A sense of revival erupted this week on a college campus in Kentucky. It could be the sign of a spiritual tsunami headed our way. Students at Asbury College in Kentucky arrived for their usual 10 a.m. chapel on Monday of this week. Some of them are still there today.
Students are worshiping, weeping and praying. Many of them took off their shoes in Hughes Auditorium because they felt they were standing on holy ground. A photo on the nondenominational Christian college’s Web site shows students with their hands raised in praise as they crowd near the chapel’s altar.
“God’s will just broke out,” said one student, Michael Spann. “People were just yearning for God. I can’t even describe it. I didn’t want to leave until I felt the Lord was in me the way He wanted to be.”“There’s nothing else you can do when you meet your Creator face to face like we did yesterday,” sophomore Ben Greenhoe said on Tuesday.
The president of Asbury, Paul Rader, stayed in the auditorium watching the scene until midnight Monday. Folks in the small town of Wilmore, where Asbury is located, heard about the protracted meeting and wandered in. A local grocer sent water and snacks to the campus after hearing that the prayer service was going nonstop.
Wednesday night there were several hundred students praying in the chapel. Some stayed until 4 a.m.On Thursday Rader led the morning chapel and felt what he called “an awesome sense of expectation.” He said: “From the first praise chorus students began coming to the long altar at the front of the auditorium. Soon the altar was crowded with students again. There was incredible freedom in the Spirit as we sang and prayed and shared testimonies of God’s gracious work in the hearts of students.”
This is not the first time Hughes Auditorium has been the site of a revival outbreak. On Feb. 3, 1970, the Holy Spirit invaded a chapel service that was supposed to last 50 minutes. It lasted 185 hours, running 24 hours a day, and then continued intermittently for weeks. It eventually spread throughout the United States and to several foreign countries.
Asbury is an interdenominational Christian college with Wesleyan roots. The 1970 revival broke out when the school’s academic dean, Custer Reynolds, gave his testimony and then asked students to share theirs. After several students spoke, Reynolds said something “broke.” “Then [students] started pouring to the altar,” Reynolds told the Lexington Herald Leader.The newspaper noted: “
Asbury, like many evangelical organizations, held annual, scheduled ‘revivals’ with guest ministers and services booked in advance. This, however, was not the same. No one had planned it. No one was leading it.”
Asbury’s president at that time, Dennis Kinlaw, was later asked by a reporter to explain what happened at Asbury. Kinlaw struggled to find the words to describe something that seemed holy and otherworldly.Said Kinlaw: “Well, you may not understand this, but the only way I know how to account for this is that last Tuesday morning, about 20 of 11, the Lord Jesus walked into Hughes Auditorium, and He's been there ever since, and you've got the whole community paying tribute to His presence.”
History books now say that the 1970 Asbury Revival spread to 130 colleges, seminaries and Bible schools. Students from the school fanned out and shared their testimonies in churches and schools all across the nation, and their fervor spread like some kind of heavenly virus.A 1970 book about the revival, One Divine Moment, by Asbury history professor Jeff Blake, described the event as a modern, Pentecost. Other historians have noted that it occurred at the same time a neo-Pentecostal movement was breathing new life into American churches during the Jesus movement.
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