Last month God used a poor pastor from Malawi to challenge my suburban American priorities.

When I arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, last month to conduct a women’s conference, my host, a journalist named Gideon, mentioned that my “pastor friend from Malawi” was waiting to see me. I was surprised to hear this, since I wasn’t aware that I had a pastor friend from Malawi. I’ve never been to that country and I didn’t remember talking to anyone from there.

“He says you’ve been e-mailing each other,” Gideon said. “And he arrived today to see you.”

Then I vaguely remembered receiving a message a few months earlier from a man from somewhere in southern Africa. He asked if I would come to his country to speak at a women’s conference, and I told him that I can’t do events like that with people until I have met them and established a relationship of trust.

In a few hours I met this man, Pastor Peacepound. After a few minutes of small talk I learned that he had traveled on a crowded bus from Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, to Nairobi. It was a four-day journey.

Four days on a bus? I was stunned. I’ve never met anyone in the United States who has traveled that long to attend a Christian meeting. We simply aren’t that spiritually desperate. But this guy was so concerned about the way women are abused in his country—through domestic violence, molestation and mutilation—that he made an astonishing sacrifice.

Then he stunned me again with a question. “You said you could not come to Malawi unless we met. Now that we have met, will you come?”

What was I supposed to say? I almost laughed out loud as I imagined a possible response. “Well, pastor, I’ll have to pray about that,” just didn’t seem appropriate. How could I deny this man’s petition when he had paid such an incredible price?What was there to pray about?

This pastor’s request reminded me of the apostle Paul’s vision of a Macedonian man who said to him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (Acts 16:9, NASB). Pastor Peacepound’s appeal was as sincere as it was humbling. Before the afternoon was over I had committed myself to coming to Lilongwe. It was the least I could do in light of this man’s faith and tenacity.

I’ll have to make a few sacrifices to go to Malawi next year. I don’t enjoy being away from my family that long. But when I consider the fact that my plane ride from Florida to Africa will take less time than Pastor Peacepound’s famous bus ride, it puts things into perspective.

In my recent travels in the developing world I have met so many precious men and women like Pastor Peacepound. They know little of our Western comforts. They’ve never seen granite countertops, flat-screen TVs, iPods or GPS systems. They can’t imagine needing garage door openers, leaf blowers, security systems or the other suburban niceties we think are so crucial. The concept of gated communities or home theaters is an unthinkable concept to them.

These people live in poor countries where many people don’t even have access to clean water or reliable electricity. They are just thankful to have enough rice and beans on the table. (Meanwhile some of us are obsessing about whether our gourmet vegetables are organic.)

As I have built friendships with Christian leaders in the developing world, God has totally messed with my suburban values:

• My friend Raja, who rescues throwaway baby girls from trash cans in southeastern India, runs an orphanage for dozens of kids yet lives on a miniscule salary.
• Lydia, a Christian lady I met in Kenya, runs a charitable school in Nairobi’s largest slum and cares for numerous special—needs children—even though the school cannot cover her own living expenses.
• Oto, a pastor I work with in Guatemala, feeds more than 100 needy children every day—but he has no health insurance or retirement plan and he has never been able to afford a vacation.

It’s uncomfortable to think about these jarring disparities, but I think we should let reality sink in. So much of the world today is struggling while we Americans—even in an economic recession—are living at a level of unimaginable abundance

I pray we will hear and answer the Macedonian cry coming from so many parts of the world. I pray we will act. I pray that someday soon you will meet your own version of Pastor Peacepound, and that you will begin to view the world through his eyes.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. He is ministering in Canada this week. You can find him on Twitter at leegrady.

In Uganda and Kenya, where polygamy is common, Christians are defending the Bible while we disdain it.

Two weeks ago when I was speaking in a women’s conference in Kampala, Uganda, I asked the women to raise their hands if they grew up in a polygamous home. A majority of the hands went up. Then I asked how many wives lived in their father’s home.

“How many had two wives living in the house?” I asked. A majority of the hands went up.

“How about three?” Still a majority of hands stayed in the air. “How about four? Five? Six? Seven?” A few hands waved.

“How about eight?” I asked. Two women near the back of the auditorium lifted their hands reluctantly.

