Confronting The Need
The Street and the Church
“Jesus Christ, the same yesterday today and forever.” All human History is really His-Story. Every awakening starts with a revelation from God to people with hungry hearts. God is looking for people who will hear His Word and honor His Name, determined to bring Him glory above all else by their life or in their death. Every godly visitation owes its origin to a fresh Divine revelation of the nature and character of God, the state of the Church and the world, and the all-sufficiency of Christ to show Himself Lord of all. There has never been a fresh work of God without a fresh word from God. Without a vision, people perish.
Equally significant in an awakening is the grasp and practice of real truth. Whenever God begins to do something in the earth, He “establishes a testimony and appoints a law”. He raises up something supernatural of Himself in someone you can see and gives that someone something significant to say. The sight and the light go hand in hand. There is in the words of A.W. Tozer “no revival without reformation.” The messenger must have a message.
These young people were committed to real and lasting change in both the Church and the world. They were prepared to study, to train, to discipline themselves for godliness. They sought out the Gospel message in the ministries of revivalists, missionaries, and evangelists who had preceded them in history. They learned what these holy pioneers said and why they said it. They made God’s Book their chief reading priority and counted it especially dear; in their training schools they read the New Testament five times in ten weeks. The libraries and bookstores made available to them were filled with the words and works of their spiritual ancestors in the work of missionary revival-based ministry: the Moravians, Wesley and his Methodists, George Whitfield, Charles Finney, George Fox, William and Catherine Booth, Praying Hyde. They cut their teeth on the works of evangelists and revivalists. They read Tozer, Ravenhill, E.M. Bounds, William McDonald. They gave themselves to serious prayer and learned how to weep for lost men and women. They modeled their lives after missionary heroes - Jim Eliot, Sundar Singh, David Brainerd. They sought to come to grips with the challenges of their culture along with C.S. Lewis, Francis Shaeffer, and Os Guiness. They listened to messages by intercessors like Joy Dawson, intense missionaries like George Verwer, and ministers with prophetic hearts like David Wilkerson.
“I am debtor” said Paul - “to the Jews and the Greeks, to the wise and the unwise, the bond and the free.” The Greeks of Paul’s time defined civilization. They were the cool, the cultured, and the classy. Greek was the language of the civilized world, the words of poetry and song, the record of philosophy, history, and martial victory. To owe a debt to a Greek was to know what was going on in their world, to so appreciate and see in its utter lost beauty the fallen image of God, and to so live in that world as to not speak with an accent when they preached the Gospel to it.
Agape Forcers were young people sometimes from sheltered backgrounds who had neither known the scars of the utterly secular nor the cynicism of rejected revival. Some were recently rescued themselves and had to learn the language of the Church to tell what had happened to them in words other than those religious people had never heard. They took a risk that they believed was worth it. They gave their lives and futures to the Wind of the Holy Spirit with a concern for the Church to experience revival and to take it to the streets.
Winkie Pratney