Skip to main content

Revival, Cross Country Emmaus, 1990-1997 (Part 1)

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't save me on a Walk To Emmaus. God delivered, revived, and overwhelmed me with the reality of His sovereign love for me on a walk and through the Cross Country and, to a lesser degree, the Big Country Emmaus communities in those years.

A Walk is a long weekend retreat for either men or women. There are fifteen talks, given mainly by the laity but five by the clergy. About six men or women are grouped into tables in which they interact over the talks and other assignments. They form a small group. There are about 40 team members and about 40 pilgrims (participants). All team members have already been on a walk.

Following are the elements of those walks that I believe were instrumental in the move of God. 1) Prayer Cover - Everything was bathed in prayer from the first preparatory meeting through an around-the-clock prayer vigil during the retreat, 2) Agape Love - People in the community do hundreds of hours of sacrificial service before, during, and after a walk to demonstrate the love of God to the pilgrims, 3) God's Word - It saturates the talks, the worship services, and the table talk, 4) Sacrificial Preparation - Every talk is prepared, presented, and critiqued before the weekend and the team spends hours and hours preparing themselves to serve on the weekend, 5) Worship - The weekend is filled with worship, 6) God Glorifying - This is not a self-help weekend, but an all-out effort to move every pilgrim to surrender their life to the service of Christ, 7) Community - Those who have already been, from many different denominational backgrounds, continue to worship and work together in order to bless the pilgrims and to encourage each of them to be faithful to God and their church in the days after the event. 





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Huge Opportunity To Reach Sabine Parish Families With Children

There are many families with children in Sabine Parish. There are 4,141 students in Sabine Parish schools, 6,353 under the age of 18, 29% of the parish population, and approximately 3,000 households with children. So, there are plenty of unreached families with children to reach. There are many churches in Sabine Parish. 70 churches. 1 church for every 313 people. Abilene, Texas brags about the highest per capita churches at 1 for every 563. The national average is 1 for every 1015. We beat the averages. So, we don't need more churches in Sabine Parish, but we do need more biblically sound churches, filled and controlled by God's Spirit, who are committed to God's mission, and who train their members to reach the unreached in our parish. There are far fewer people attending church in Sabine Parish. 7,000 people attend church, between 3,500 and 5,000 on any given Sunday. That attendance is half what it was 25 years ago. So, we need to make disciples, not just converts. Disc...
Post a Comment
Read more

The 1980 Haskell-Knox Revival

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Good News (Part 3): God's grace and our sinning.

God is gracious, but that's not why his grace is available to you. It's available because God is righteous, just, and compassionate. He is righteous because He cannot and will not tolerate sin. He's just because He's promised His wrath on all sins and sinners. He is compassionate because He's sacrificed His Son to satisfy His righteousness and justness. That's why His grace is available.  You will never, ever deserve His compassionate grace, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," (Rom. 3:23). You will never, ever  do anything to deserve it because all of us who receive it "are justified freely by his grace," (Rom. 3:24a) You will never, ever love Him enough to deserve it, but He loved you more than enough to give it, proving "His own love for us in that while we were still sinners," in that, "Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8) God is actually glorified by the greatness of the sin He forgives, Paul writing th...
Post a Comment
Read more