Preparing the Church for Revival

The following is a pre-recorded program. Welcome to The Wine of Fire. Thanks for joining us. Such a joy to be with you, Dr. Brown.

Thank you. All right, so we've gotten to know each other the last few years. You had known of me or read some of my stuff in years before, but we've gotten to know each other well. Tell me a little bit about the history of Radiant Church. When did you get involved?

How far back does it go? Yeah, Radiant Church has a history of 26 years. It's almost been 27 years that my wife, Jane, and I moved from Grand Rapids down to Kalamazoo, which is, for those of your listeners that don't know about our little town here, it's a small Midwestern city that's really built around a couple of colleges and universities. So it's a very progressive, very college-oriented city that, at that time, 27 years ago, Jane and I were involved in doing young adult ministry at a very large church. We felt like God stirred our heart that our next assignment was going to be planting a church from the beginning, and that was in 1996 when church planting wasn't, like, in fashion the way it is today. The idea of planting a church was, it was bigger than life, but we really knew that God had called us to do that. So we moved down here, did not know anybody, didn't have any money, didn't have a building, no experience, 24 and 25 years old, but we had in our hearts a picture, a vision, that we believe was from the Lord about what he wanted to do.

And so we started in the most rural corner of Kalamazoo that you could find in a high school that the mascot's name was the Blue Devils, and the only room we could rent in the whole town was this room that had a sign over it that said, Welcome to the Devil's Den. Really? Oh, come on! For real. I didn't know that for the story.

For real. And so that's where we started church, with an overhead projector, about 80 wobbly blue chairs. How did you draw people in? At that time we knew a few people that were driving to the church we were being sent from, that was about an hour away. I think we started with eight people at our first interest meeting, 17 people, and then on our first Sunday morning in September 8, 1996, we had 72 people that had heard about what we were going to do. We had a Gideon's revival.

The next week we went from 72 to 50, and that was where we started, and that was 27 years ago. All right, so let's fast forward to today. Yeah. Radiant Church, proper, right here in Kalamazoo.

We'll talk about the network afterwards. Yeah. But tell me about Radiant and the campuses right now. Well, currently Radiant has three locations in our city. Richland, which is our original location, Portage, and then downtown in our city center, and Radiant Church now is currently a church of about five or six thousand people, by God's grace.

Yeah. All right, and what about young people? You started with young adult ministry. What about young people in your church? That was part of the call of God on my life very early on, was to be a voice to my generation, and so that started in youth ministry. Jen and I lived in Kansas City for a couple of years, served as a part-time youth pastor in different capacities, and then, like I mentioned, did young adult ministry. When we moved down here, part of that call was we knew we were called to impact young adults, and a college town was a perfect place to do that.

So from the very beginning, everything that we did was really driven at impacting young people. All right, so today, in a given week, how many young people are involved? What are the age ranges of people that are seriously involved in the church?

Yeah, well, we have two groups of two groups of people. We have young adults that are college students here in our city, as well as we have our own Radiant School of Ministry, Radiant School of Worship, so there are several hundred. I mean, if I were to say five or six hundred on any given week that are involved or more, and then if you add high school and junior high, there's probably probably a thousand or or more young people that are involved in the life of Radiant Church, not just on weekends, but during the week, in prayer meetings, in youth services, in small groups, in our schools of ministry. Yeah, and I've been in the services and seen the whole front of the building flooded with young people, worshiping God, kids, young adults, going after God. So what role has prayer played in the growth of the church?

It's central. You and I have talked about this, but that was one of the very first things that we felt like God was marking us as a church, that we were to build a praying and a worshiping church. From the very beginning, I'd encounter with the Lord in my car about three months before we launched, and it's a longer story, but the short version of it is, the Lord met me at a time when I was really anxious about how to build a church. I said, God, I don't have any experience.

I need you to help me. And the Lord met me in my car that day, and the word that he gave me, it was so clear, was, Lee, build a praying and a worshiping church. And at that time, I had been greatly impacted by authors like Leonard Ravenhill, A.W.

Tozer, E.M. Bounds, even David Young E. Cho. One of the books that I read as a teenager that impacted me greatly was Cho's book, where he recounts how he built his church in Korea post-World War II on prayer. The book is called Prayer, the Key to Revival, and that book impacted me. I came out of a church that had a vibrant prayer culture, and so when Jane and I put down our roots, we probably did everything that church growth conferences would tell you you're supposed to do.