In that group of 500 women, two lived in a family with one father and eight wives. As I addressed the sensitive issue from 1 Samuel, describing the pain Hannah experienced living with her husband’s second wife, Peninnah, these Ugandan women were comforted by the fact that God understands the oppression and abuse caused by polygamy. And they were encouraged to hear marriage clearly defined as a covenant relationship between one man and one woman, as outlined in the first chapters of Genesis.

But it was not until I arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, a few days later that I discovered what an intense battle is raging in Africa over the definition of marriage. Kenyans today are engaged in a heated debate over polygamy. One of several bills proposed in September would keep polygamy legal, but would require a first wife to grant written permission to her husband to marry additional wives.

(Should I ask for a show of hands of how many American brides would sign such a consent form?)

Kenya’s Muslims, who believe a man has a right to take as many as four wives, have vehemently opposed this change in the law. Yet Christian leaders in the country have fought for years to end the pain caused by polygamy. One of them is Judy Mbugua, the continental coordinator of the Pan African Christian Women Alliance (PACWA), which is tackling other tough issues including female genital mutilation, domestic violence, “wife inheritance” (which requires a relative to marry a woman if her husband dies) and the AIDS epidemic (which touches millions of African women when unfaithful husbands spread the disease to them, sometimes through rape).

Since Mbugua started PACWA in 1987, she has stood with African women across the continent to strengthen belief in biblical marriage. She has released a document clearly stating that African Christian women believe polygamy is wrong—not because it differs from Western traditions but because “God’s design for marriage is monogamy.”

I found it ironic that while this war of words rages in Kenya (the birthplace of President Obama’s father), we are engaged in a similar battle over the definition of marriage. Only in the United States, we are not arguing about how many wives a man can collect but about whether a man can marry another man.

I don’t have to ask Mbugua or other African church leaders how they view same-sex marriage. Homosexuality is strongly discouraged in Africa (despite attempts by international organizations to encourage it) and African bishops have rebuked Episcopalians in the United States and Anglicans in England for suggesting that God endorses gay unions.

Nigerian Anglican leader Oluranti Odubogun was not trying to win a popularity contest when he went on record by saying, “Homosexual behaviour is deviant, unbiblical, un-Christian and unnatural.” But he said what most African Christians believe. In a similar rejection of pro-gay theology, Nigerian Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola said in 2004 that Western churches are peddling a “new religion,” and he vowed to send his ministerial candidates elsewhere to be trained.

Puzzling, isn’t it? More and more Africans are looking to the Bible to define marriage as one man and one woman at a time when Muslims and some tribal activists are defending polygamy. Meanwhile some American politicians and thin-skinned religious leaders want to redefine marriage as two men or two women—and a growing number of Americans agree with this agenda.

One culture is moving forward and the other is moving backward, depending on how you define progress. In Africa, where indigenous Christianity is growing, the church is looking to the Bible to transform society. Here in our country, the Bible and its values are mocked in the public square while many Christians avoid the marriage debate so they won’t offend anyone.

There is something terribly wrong with this picture.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. You can find him on Twitter at leegrady.

We can learn an important lesson from the East African Revival, which transformed a region 80 years ago.

The people of Uganda call it Balokole. In the Luganda language it means “the saved ones,” but the word became synonymous with the East African Revival—one of the most significant Christian movements in modern history.

This revival had humble beginnings in September 1929, just before America’s Great Depression. Historians trace it to a prayer meeting on Namirembe Hill in Kampala, Uganda, where a missionary to Rwanda, Joe Church, prayed and read the Bible for two days with his friend Simeoni Nsibambi. They felt God had showed them that the African church was powerless because of a lack of personal holiness.

It is impossible to explain exactly what happened after this prayer meeting or how the resulting spiritual fervor spread. When God comes, unusual things happen. Within weeks after the Rev. Church returned to Gahini, Rwanda, Christians gathered to pray and confess their sins openly. A heavy spirit of conviction fell on the people. Whenever they repented for their sins and failures they would weep uncontrollably, ask others to forgive them and pledge to make restitution.

The weeping spread to farmlands and open fields. Unbelievers who visited these gatherings were converted after they witnessed the sincerity of the Christians. Repentance went deep. Husbands publicly apologized for adultery and farmers repented for stealing cows from each other. Eventually, as the revival spread from Rwanda to Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi, even the centuries-old tradition of polygamy (which was still common among professing Christians) was unraveled in some areas.

