“And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and violent men take it by force.” Matthew 11:12 (NASB)
“We used to pray a lot in Los Banos”, says Robert Duran. Robert came to the Lord in Los Banos and went on from there to be on many Agape Force teams all over the U.S. and then to Mexico as a career missionary.
That team and the work that was done in that town was built on prayer more than on any other single thing we did or method we used to reach people. We prayed A LOT!
Jim and I were sent to Los Banos for a short time to prepare for the “Pot Pourri” album. Sometimes Tony would send us to another team for a while, even when we were usually busy touring. We were there, not only to help with the music or to assist them in outreach through our music, but to get away in a quiet place and work on the album projects. In the early years, before the Force had any record contracts with Christian record companies or became successful in the Christian music industry, Jim was heavily involved in producing the albums. That was what was happening when we went to Los Banos.
For our entire stay the Los Banos team prayed around the clock. I remember vividly setting my alarm clock for 2:00 a.m. That was my hour in the round the clock prayer chain. I think Steve Harrison, who led the team, and every single team member knew that if anything significant was to happen, it had to come through prayer. So we prayed and prayed and prayed.
But, Los Banos was not that different from any other team we were ever on. The whole ministry was built on prayer. Whether it was the Tour Teams, or the Field Stations, or Outreaches, it was all the same. The circumstances or methods might have varied, but the bottom line for every single venture we were ever involved in was prayer.
The spirit, or style, of Agape Force prayer was militant. We felt like soldiers fighting for God’s interests. Even our praise was militant. Aggressive.
As an individual I had many times of sweet, restful, and even peaceful, prayer, praise, and worship. In chapels and on teams there was the whole spectrum of emotions that you might expect, but mostly there was a attitude of spiritual aggressiveness that permeated the atmosphere. We treated our evangelistic efforts and many times even our walk with the Lord as warfare. We were at war with an unseen enemy who sought to deceive and destroy those whom God loved. We were also at war with our own flesh, the sin which could so easily beset us, and with anything that we thought brought pain or sadness to the heart of God.
We were not violent people in the flesh. On the contrary. But, we were extremely violent in prayer. A typical prayer meeting lasted well over an hour. If we really got going prayer could easily go two hours or longer. These days I think this kind of prayer would be classified as intense intercession. For us, intercession went further and deeper still, than what I’ve de scribed. It was connected in our minds with the sheer agony that came with tasting the heartbreak of a loving God. Intercession was like walking with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane.
Many of my memories of prayer times are of team members sitting in a circle, either in chairs or on the floor. We didn’t often pray all at the same time. We would take turns “leading out” in prayer, bringing up the things that were on our heart or the people that we had met as we went about our tasks. In this way, we could agree with each other in prayer and we believed that this not only pleased the Lord, but added power. A bunch of us praying as individuals in a group might not have been as effective.
Prayer would usually start calmly, thankfully. As we focused our hearts together and called upon God to move in our midst, things would heat up quickly. Some people would pace back and forth. Others would lay prostrate on the floor. Some would weep easily. Some would cry out in loud voices. We called on God for the souls of men and we prayed specifically. If we met someone in the park who seemed cold and hardened to the Gospel we would cry out to God and call that person by name. We would pray about the specific things we knew about this person. We would also ask God to show us how to pray. If we didn’t know his name we would describe him and pray fervently that God would do this or that. There is no way to record all the specific answers to these specific prayers. There are just too many. And we lived in such a state of expectation that God would answer and keep his promises to us that we took many of these powerful answers in stride, not even recording them.
A theme song that we sang over and over for many years in the ministry went like this:
We are the soldiers of the Army Of Salvation
That God is raising up to save the World
And we won’t lay down our arms until every nation
Is bowed on bended knees before the Lord...
The work in Los Banos was started by a handful of young men and women who went in under the direction of Jim Henry. On the outside, Jim did not look like the militant type. Most would not have even guessed that he was the leader of the Agape Force team in that town. His intent, however, was to take the town of Los Banos for Jesus. His secret weapon, prayer.
One night, after the customary prayer meeting, the team took a flat bed truck and went into downtown Los Banos for a street outreach. They set up in the parking lot of the supermarket that was across the street from the high school. There was music, as usual, and preaching.
That night Lee and Jan, two of the original members of the team, met a young man named Robert Duran who was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the supermarket. They didn’t know it at the time, but Robert was not there listening to what the team was doing. He was waiting near the corner to complete a drug deal. Of that time Robert remembers:
“What impressed me was that the two people witnessing to me, stood there and talked to me for as long as I would talk to them. Pretty soon it started to rain, but they just stayed there. I was sitting in my car, with my window rolled down just a little bit, and they were standing outside. They just stood there in the rain, talking to me about Jesus for over an hour. I kept leading them on wondering just how long these ‘idiots’ would stand in the rain and talk. I said, ‘There’s something wrong with these people’. But even so, it must have really made an impression on me because the next day I went looking for them.
“When I found the address, the door was open so I walked in. Standing there, just inside the door, I was met by what I considered to be a most bizarre sight. People were all over the living room engaged in fervent, radical, Pentecostal prayer. It really didn’t occur to me what they were doing at the time, but as I stood there watching I realized that they were calling my name. They were praying for me!
“After a while Jerry Lafferty saw me standing there and took me into a side office where we could talk. I was a little flabbergasted by what I had just seen, so I just kind of sat there. Pretty soon, as he was talking to me about my sin, I thought he was getting a little too aggressive and I got upset. I told him that he was wasting his time and that I wasn’t interested. He looked at me and said ‘Your sin is breaking God’s heart’.
“‘Even if God does exist,’ I said ‘He’s not that interested in me.’
“‘Why don’t you ask Him?’ Jerry came back quickly.
“ ‘Ask Him?’ I was incredulous.
“‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘kneel down right here by this chair and ask Him.’
“Well, I considered that a challenge and I was a proud dude. Even though I was not serious about God in the least, I knelt there by that chair and went through the motions of asking God to show me how He felt about me. I did it just to prove this guy wrong and get out of that house full of crazy people.
“I don’t know how to explain what happened next except to say that God instantly showed me my heart and answered my prayer. What I saw broke my heart and I was overcome by the Holy Spirit. I broke and wept. When I finally stood up from kneeling in front of that chair I knew that I would serve God for the rest of my life.
“Even today, in my missionary work in Mexico, I use the same words with many people. ‘If you don’t believe that God is heartbroken over your sin, just ask Him. Let’s ask Him right now.’ I’ve seen it work so powerfully so many times. When you concentrate of the theme and the idea of the heartbreak of God, He will show up.”
Not long after Robert came to the Lord, his friend Carmen gave his life to God. With those two off the streets the drug trade in Los Banos came to a screeching halt. God kept moving. More people came to the Lord every week. Before long the local Churches were experiencing growth like never before. Soon every Bible believing Church in town was bursting at the seams. And it all started with prayer.
When exhorting others, including each other, to live in faith and grow in God we pushed hard for revival. By “revival” we meant bringing back to life that which is dead or almost dead, spiritually. “If you want to see revival,” we would say, “draw a circle on the ground, get in the circle and then pray that revival would come to everyone in that circle.”
After the Los Banos team had been working in that town for a while, they were approached by the neighboring Merced, California police department. They wanted to know if we would consider sending a team to Merced. Every form of crime had dropped drastically in Los Banos since the team had come. Perhaps the same would happen if we sent a team to Merced. We did.