We probably did that all wrong. But the one thing that we did was we said, from the very beginning, we're going to be a people of prayer. We're going to have prayer meetings. We're going to seek the Lord.

We're going to call people to prayer, and we're going to model what it looks like to be a praying church. So right now, just in terms of the ongoing life cycle of the church, not people praying alone at home or your own prayer time, but the public life cycle of the church, how often are there prayer meetings? Is it weekly?

Is it daily? We have a prayer room right at the center of what we do in our downtown city center that integrates and is very synergistic with our schools of worship as well as with our church community, and we have prayer meetings morning, noon, and night Monday through Saturday. So I think we have like something like 20 different prayer meetings throughout the week, usually an hour set with worship, a prayer leader, a prayer focus, and then about a thousand or more people that on a weekly basis cycle through our prayer meetings.

It's at the heart of everything that we do. We consider the prayer room the furnace of the church. It's like, when that's hot, what we're doing in our weekend services at our other locations, other locations, they're burning with the fire of God as well. Yeah, I remember reading an amazing story from evangelist James Stewart.

So this is probably shortly after World War II. He was called as a boy to be an evangelist, wanted to be a soccer player, football as they call it in UK. God called him to be an evangelist, and then he began ministering in Eastern Europe, and he he went in to minister one night and was shocked that the opening night it was like heaven was dramatically open and people flocking to get right with God and weeping in repentance, and he thought this only takes days of ministry and preaching to to penetrate the hearts that deeply and to to bring about that openness to the spirit, and he was shocked by the results of the opening night.

The next night he got into the building early and was just kind of wandering around the building and happened to stumble in a room where the people there were engaged in such focused prayer they didn't even know he walked in, and he realized these people had prepared the way in prayer, and if you think of it, he referred to his throne ministry, so if you think of it, the most important ministry we can do is at the feet of the Lord, at his throne, and then if he builds the house, something's going to happen. Yeah, that's right. All right, so the church you came out of in Grand Rapids, your pastor, Wayne Benson, had been touched himself in revival, in the Brownsville Revival. That's where I got to know him.

That's right. What happened to him when he went there? Well, from what I recall, Pastor Benson had gone through a real struggle with his voice, and I think after consulting doctors and physicians, they recognized that he had, I believe, nodules on his vocal cords, and what they did was it put him on vocal rest for quite a while, and that was very discouraging, and he traveled down to Brownsville, and when he was there, he received a touch from the Lord that miraculously healed him and restored his voice, and he brought that back to Grand Rapids and immediately went into a season of revival that really was probably only eclipsed by what God was continuing to do at Brownsville, but in Grand Rapids, that went on for a couple of years where God really powerfully and miraculously visited that church. And what kind of things do you remember seeing back then in your church in Grand Rapids?

When you talk about a wave of revival, and again, our folks were there, the whole team went there to Grand Rapids. That was one trip I was unable to make, but then Pastor Benson and I got to know each other better in subsequent years, and I heard more of the stories, and I remember one line I often quote from him. I just use it as my own, I guess, but you know, he asked which of the 10 spies named any of the 10 spies that said we can't go into the promised land, right?

You don't remember their names. You remember the ones who said we can take the land, Joshua and Caleb. So he was a wise man, the true man of God, but we got a couple minutes before the break. What kind of things did you see back then?

Well, that sounds like a quote from Pastor Benson, because he's full of them. I wasn't in the church weekly during the revival, because I was away at Bible college. You started to plant, right?

Yeah, and we were just beginning to plant, exactly. But I made several visits up there, and I think the thing that was striking to me at the church for many, many years, even before it broke out, because even in the 80s as a teenager, there was a priority on the presence of God and on calling people to salvation. Pastor Benson was an amazing giver of altar calls. During the revival, though, there was such a sweeping sense of conviction when I was there that you could cut it with a knife. There was a weightiness of the tangible abiding presence of God in that place, and when they gave the altar call, whether it was Sam, Rolf Kogel, who's the pastor there now, he was the evangelist in those days, or Pastor Benson, you didn't have to diminish what you were calling people, and you didn't have to work hard at it.

