NEWS FEATURE: Mega-Revivals Touching Lives of Churchgoers

c. 2000 Religion News Service WILLOWICK, Ohio _ The bodies are falling so fast church workers can barely keep up with them. The Rev. Jim White is feeling it now. As the choir cries out, “Lord have mercy,” White nimbly moves across the sanctuary, touching the foreheads of worshippers crowding around him. Volunteers, stepping over […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

WILLOWICK, Ohio _ The bodies are falling so fast church workers can barely keep up with them.

The Rev. Jim White is feeling it now. As the choir cries out, “Lord have mercy,” White nimbly moves across the sanctuary, touching the foreheads of worshippers crowding around him.


Volunteers, stepping over the prostrate forms of those already “slain in the Spirit,”have to move quickly to catch the latest falling bodies and cover them with blankets.

Just another Saturday night at Greater Cleveland’s longest-running revival.

Revivals, evangelistic meetings where an outside minister is brought in to give a spiritual boost to a congregation, are commonplace in many evangelical churches. The meetings usually are limited to a few days or a week.

In this storefront church in Willowick between a bank and a liquor store, however, people have been coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights for more than two years to feel the presence of God in anticipation of the Second Coming.

Harkening to the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of people throughout North America have flocked to mega-revivals in places like Toronto; Pensacola, Fla.; and Smithton, Mo. But it is here, in places like Willow Praise Assembly of God in Willowick, that the international movement is touching the lives of local churchgoers.

When Jesus returns to Earth, Willow Praise will be prepared.

“Whether he comes tonight or 10 years from now, we can’t think of a better way to get ready,” said the Rev. Larry Bogenrief, pastor of Willow Praise.

The second chapter of the biblical Book of Joel talks of the coming of the day of the Lord as a time when God “will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”

Many evangelicals interpret the book as indicating worldwide revival will precede the end times. Among the signs giving these Christians hope that Jesus will return soon are technological advances that have allowed the Bible to be translated and preached in hundreds of languages. Growing events such as the National Day of Prayer, schoolchildren rallying around the flagpole to pray and a new emphasis on fasting also are cited.


But perhaps the most dramatic evidence in a nation whose largest Protestant groups _ Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals _ were forged to a large degree on the fires of revivalism are the outsized revivals in places like Pensacola. There, the Brownsville Assembly of God has drawn millions since 1995. Large revivals like Brownsville and Smithton have become mini-industries, with books, CDs, schools of ministry and pastors’ conferences attempting to spread the movement.

And that is happening, say evangelical observers.

Lee Grady, editor of the evangelical magazine Charisma, said his reporters find out about a new long-running revival every day.

“I would say that it has certainly shifted to the grass roots,” Grady said. “It’s obviously going on in so many places we can’t keep track of it.”

In this area, after the pastor returned from Brownsville, Christ the King Church in North Olmsted had revival services five nights a week for approximately two years ending in September 1998.

Bogenrief attended a conference given by the Rev. John Kilpatrick, Brownsville’s pastor, in Columbus and visited Brownsville before his church began to pray in 1996 for revival. The church prayed for more than a year before scheduling a revival on Nov. 21, 1997.

It did not get off to an auspicious start. The evangelist for that weekend canceled. The day before, Bogenrief contacted a local minister, White, who agreed to come on short notice.


The evangelist, who was used to being the one to whip up a congregation, was startled by the enthusiastic response of the congregation that first night.

“I thought they were all loony, all crazy,” said White.

The church had made no plans beyond the first weekend, but it was obvious something special had occurred, the pastor said. “The Lord said something simple to me. `If you make room for me, I will come,'”Bogenrief said.

One weekend led to another weekend, and one month to another month. Last November, the Shoregate Revival, so called because the church is in the Shoregate Shopping Center, celebrated its second anniversary of Friday, Saturday and Sunday night revival services. Since it started, the revival has had more than 3,000 visitors, with 150 people being baptized and 500 making public commitments to Christianity, Bogenrief said.

On any given weekend, people from 15 churches attend, he said.

On one Saturday in January, some 75 worshippers have turned out. About 20 people raise their hands when the pastor asks who is visiting from other churches. They are people such as Mark Churchill, 46, of Richmond Heights. He grew up in a variety of mainline churches but drifted away in college and did not return until he attended a Billy Graham crusade in 1994.

Now he and his family spend their vacations at Brownsville in Pensacola and go to the Willow Praise revival in addition to services at their own church.

“People want to be more sold out to God,” said Churchill, who described just going to church on Sunday as “sort of like giving God a tip rather than giving him your whole life.”


These revivals are not for the uncommitted.

For the first hour or more, worshippers sing contemporary Christian songs accompanied by a band and choir. The dress is casual _ a lot of boots and jeans and flannel shirts _ but not the spiritual intensity.

Worshippers may be sprawled in meditation in front of the church or dancing a Christian version of the Funky Chicken as they feel the Holy Spirit move them.

“You’re going to have some fire here tonight. How many need some fire tonight? Amen, alleluia,” Bogenrief cries out at the beginning of the more formal service.

White compares the action at Willow Praise to the scene at Jacobs Field. Only instead of cheering for the Indians, worshippers here pump their fists into the air and repeatedly chant, “Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, yes, yes Lord.”

Think an hour on Sunday is just about right? You’re in the wrong place, White tells churchgoers.

Why do people come, week after week, for more than two years to a storefront church with institutional white lighting, chairs instead of pews and just a simple wooden cross up front inscribed with the words “For God so loves you”?


Many revival-goers spoke of having a personal encounter with God during the intense worship.

“It’s just between you and God, you two,” said Rose Chapman, 49, of Willoughby Hills.”You’re having a relationship with him, and nothing else matters around you.”

Fred Mocnik, 41, of Wickliffe, said the best way to describe the experience is that one feels the presence of the Lord. “I think people our age are looking for something real in their lives,” he said. “They’re really looking for a true touch from God, that the presence of God is with them.”

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In one development that would gladden social reformer Charles Finney, the 19th-century preacher and former Oberlin College president who is often called “the father of modern revival,” the spiritual immersion has led to greater involvement in the community.

Willow Praise has started ministries to the homeless in which 10 volunteers travel each month to different sites in the city to distribute clothing and food to people without permanent shelter. Also, each week about seven volunteers lead a sidewalk Sunday School program at a local low-income apartment complex.

“They have become a church with an attitude that the church isn’t the building, it’s the people,” Bogenrief said.

The people at Willow Praise also consider themselves part of a larger movement.

Tom Phillips, a former senior crusade director for Billy Graham and the author of “Revival Signs: The Coming Spiritual Awakening,” said 160 million people in nearly 200 countries are engaged in prayer for world revival. The strength of the movement depends as much on revivals such as the one in Willowick as it does on larger meetings, he said.


“I do think that’s the way one would hope a movement that is really a movement would go,” Phillips said. “I don’t think the location or number is that important. It’s the fact of connectedness.”

In this area, the small revival in a Willowick shopping center is only the start of something bigger, White and Bogenrief said.

“I believe this is the time. The order from God right now is revival,” White said. “I believe God’s ordered revival for this whole Northeast Ohio region.”

DEA END BRIGGS

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