During a revival service in 2006, a Pentecostal church in Oklahoma saw a 58 year-old man suffer a heart attack and fall back into his pew. Since people around were experiencing God, they assumed him to have become overtaken by the service. At the end of an extremely long service at 11PM, when the service wound down, people noticed that the man had not moved for at least two hours. They also noticed he was blue. That’s when they knew something was wrong.

They called 911 while people prayed passionately for the man’s healing but he was “pretty cold by then,” says one observer. The ambulance arrived and took him to the county hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The pastor responded to the media with, “We want people to meet with God at our meetings, but not face to face.”

I’m sure that placed a new emphasis on the remainder of the revival services.

We can define revival as a period of unusual blessing and activity in the life of the church. Revival means awakening, stimulating the life, bringing it to the surface again. Revival is not intended to cause death but to bring life to individuals and to the church. It happens in the church amongst believing people, and affects those that are outside also. Now this is a most important point, because this definition helps us to differentiate, once and for all, between a revival and an evangelistic campaign. An evangelistic campaign is the Church deciding to do something with respect to those who are outside. A revival is not the Church deciding to do something and doing it. It is something that is done to the Church, something that happens to the Church.

Bro. Larry