You gave the altar call, and people rushed the altars. And what it struck me with in those days, and what I saw marked it even Brownsville from a distance, was that when God shows up, conviction fills the room, and it cuts the heart of men. And that has stuck with me because that's the true mark of revival and almost any other revival or awakening and outpouring that you see in history. Yeah, the presence of God comes deeply, and because things are not right, that's why you're praying for revival. So the Holy Spirit now reveals what's wrong, and people who walked in feeling great, I'm good, God's happy with me, etc., they run to the altar. I had so many pastors telling me that they would bring their people down to Brownsville because their people needed a fresh touch from God. And the pastors, they were the first ones running to the altar to repent because God convicted them of leaving their first love, or the spiritual part, or complacency, or whatever it was. All right, when you come back, I want to talk about what's happened recently in your church, some very, very significant things, some amazing testimonies, things you've seen with the MIs, friends. This is going to lead us to the ministry directly to you, because it's not just about a church here in Kalamazoo, it's about a God feeling in America.

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Start with only one thing. Jesus said there's plenty of time in one day to worry about the things for that day, and since that's true, there must be something that you can cut out. Whatever it is, quit talking yourself into holding on to it. It may take a bold step to humble yourself and tell others that you're over-committed. Then as soon as you can, drop out of that one thing that you really don't have to be doing. Afterwards, you will find more peace of mind and life will become less of a burden and more of a joy. Do it today.

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Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. So just before we get back to the subject of revival, I gave you a little challenge or an invitation as we just heard from our sponsor, Trivita. So I told you to go to trivita.com and order the nitric oxide and mild health and to use them for one month before your workouts. Now, the worst case scenario, if you don't find they benefit you the same way they benefit me, you made a donation.

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Okay, all right. So you have recently seen God move in a very powerful way in the church. So again, friends, remember if you came here on a given Sunday and you were here and you see the hundreds of young people at the altar seeking God during the worship time, you know, just coming up to worship in the front, you see the passion of the congregation, you see the hunger, the thirst. And you're a teacher, you've got a great theological library, a serious student of the word, so it's not hyped up emotionalism.

Your school of worship produces these beautiful songs, so many Christ-centered, cross-centered, beautiful songs, so there's substance in the worship. But if you were here a year ago, you'd say, wow, God's really moving here, something's happening, this is wonderful. But something beyond that happened recently, so tell us about that. Yes, so we came into 2023, as we always do, entering into a 21-day season of prayer and fasting. We've done that for many, many years, as have many churches. But this year was markedly different. We came into it, and the day that we started, which was January 8th, Sunday, that Sunday morning, I could feel that there was an increase in the hunger of the people for the Lord.

And a lot of times with a fast, it takes you a couple days, especially coming out of the holidays, to kind of ramp up. But we noticed in our prayer meetings, in our Sunday morning services, and then we launched Sunday night for three nights, we called them revival nights, the way that people were leaning in was different. And it caused me to really dig in a little bit in prayer and just say, Lord, what are you doing? And we went through the whole month of January, through our season of seek, and it was unlike any other time. Our prayer meetings were more populated, worship was more passionate, the response to the message seemed to be different, and we even talked amongst ourselves and our leadership team, God's doing something.

Jane and I went to Mexico on vacation, as you do in Michigan, you need to get a little warm weather. And so we went away at the beginning of February, and while I was sitting next to the pool, Jane and I were sitting there, I was scrolling through, and all of my friends started texting me, have you seen what's happening at Asbury? Have you seen what's going on at Asbury College? As a student of revival, I'm very familiar with like the outpouring that took place in 1970 and several others throughout the 20th century at Asbury that seems to be kind of a bellwether of what is about to happen on a national level.

So I started paying attention, my friends are going there, I had a bad case of FOMO, it's like I want to be there so bad. And then we had a group of our School of Ministry students who saw it as well and decided, our director Toby Cavanaugh said, let's go down to Asbury. They jumped in a van, drove down there, got in, it was in some of the early days of the outpouring there, and they were so touched by it in a profound, but in a very simple way, because if you know much about what happened to Asbury, it wasn't lights and glam, it wasn't hype, it was very pure, it was very innocent, very simple, but very powerful. And our young people came back from that, they just literally went in a 24-hour period of time, came back, and Thursday morning we went into our 8 a.m. prayer set, and it was supposed to go from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., but the prayer set kept going, and it kept going, and it kept going, and it went around the clock for one day, two day, three days, on into the next week, and into the weekend. I came back shortly after it started from Mexico, and I was supposed to start that weekend, that Sunday morning, I was supposed to start a new series on family and marriage, and the Lord arrested me and said, Lee, do not just start this series, I'm doing something. And it was evident, people were flooding to our prayer room, our people by the hundreds were flooding to the prayer room around the clock, word got out that God was doing something there.

