Gen Z Evangelist: How Do You Know When It’s Genuine Revival?
Pastor Nik Walker is a traveling evangelist, and at the age of 25, he’s been involved in many extended revivals during his short time in ministry.
But when it comes to extended revivals, Walker says, kingdom leaders must listen to the voice of God to know exactly when to end them. What’s the cutoff point? When is it enough?
That, Walker says, is always a challenge, but it has a lot to do with repentance, but also with how long the church itself is prepared to keep the revival moving forward.
“For me, that’s the hardest thing to do, to know when to go,” says Nik Walker, founder of Nik Walker Ministries in Tennessee and a protégé of Perry Stone’s. “We always leave that decision up to the pastor and I don’t recall ever having a revival season come close to where the pastor and I didn’t come to an agreement on that.
“It depends upon the church and what they are ready for. If you have, for example, maybe a revival meeting where 200 people get saved in two weeks, the church now has the responsibility of discipling perhaps 200 people. So, is this church ready for that? Is the church’s nets ready for that catch of fish, so to speak, without the boat sinking?”
Walker says that the church where he had just held a revival that lasted 16 days—New Life Church in Sandusky, Ohio—they were ready for what they experienced during that three-week period. There were about 130 people baptized and most of them were rededications. Revelation 2 would tell us that if you have left your first love, you can return to your first love by doing your first works over again, which is repentance and water baptism as referenced in Acts 2. So, the Lord gave this church what it had been praying and fasting for.
Walker’s ministry has experienced extended revival in the past. Earlier this year, meetings in West Virginia were scheduled to last a few days but wound up lasting 15 weeks, with multitudes getting saved and healed in a depressed area of the state where a great deal of hopelessness abounds.
But Walker says sometimes it’s difficult to know the difference between a series of good meetings and genuine revival. The answer to that question is, he says, “revival is always filled with repentance.”
“That’s the essence of revival because the dead are coming back to life and the sleepers are being awakened,” Walker says. “That’s always how revival is referenced, whether it’s a series of three services or three weeks of services. You saw it earlier in the year at Asbury, where there was no preaching and there were no real services. It was just 24-hour, 24/7. I got to go experience one of those.
“So, revival comes in all shapes and sizes; whatever the church is ready for, He will bring to them. I’m grateful to run with pastors and leaders that not only hear the Lord’s voice, but they know when to quit.”
In Sandusky, there was no need to quit. A powerful move of the Holy Spirit overwhelmed New Life Church, and Walker says it was filled with repentance.
“I will usually bring a little horse trough with me in a trailer and we just perform spontaneous baptisms,” Walker says. “That’s a big part of evangelism ministry. We always put it right at the front of the pulpit and give a call to spontaneous baptism, rededication and repentance.
“I was telling the pastor here, Dustin Ours, that [we] saw more families get into this horse trough at this revival than any other revival. We baptized nine or 10 families of four at a time. So, the Lord really did some amazing things with the family unit.
“On a Monday night, we had a woman who brought her infant child who was less than a year old, but was born at 26 weeks. He has had a feeding tube since he was born and had a hole in his heart. They came that Monday night and we laid hands on this baby. They came back later as we were baptizing people and the baby’s aunt got in my ear. She said that she had the baby that day, and they went to the doctor to run some tests and they were supposed to put a permanent feeding tube into the child. … Not only did they take the feeding tube out, but the hole in his heart closed. So, we saw some really wild miracles at that revival, including a woman who turns 90 this year that received physical manifestations of healing.
“The Lord is just demonstrating in this generation that He can touch the things we have called untouchable,” Walker says. “There’s a reason why revivals come about it, and you saw them [in Sandusky].” {eoa}
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Shawn A. Akers is the online editor at Charisma Media.