Balokole changed African Christianity forever. In a 1986 article for Christian History, Michael Harper writes of the revival: “It’s effects have been more lasting than almost any other revival in history, so that today there is hardly a single Protestant leader in East Africa who has not been touched by it in some way.”

I spent the past two weeks ministering in Uganda and Kenya, and everywhere I went I met people who still talk about the East African Revival—80 years after it began. It breathed resurrection power into dead, traditional churches and triggered aggressive church-planting movements that affected a variety of denominations.

Whether sermons were delivered from pulpits or under trees, six important themes were emphasized in those days: 1) the blood of Jesus; 2) the name of Jesus; 3) the cross of Jesus; 4) the Word of God; 5) the testimony of the saints; and 6) the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Leaders also stressed the message of 1 John 6-7: “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His son cleanses us from all sin (NASB).” As was true in other spiritual awakenings in history (such as the Asbury Revival in Kentucky in 1970), people stood in front of each other and admitted their sins, no matter how embarrassing. The honesty cut deep into human pride and dealt a fatal blow against entrenched sin and religious hypocrisy.

After hearing more details about the East African Revival while I was in Uganda last week, I was convinced that this type of movement is the only thing that will pull the United States out of its current despair. We must have a spiritual awakening, or we die. Political engineering, economic policies, government bailouts and stimulus packages will not save us. No politician, Democrat or Republican, will reverse our course toward destruction.

Our only hope is that a backslidden American church—a church that is as smug, blind and lukewarm as the Laodiceans-—will “be zealous and repent” (see Rev. 3:19).

What encourages me is that God, not man, initiated all the spiritual awakenings of the past—including the First Great Awakening, which gave our country its historic Christian identity. Yes, we play our feeble part by praying, and we must storm heaven. Yes, awakenings come in response to our weak attempts to repent, and we must passionately seek a fresh baptism of holiness.

But we cannot manufacture revivals. Pentecostal fire comes from heaven alone. It is a sovereign blessing from a God who loves us and desires to rescue us from ourselves. We charismatics have generated a lot of our own sound and fury in the past 30 years, but much of what we have created is a shameful substitute for revival. We must become desperate for the real thing.

Today our movement is mired in the shallow waters of self-centered, carnal Christianity. May God mercifully send us our own version of Balokole. May gut-wrenching repentance and public confession of sin interrupt our trendy worship services. May this holy fire spread until the people of the United States see genuine Christians living the message we preach.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. You can find him on Twitter at leegrady.

St. Kakumba Chapel in Uganda has grown from 500 to 5,000 members since Pastor Medad Birungi replaced stale traditions with Pentecostal vibrancy.

Pastor Medad Birungi was the least likely man to engineer a spiritual rebirth in the tradition-bound Church of Uganda. Raised in a polygamous home (his alcoholic father had six wives and 32 children), Birungi suffered horrible trauma, rejection and poverty. But he had a dramatic encounter with the Holy Spirit while he was a college student, and his moment of renewal is still having ripple effects throughout Uganda and the world.

Birungi was a religious Anglican before this experience. He despised Pentecostals and viewed them as sheep-stealers and misguided pretenders. But while he was performing with a choir on a conference stage near Kampala in 1987, he felt strangely compelled to run outside to pray. He was then literally arrested by the power of God. He fell to the ground and spoke in tongues for three hours.

Says Birungi: “I was crying out to God, ‘I accept! I accept!’ My Anglican tradition said miracles no longer happened. But my new experience broke all my biases.” The next day he had a lengthy vision of a blinding light and sensed a strong call into ministry.

That same year an Anglican bishop who was dying of leukemia laid hands on Birungi and gave him an important message. “He told me that if people are sleeping in a house that is on fire, you must wake up the people in that house,” Birungi says. “You don’t leave the house. He begged me not to leave the Anglican Church, but rather to bring renewal to it.”

Birungi, who is 47, has been engaged in this work of renewal ever since. But opposition has been intense. Some Anglican leaders have sharply criticized him, accusing him of “joining the Pentecostals.” But it’s difficult to argue with the success he has witnessed, especially since he assumed the pastorate at St. Kakumba Chapel in Kampala in 2002.

