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Fire from heaven

Times of extraordinary revival

Is our God real?

FIRE FROM HEAVEN
Times of extraordinary revival
By Paul E.G. Cook
Evangelical Press. 143 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-0-85234-709-6

This is a hugely stimulating survey of outbreaks of revival in Britain in the period 1791-1840.

In particular, the reader is given a marvellous selection of eyewitness accounts of what God did in these years among the ordinary people of Cornwall and the North of England. Where did all those 19th-century nonconformist chapels, now standing empty, despised or derelict in many towns, come from? This book will tell you the wonderful story.

Though the Evangelical Revival under Whitefield and Wesley (approximately 1737-1791 when Wesley died) was a tremendous breakthrough in this country, the greater growth actually took place in the subsequent period upon which this book focuses. For example, when John Wesley died the Wesleyan Methodists numbered 72,000 in Britain. By 1828 they had tripled to 245,000 and in the next 15 years another 100,000 were added.

The central lesson of the book is that we must look for the intervention of God and not to human abilities if we would see our nation changed for the better. The records upon which the author relies for his account are mainly those of the Methodists. When these forefathers saw their churches beginning to decline their reaction was to seek God earnestly in prolonged and fervent prayer that he would pour out his Spirit. And God answered. This is not an emphasis which prevails today. Prayer meetings tend to be neglected. And ‘the thought of divine visitations is so strange to us that whenever we hear of any church experiencing the blessing of God we enquire exactly how things happened and then institutionalise it by turning it into a method’.

The book does not despise the day of small things, in that it is at pains to define revival not as something distinct and separate, but as simply a great intensification of the normal workings of the Holy Spirit. But it does rightly challenge our putting our trust in techniques, meetings and Christian ‘celebrities’ of various sorts. For those who respond that ‘we have prayed but nothing has happened’, there is a fine emphasis on our need for holiness and, first of all, not to seek revival, but to seek God himself.

John Benton