Cyle Clayton

Did God use the Cross Country Emmaus community and the Walk To Emmaus from 1990-1997 as a tool of revival and renewal in the church in West Central Texas?  God used it to change my Walk with Him radically and, in turn, the trajectory of my life. I know dozens, if not hundreds, of people who faithfully follow Christ and make Him known today who would say the same. My last post gives details about the Walk itself. Let me tell you about what I saw, not what I heard God do in those years.  I was baptized at 8, raised in the church, rebelled against God, became an agnostic, and spent at least 10 years increasing my alcohol intake to deal with the resentment and chaos in my heart and mind. I tried to stop drinking but could not until September 1, 1990, when I sobered up through AA. A year after that, I believed in Christ. 6 months after that, at my mother's and wife's insistence, I went on a Walk to Emmaus. Before the Walk, I was a believer but was scared to read the Bible (because o

I've been trying to write this article for about two weeks. It's taken so long because I wanted to explain the Walk To Emmaus, what it was all about, and how it was uniquely conservative, evangelical, and spirit-filled in the days God used it in my life. One reason is that some will dismiss it since its roots are in the United Methodist Church. They will have a "can anything good come out of Nazareth" opinion. Another is that I have sponsored people on a couple of other Walks in the last few years in this area and found them to be more liberal and less impactful. Well, I'm not going to worry about any of that. I'm still going to do this thing in two parts. The first is the facts about this thing in those days. The second is what I experienced, the lives I saw that were changed. I'm going to do what I said I was going to do with these articles. I'm going to tell about a several-year move of God that was an ongoing revival experience for me. God didn'

"When God intends great mercy for his people, he, first of all, sets them praying." ~ Matthew Henry "There has never been a spiritual awakening in any country or locality that did not begin in united prayer." ~ A. T. Pierson If there is revival, there is prayer, but what kind of prayer? God is always at work in the lives of His people, sanctifying, teaching, encouraging, and transforming them into the image of Christ. Jonathon Edwards and others have distinguished between the ordinary and the extraordinary work of God. Revival is an extraordinary work. It is extraordinary in the number of people affected and the work's speed and depth.   The Bible makes a distinction between ordinary and extraordinary prayer. Jesus had an ordinary pattern of prayer. He prayed with others, but He tended to pray by himself, away from others, late at night or early in the morning (Mk. 1:35; Lk. 5:16; 6:12). On the night He was betrayed, He did what He ordinarily did. He went to a p

Following are quotes from various Christians in their attempts to define revival, or to define the happening we often call revival. "In the history of the church, the term revival in its most biblical sense has meant a sovereign work of God in which the whole region of many churches, many Christians has been lifted out of spiritual indifference and worldliness into conviction of sin, earnest desires for more of Christ and his word, boldness in witness, purity of life, lots of conversions, joyful worship, renewed commitment to missions. You feel God has moved here. And basically revival, then, is God doing among many Christians at the same time or in the same region, usually, what he is doing all the time in individual Christian lives as people get saved and individually renewed around the world."   John Piper "Revival is a community saturated with God. In writing of the movement, I would like first to state what I mean by revival as witnessed in the Hebrides. I do not me

In the midst of all the discussion of what is and what is not "revival," I decided to record what I remember about the revivals I have been privileged to be part of. The Haskell-Knox Revival of 1980 was a tent revival sponsored by a group of area churches. After "cottage prayer meetings" that were attended for weeks by people from many different churches, a large tent was erected on the grounds of the school in O'Brien, Texas. A baptist pastor turned evangelist, Jack Taylor, was the preacher. There were only about 300 in that town and less than 10,000 in the rural area surrounding the location, but hundreds came. Most of what I tell about this revival is from reports to me from others since I was not an active participant until the fourth night. I was a spiritually and physically strung-out 18-year-old when it started. My mother begged me to go each night. I refused and finally yelled at her. She cried, I felt guilty, and I went to the revival on Thursday.  What