It was mostly led by Gen Z, it was mostly led by college students and Gen Z, it was amazing. And there was a strong presence of the Lord, testimonies were being given, prayer just kept going and going, and we didn't want to disturb it. So that Sunday morning I said, Lord, what do you want me to do?

And he said, I want you to talk about what happens when I come. So I preached a message called When God Comes. Yeah, and you texted me beforehand, you texted me beforehand, you felt the fear of God.

I did, I felt like, I've got to get this right. And I need to let our people know what God is doing, what He's beginning to do, what we've talked about for years, and I believe Asbury was just kind of the sprinkling on the windshield, and what he's doing in our prayer room. And that day I... And when you say the sprinkling on the windshield, you mean that... I feel like, yeah, I feel like what we've seen the first part of 2023 is just God in His mercy, like pouring out His Spirit at Asbury and at a few churches and a few college campuses. His way, it's like sprinkling on the windshield when there's a deluge up ahead, when you're driving in your car, and it's a warning, and it's a merciful warning. It's God saying, I still can, I still will, and I'm about to.

All right, now one other thing before we get into what actually happened. I understand the terminology when God comes. Those who study history of revival understand that terminology. People talk about God stepping down from heaven, or children would say Jesus came to our village. But others would say, but the Holy Spirit's always at work. God fills the universe. Jesus is here with His people. So what do you mean when God comes? Yeah, obviously we believe God's transcendent, but He's also immanent.

So He's everywhere all at the same time, because He's omnipresent, but there are times, and you can see that in the Bible, where God makes Himself obvious, where He breaks... Seek the Lord while He may be found. That's it. He breaks into history, makes Himself known in a tangible, physical way.

I love what R.T. Kendall says. He says that God's manifest presence is when God makes... Hey friends, Michael Brown here. You know, it seems the whole country now is talking about revival. Could it be that a fresh wave of revival is here? Friends, I've said for decades, without a fresh wave of revival in the church and awakening in society, it's over for America as we know it. And that's where I wrote the book, Revival or We Die. A great awakening is our only hope. Friends, when you read this book, it won't just give you a vision of what revival can do in society, in the church, but in your own heart, in your own life, in a light of fresh fire, and it ignites something in you, a hunger or desire, a vision of what God can do through a yielded life. Revival or we die. I even have a whole chapter where I share intimate, open prayers I've prayed to God, even in recent years, to ignite a fresh, a first love in me. I believe as you read it, something will be ignited within you as well. But you know, whenever revival comes, there's controversy. And that's why I wrote the revival answer book.

I wrote it in the midst of the Brownsboro revival, answering the many honest questions. Is there too much emotion? What about shaky?

What about falling? What about unusual things that happen in revival? And can we really expect revival in the last days?

Will things only get worse? When you order this hardcover edition of Revival or We Die, I wanna give you this book, the revival answer book, 300 page book. I wanna give it to you absolutely free. So here's the number to call, 1-800-538-5275. That's 1-800-538-5275. Or go to AskDrBrown.org.

Just click on shop. And when you do, you'll see the special offer, the hardcover edition of Revival or We Die. A great awakening is our only hope. Along with the revival answer book is our free gift to you when you order. One more time, the number to call 1-800-538-5275. The time for revival is now. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the line of fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. So we were just in the early stages of the story of this outpouring that you had, this first sign that the reign of the spirit has fallen in revival. So again, you've got a healthy church, a growing church, a thriving church. I didn't even talk about the network of churches, but how many churches are part of the radiant church network in America? There's about 65 churches that are part of our family of churches across North America. All right, so not only has God used you to birth this, there's a radiant movement and school of worship, ministry, etc. So healthy, thriving, and yet the hunger for more.

There's got to be more. So you preach this message now on when God comes with tremendous sobriety. You texted me the day before just overwhelmed by His presence and wanting to handle it rightly because you had this holy fear that you're speaking.

Every time we get up to preach, we're speaking as God's vessels and mouthpiece. So it's a very sacred thing, but you felt it even more. What happened that day? I did. I preached at Zachariah 10 where it says to ask the Lord for rain in the season of rain.

10-1, yeah. And I talked about what was happening at Asbury, answering the question, when these type of things happen, when we see people impacted by the manifest presence of the Lord in powerful ways, what we some would describe as a revival or an outpouring or awakening, how do we respond to it? And what does it mean?

