Revival in the Land pt.4-The Toronto Blessing, Brownsville Revival, and Lakeland Outpouring

On January 20, 1994, in a small Vineyard church in Toronto, Canada a supposed outpouring of God’s Spirit occurred in a small meeting of 120 people. Over the course of the next 12 ½ years, meetings would continue 6 nights a week, and Charisma Magazine reported that an estimated 4,000 churches in England and another 7,000 churches in North America had been impacted by this new revival movement.

 

A little over a year late, on June 18, Father’s Day, 1995, a similar revival broke out at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida. Over the course of the next five years, the church would open its doors for Tuesday-through-Saturday evening revival services to accommodate the thousands of people who arrived and waited in the church parking lot before dawn for a chance to enter the packed sanctuary, some even camping overnight waiting for the doors to open. Leaders of the revival would later estimate that over 200,000 people from all walks of life received Christ as a result of the revival.

 

Some 13 years later, in April of 2008, a controversial Canadian faith healer began holding revival services in Lakeland, Florida. The revival attracted up to 10,000 attendees nightly and around 30,000 over the week. By May 29, it was estimated that over 140,000 people from over forty nations had visited, and 1.2 million had watched via the Internet.

 

But were all of these recent “revivals” truly moves of God? How do we understand their impact? How do they differ from other historic revivals? What do we make of their controversies?