position to see what was going on.
Over 2½ years I must have been to around 250 meetings at Sunderland Christian Centre. In that time I saw many thousands of people “slain in the Spirit”, and spent many hours on the SCC carpet myself (I even saw the new year in twice on the carpet!). I observed all manner of manifestations and heard all kinds of sounds. There was undoubtedly some flesh in the proceedings, but I believe the vast majority of what I saw and heard was the work of God. I listened to many testimonies of what God had been doing in the lives of people, both from the platform and also from the people I chatted to afterwards. I stopped worrying about the manifestations - in the end how often you fall and how hard you laugh isn’t the real sign of whether God is at work in you, it is the fruit, the change that has occurred in your life, and there was abundant evidence that this is what was taking place in so many cases (including my own).
The focus of the meetings was never on manifestations - it was on God. Manifestations were simply accepted as one of the things that might occur when God shows up in power. Every night there was also powerful biblical preaching. The renewal raised up a number of people from different traditions with a real anointing to declare God’s word. Ken Gott was obviously the key figure, but the Lord also spoke powerfully through Philip Le Dune, Ian Langdown, Andy Fitz-Gibbon, and so many other people from the platform at SCC. The music from those renewal meetings is still highly evocative, and I really enjoyed the opportunity of working with anointed worship leaders such as David McRae, Shaun Edmonston and Joe Ditch, as well as all the really talented musicians from different fellowships around the region who made themselves available to serve the Lord in worship in the renewal meetings.
In the time since the renewal meetings ended, the work at Sunderland has continued to grow. What is now Revival Now ministries oversees a number of fellowships throughout the North-East, and is involved in planting others, as well as running major conferences which still attract people from around the world. For the latest information on what God is doing in their midst, check out their website at: http://www.crown-house.com
God was at work in Sunderland in a powerful way, and it was a privilege to be able to be a part of what he was doing there. Even today (in spite of a new pair of glasses and shaving off my beard) I still meet people who recognize me from the meetings at SCC. But much as I enjoyed being a part of that, I strongly felt that God had brought me specifically to Gateshead, and so I had to seek Him as to where I went next.
Back in Gateshead, I was meeting with a small group of people who didn’t quite know what they were doing or where they were going, but were open to the Lord to direct them. Along with a number of other people from the Gateshead area who we had met at the renewal meetings at SCC we started to hold meetings to pray for our town. Each month we gathered in a venue in a different part of the borough, calling on God to open up a well of blessing in Gateshead. During this period the Lord spoke to us prophetically through a vision of the way paddy fields are irrigated to show us his desire to establish cell groups in the town. It was a time of establishing relationships and finding out who shared our heart. Some who met with us felt that God was calling them to other things, others had different priorities, but many of us recognized that God was calling us together with a purpose.
On Wednesday 10th of January 1996, ten of us met together in a house in Low Fell, and became Vision Christian Fellowship. Our main focus was on cell groups meeting in homes - that was church, not just a part of church. On a Sunday the different cell groups would come together in a room in a local school to celebrate the Lord. Since that time we have seen growth until at one time forty people were gathering together on a Sunday, to times when many seemed to be turning away from what the Lord had called us to, either to meet with others, or to reject the Lord. 1998 especially was a year of severe spiritual attack where the enemy sowed discouragement, yet in the midst of the darkest times, the Lord was at work and it was great to see the way in which some people were growing in Him. We have always sought to bring churches together to pray for the town and to unite in preaching the gospel to the lost - a couple of missions with Don Double which Vision co-ordinated brought great blessings to many people. We have seen people saved, baptized (in water and the Spirit) and released to serve the Lord.
In spite of the struggles and disappointments there have also been times of real blessing and encouragement, together with seasons of refreshing. Following a visit from Rick and Annie Stivers in May 1999 we saw a period of intense outpouring. Week after week the Lord was moving in an increasingly powerful way in every meeting, whether in the school, in the cell groups and in the prayer meeting. Many of the scenes as John Webster struggled to preach on revival were reminiscent of the early days of refreshing at Sunderland, with laughter, groans, shaking, people lying on the floor. One man was released and leaping around like a kangaroo, I was struggling to remain upright while trying to lead worship. In the midst of what appeared total chaos, God was moving powerfully in hearts and lives.
This is where we are at the moment. I will try occasionally to bring things up to date. The Lord is at work in our midst, and I have no way of knowing how it will all pan out, but if we continue to let him have control, I’m sure it will be really exciting. To be continued.....