And what has God done in history? That was kind of the tenor of the message. And our church was packed that day because there was such this Psalm 63 hunger and thirst for the things of God. And at the end, I gave an invitation for people to come forward. First of all, I gave a every head up, every eye looking around, nobody moving. So not every head down, every eye closed.

This was blatant. And I gave a strong salvation altar call. This is the time to seek the Lord.

And over a hundred people came forward in each of our services. So this is in a church service on a Sunday morning and you give a call for people to be saved. Get out of your seat.

So not just to come and be blessed, come and get in touch so you can prosper, get a miracle. No, this is you need to repent. You need to surrender to Jesus. He's real.

He's moving. This is the time to seek the Lord. This is the time for you to get right. And I didn't ask people to raise hands.

I said, I want you to get out of your seat, come forward. And people rushed to the altar. We have three locations at every location and just found a place and God touched them. Worship. We dismissed our last service, but yet we didn't get out of there until well over two o'clock. I mean, many people lingered in worship. We called a spontaneous service that night.

We said, we're supposed to be together. Sunday night service. And our room that we hosted in Seats 1200, we had 1800 people flood that building that night on a two-hour notice. Any young people show up? Pardon? Any young people show up?

Are you kidding me? I mean, it was just packed, just packed with young people. And I think that's significant because right now, I think the church has lost hope that a generation can be impacted by God. We believe the lie that Gen Z and a millennial generation have moved beyond Christianity, have moved beyond the Bible, don't need Jesus.

We've got everything. But what we haven't realized is this is a generation, one of the largest. If you take millennials and Gen Z, put them together, it's the single largest generation American history has ever seen. But it's also a generation that's never seen a move of God. They've heard about them. Many haven't even heard about them, but is in desperate need of it.

And what I saw that day and what I'm seeing across the landscape of America is that the wood is dry and ready to catch the flame. Yeah. And with so much anxiety and COVID, the isolation. Suicide, depression.

Yeah. And even the larger fears, global warming. Is this the end of the world?

What's going to happen with nuclear bombs? And they live with that certain sense of tension, the bombardment of social media. There's been tremendous negativity dropping out of churches, scandals in the churches.

They turn them off, politicizing the gospels, turn them off. And yet they're hungry. They're hungry. They're hungry for the real thing.

They're looking for answers. I mean, the nuclear family's broken down. They're connected to everything, but they belong to nothing.

They've got the world at their exposure in their pockets on a device, but yet their heart is bankrupt. And that hole that nothing else can fill is just screaming for an encounter with something supernatural. Yeah. So God starts moving then. You have that prayer meeting. I remember you texted me about the remarkable turnout that night. What happened in the weeks that followed? Our prayer meeting kept going. And then the next week I did part two of When God Comes, gave another altar call, same response, hundreds. And I think in three weeks we saw over 500 people receive Christ.

We started pulling people up in the service to give testimonies about what God was doing. And again, young people coming out of— one young lady coming out of a trans background during COVID, identifying herself as bisexual, then transgender. And she's all over TikTok and social media. She stands up and gives a testimony. She had her pictures of here, I'm becoming a boy and this whole thing. Yep.

Short hair and different stages, marching and pride parades, TikTok videos that she pulled up. But then she stands up and testifies that in the last year that she's come into the church, she's found Jesus, she's found community, she's been transformed and changed, and that Jesus is real. I mean, it's powerful.

Lit the place on fire. And testimony after testimony after testimony of God healing people, saving people, rescuing them, speaking to them, transforming their lives. And it's just, it went on like this for almost a month. Just really intense in our services and in our prayer meetings.

That's really the furnace that kept it burning. All right. But at a certain point, you realize that that intensity was waning some, so you're not just trying to work it up. So the first thing you have to do is you have to welcome God when he comes.

Yes. The Spirit's moving, something unusual is happening. You have to welcome that presence. You have to say, okay, we've got to be out of the building at a certain time. Let's gather here to pray. Let's do this.

Or, hey, let's gather to go in the community and reach out. You've got to take the step where God's moving, God's stirring. And then you open the door and go another day, go another week. At a certain point, though, you realize, okay, there's normal life. The responsibilities you have, your pastoral team has, their parents, kids, work, all this. So now the question is, okay, if God keeps moving like this, or what if it intensifies?

Yes. Then what do we do? How do we sustain this? Now, again, it's easier said than done.

And in hindsight, we can look back at Brownsville and God moving in incredible ways. And my week was 70 to 80 hours of ministry-related activity in a week, and other leaders the same. You had other people working full-time jobs, then in five, six-hour services, night after night after night. How do you sustain this? What have you learned from this initial run?

And again, this is partly theorizing because the full rain hasn't come. And that's part of what we're trying to do, help other pastors and leaders as God moves to be ready. But from what you've learned thus far, what do you understand is going to be a key to seeing something sustain long-term?

First thing I did was I called you and asked for some advice. But the second thing we did is, as a leadership team, we came together and I told them, I said, this is uncharted territory. Revival, for me, has always been defined as God by His Spirit restoring the church back to New Testament Christianity. And so if revival is what we're supposed to be living in, anything else is the alternative.

Which means, what do I need to prune in order to make room for the real thing? So we, as a leadership team, came together and said, okay, what do we need to do? We want to steward this well. Do we feel like this is continuing? Do we continue Sunday nights?

Do we change our service structure? What about prayer meetings? Are we going to go around the clock? And we kind of gauged it day by day, praying into it. And what we felt like is that in God's mercy, He's given us this sample, like a Costco sample, so to speak, and saying, this is what's coming, prepare for it. And we felt like the Lord said that this is the first wave, more are going to come.

But this is to help us prepare for it. And again, the goal is not to have endless revival services, but to have a revived church. Yeah, that's right.

Right. So let's just say, you know, the church, you've got, you know, going up, up, stronger, stronger, and then over a period of years, leaving its first love, getting prayerless, getting complacent, worldly, discouraged, et cetera. So the, you know, the graph's going down, down. So you have a season of revival, now it jumps up. It's not the up, down, up, down, it's to now get to that place of consistency. Get to that place where, no, it's not necessarily the building absolutely packed every night.

People run into the altar every night. But on a regular basis, the presence of God is strong. On a regular basis, people getting radically converted. On a regular basis, solid disciples are being made and sent out and making a difference. That should be happening. As you got this first glimpse of an outpouring in its early stages, what did you immediately begin to see as an experienced pastor and a pastor of pastors that would be some of the first challenges, the biggest things that your local church pastor is going to have to deal with?

Because most of them are juggling lots of different things. So as you got kind of this initial stage, what have you already seen? Okay, I could say this to other pastors already in terms of some words of wisdom. Well, I think the first thing is that we recognize that revival and spiritual formation are not polar opposites. You need revival is God putting the paddles on the chest of the body of Christ, reviving us back to our first love. But formation or discipleship is where we help people walk that out. And what we immediately recognize is we got to get better at that formation piece and grow in our discipleship making because if revival really comes when revival really comes, we're going to have people whose lives are a mess coming into the church, lost people, people with sexual baggage, demonic baggage, some people who have never been in church and they're going to need more than what we have. And so we need to get that in order.

God in His grace doesn't give us more than we can care for. So we saw that. The other thing is we cannot have a regularly scheduled programming status quo mentality. It's like this is our rhythm, this is our routine. We've got to be flexible. And when God shows up in a powerful, significant way, we've got to flex with that. And that means some of our scheduling and our programming has to be able to be shifted. And that's the key because we can get, and pastors can get very rigid.

I can get very rigid. This is how we do things. This is our schedule. But I think God is saying, what do you want more? Do you want the tabernacle structure? Are you happy with the tabernacle structure without my presence?

Or are you pursuing my presence more than anything else? And that also means then, let's say a pastor has a building, they're renting on a Sunday morning, high school, and they set up, take things down. So we don't have a place to gather, we have homes. In other words, you can say, hey, anyone wants to open their home, let's gather and pray. There are all kinds of different dynamic ways to do things. But I think those two words of wisdom are really important.

I just want to restress them before the break. Friends, as I speak with Pastor Lee Cummings here in Kalamazoo, one, the operational structure has to be solid to start. You know, if the foundation's not good and now you build too high, everything collapses. So are you based already in prayer, in a solid way in God, and are you making disciples? If God's going to send all these new people in, what's going to happen to them, right?

Is it just going to be in the front door, out the back? So have those things in order. Don't try to fix things. We'll fix the race car once we're on the track.

No, it doesn't work like that. And the other thing is to be flexible. Not to be chaotic, but to be flexible. And to say, this is the Lord's church, not our church. This is what happens when God comes and these little tastes are what's going to get us ready for the rest.

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That's 800-811-9628. All right, I'm sitting here in Kalamazoo, Michigan with Pastor Lee Cummings, and I do want to talk before we're done about the atmosphere here and the liberal progressive atmosphere of Kalamazoo and what you've done, the standards you've taken, because Friends Michigan, similar to California in certain ways in terms of some radical leftist agenda that's really pushing and dominating it, and Radiant Church has pushed back against that in the Lord. In your own spiritual experiences, a man of God, a man who loves worship, loves the presence of God, in these four weeks where God visited in an unusual way, what was most precious to you? What was most precious to me, and it truly is, it's beautiful, is to see young people in full throttle worship, to just see them encountering the Lord, to see awe and wonder in their faces that God's real, to see them experiencing the Father's touch. You know, so many times you see these young people that are just on their faces with reckless abandon, nothing to lose, even some young people waving some banners. I'm not necessarily a banners guy, but it's like you just see these people, these young people just passionate, waving. How can you not see that as a beautiful expression of worship? And the intangible thing that you just saw was the Father just drawing near to this generation of kids, little kids, young people and college students who have so much that they're facing. It's so different than just seeing, you know, people sitting in a crowd, liping the songs, singing the songs.

These young people were just going for it. And to me, it just took me back to when I was a teenager and I encountered the Lord as a 12, 13-year-old kid, and it just reminded me of the goodness of the Father. That impacted me so greatly.

Yeah. So what are you doing now in terms of continuing to posture yourself to be ready for what God does next? Well, we're doing what we've done for 26 years, which is we're a praying and worshiping church.

Personally, I feel like I can't lead any further than I go. So I'm trying to live a life where I'm really seeking after personal revival daily and calling our church to that. And our prayer meetings, morning, noon, and night, are environments where we keep throwing the wood on the fire to keep it stoked. And it's out of there that I believe that God continues to revive us. And as I spoke to the folks at the church last night, I used that principle, give the fire something to burn. You keep throwing wood in the fire, the fire keeps burning. So the wood of prayer, the wood of spiritual hunger, the wood of outreach, those things, we continue to do that. God will visit. And you've got this network of dozens and dozens of churches. Are they seeing things happening? We are. We had churches in Kentucky, one of our radiant churches in Kentucky, that had nightly services for several weeks. Prayer meetings, churches in Alabama and North Carolina and Colorado that are experiencing very similar types of things. Yeah, God's moving. We've been saying this for years, knowing it's coming.

Thank God for this season. All right, so Michigan, you've got the governor who's very liberal progressive. You've got an attorney general, very liberal progressive. You, with grace, compassion, have stood against LGBTQ activism, caring about people, loving people, but standing against activism. It's a pro-abortion state. So you have, with all the spiritual emphasis and exalting Jesus and being prayer-based, that to you is not meant to withdraw from the culture.

That's right. That's meant stand up, speak out. What happened with the pro-life rally? So in Michigan, our governor passed and our legislation passed a law that is one of the most progressive abortion laws out of any state in the United States.

It's comparable to North Korea and China. You can, technically, you can abort a child all the way up into the 39th week and point of delivery. And in many cases, you can do it without parental consent.

I mean, it's just an extreme, extreme law. And when Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, there was quite a backlash in our city because our city, as a university city, is very progressive. And progressive to the point that the walkways, as you're walking down the street. The rainbow.

Rainbow colors. On our crosswalks. And we're constantly reminded that our battle's not with flesh and blood, but it's against principalities and powers, spiritual hosts of wickedness and heavenly places.

That it's a spiritual battle. And when the Roe v. Wade was overturned, our building downtown was vandalized with abort God. It was spray painted all over the front of it because they knew that we're a very strongly pro-life church. And then when the elections, especially for the governor election, was coming up in November, we knew that this law was about ready to be passed. So we called in two weeks for a prayer meeting.

We didn't hear anybody speaking out against it. And so we called the church in our city to pray for God to move on this issue of abortion pro-life movement. And in two weeks, miraculously, we had over 50 churches. The bishop of the Catholic diocese joined us.

Black and white. We gathered, you know, brown, Spanish-speaking, English-speaking, multi-denominational. We all came together in downtown in Arcadia Park. And we had over 3,000, some say 4,000 people that gathered for a night of worship, intercession, and prayer. So it wasn't a political rally? It was not a political rally. It was a moral rally. Moral, we were crying out to God to heal our land, forgive us of the sin of abortion, and to change the trajectory that our state was going in.

It was one of the most unifying things I've ever been a part of. But obviously, when you do something like that in a city like Kalamazoo, you're going to take some heat. But we counted all joy because Jesus took the heat, and we're called to not just be a house of prayer, but we're also called to be salt and light that preserves righteousness in our city and our state.

And even though things have gone in a wrong direction, you know that Jesus is Lord. And even though we're not guaranteed that laws are going to go our way in this world, we understand it's a fallen world, do you believe that God could change the climate in Michigan? Yeah, I don't mean stop the snow. I don't mean the physical climate. That would be a huge miracle. The spiritual climate.

Yes, I do. And I believe he could do it in a day. I think one day, nothing is too difficult for our God. No, many people never thought Roe v. Wade would ever be overturned, that there would ever be justice for unborn children, and yet we saw it miraculously took place. And I think the same thing can happen on multiple different issues and multiple different things that are deemed political. They're moral first.

I believe God can change a generation in a day. And you walked into a place one day and saw a magazine, an interesting magazine that some folks had put out that didn't like you. Yeah, well, in our city, there is a segment of people that are very activist on the issues of LGBTQ plus and all the other letters that go with that, and anti-abortion and have a very, very progressive worldview. And we love them because Jesus loves them, and we're doing our best to show the kindness of God.

But in our city, we're not well liked. And so a group of these people put together a magazine with me on the cover and said, resist radiant and some other expletives that I can't say on your show. And inside basically listed all the reasons why we're a cult, all the reasons why we're the problem in Kalamazoo, all the reasons why people should resist it. And they sold it for a dollar. So Jane and I went into the bookstore where they sold it. They immediately recognized us. We asked for a copy of it. And what was interesting is at the end, they said, can we have your email so that we can send you a receipt? And my email ends with radiantchurch.tv. So they immediately knew we were.

Got it. Yeah, and I guess being on the front cover as well. But you know, the thing is when people are hurting in Kalamazoo, when people are desperate, when people are looking for meaning and truth and help, you know where they're going to go. That's right. They're going to show up at radiant and other like-minded churches. We only got a couple minutes left, but before we started the interview today, you brought in a stack of books.

Yes. My recent book, Revival, Or We Die, Great Awakenings, Our Only Hope, because you've got some pastors coming in to spend a few days with you, talking, fellowshiping, praying together. So I signed these books for them. And it's our resource offer this month, Revival, Or We Die, plus the Revival Answer Book that answers lots of questions of what happens when God moves. So when you read this book, how did it impact you?

I think, and I'm not just saying this because you're here and this is your program. I think that this is one of the best modern books written on the subject of revival. And it is so current in the day in which we are living in. I wish I could put this book in the hands of every Christian, every church in America, because it gives people a vision of what can be. It's sobering. It recognizes the moment that we are in culturally, but it also gives hope and a prophetic vision of what God can do.

I really believe that God right now, these thousand fires that are all over that are going to burst forth, are like a thousand tent poles that God's going to elevate, praying churches across America, people that are sober-minded, prayerful, that are going to help re-erect the Tabernacle of David over this nation for God's presence to fill it and for a third great awakening to erupt on America. And this book is a perfect blueprint and template for the church to see and believe. And I was stirred writing it. You know, certain books are like teaching books and you work through and you feel grace in writing it, but it's one thing.

This, I felt like the wind at my back pushing as I wrote. So friends, here's you can get a copy of Revival or We Die together with Revival Answer Book. We give you Revival Answer Book free and it'll be a hardcover edition of Revival or We Die. Call 800-538-5275.

800-538-5275. You know what I also love when I tell people to get the books? I don't make a dime. We sell 10 million of these through the ministry.

I don't make a dime. This is about getting materials out and then the funds that come in, we just turn around to reach more people for revival, for moral and cultural restoration and revolution, and for the redemption of Israel. So 800-585-ASK, get the book Revival or We Die. And then with that free Revival Answer Book. And that Revival Answer Book is really fascinating because we go through history and what happens when God moves and the things that seem unusual and what's from above, what's from below, what's earthly, what's heavenly, how do we sort these things out?

And what does scripture say about end time outpouring or things only going to get worse? So we dig in the word, we dig into history. That book is free when you get Revival or We Die. You can also just go to our website askdrbrown.org.

A-S-K-D-R-Brown.org and just click on shop. All right, Lee, we are out of time, but I am really excited to be standing with you as we're in the early stages of what's going to be a massive move of God's all around America. And friends, maybe you've heard some stuff that's encouraged you today, brought you hope. Maybe you say, wow, this is really going to happen. God's movement. The time is now. And the ones we're going to see touch more than anybody, young people are going to be transformed. Jesus can't resist us.