In those seven years the 50-year-old church has grown from 500 to 5,000, and a recent study by the archbishop’s office determined that Kakumba is the fastest-growing Anglican church in Uganda. (It is built on the exact site where a Christian boy was martyred in the late 1800s.) When I asked Birungi how his church grew so fast he listed several radical departures from old traditions.

First of all, Birungi eliminated liturgical formalism. Ministers at Kakumba quit wearing robes a few years ago. Liturgical furniture was removed and communion is now served monthly instead of weekly. “We decided to remove any liturgy that seemed irrelevant,” Birungi says. But the congregation still recites the Apostles’ Creed. The rafters of the cavernous building seem to shake when people make their bold declaration of faith.

Secondly, a contemporary worship style was adopted. Kakumba’s lively praise team includes a keyboard, drums, guitars and more than 10 singers, and it is not unusual for them to break out in African-style dancing. The organ and piano were retired to a storage room. “We have great freedom in worship but we still blend contemporary choruses with some of the old hymns,” the pastor says.

Thirdly, services are longer. Typical Anglican churches in Africa gather for only an hour. But Birungi says it takes at least two hours to devote enough time for worship, teaching and personal altar ministry. Most of Kakumba’s members attend one of three Sunday morning services, and a Swahili-language service is offered later in the afternoon.

Fourthly, Birungi dramatically altered his denomination’s view of baptism. Anglicans have historically baptized infants, but Birungi installed a baptismal tank in the church in 2006 and offers baptism by immersion for adults now. Babies are dedicated to the Lord but not baptized.

Finally, a radically new ministry philosophy has been adopted. Only three categories of ministers are ordained in the Anglican tradition: priests, deacons and bishops. But Birungi’s matra is “every member a minister.” He has empowered an army of volunteers to lead cell groups, Alpha courses, inner healing classes, Navigators Bible studies, evangelism training classes, weekly outreaches to the community and summer mission trips to England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Birungi is also radical in his outspoken advocacy of women ministers—because he believes releasing women from traditional restrictions is a key to world evangelism.

Even though the global Anglican communion is in turmoil because of liberalism and a shrinking membership, Birungi says he feels called to stay in his denomination and work for renewal. He is especially encouraged that the Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi, is a charismatic who has taken the lead in opposing the acceptance of homosexuality in the church.

“Personally I feel called to revive the Anglican Church, so I cannot leave it,” Birungi told me. “I want people to know that miracles still exist. The church is not dead.”

From what I witnessed at St. Kakumba Chapel this past weekend, Anglicanism is very much alive and well in Uganda. If Birungi’s Pentecostal fervor spreads, I won’t be surprised to see an army of African missionaries heading in our direction.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. He is ministering in Uganda and Kenya this week. You can find him on Twitter at leegrady.

Here’s your chance to shape the direction of Charisma in 2010. We really do care what you think.

An impressive collection of framed covers of Charisma decorate a hall around the corner from my office. Visitors often stop to admire the nostalgic lineup, which includes a 1975 issue featuring healing evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman and a 1978 cover of South African theologian David du Plessis. These magazines offer a panoramic view of the history of the charismatic movement—warts and all.

I’ll admit that sometimes I wince when I walk down this hallway to get coffee—and I cringe even more when I sort through my stash of old magazines. As much as I love to remember the old days—and to appreciate the spiritual giants we featured at times—it is painful when I realize that some people we wrote about did not finish well.

Most of the Christian personalities we have profiled over the years still inspire me. My personal favorite of all time was the cover story we published in 2005 about Brother Andrew, global champion of the persecuted church. I’m also very proud of the cover stories we wrote about Christian heroes such as Episcopal renewal leader Dennis Bennett; Mark Buntain, pioneer missionary to India; author Catherine Marshall; Freda Lindsey, leader of Christ for the Nations; revivalist David Wilkerson; Bible teacher Derek Prince; Vineyard founder John Wimber; Ed Cole, founder of the modern Christian men’s movement; evangelist Reinhard Bonnke; Franklin Graham, leader of Samaritan’s Purse; Messianic leader Joel Chernoff; and Charles Blake, presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ.

Yet when I look through the list of personalities we have focused on during our 34 years of publishing, there are some embarrassments. More than a dozen of them had highly publicized moral failures years after their ministries made them famous. A few of them went to jail, either for tax evasion or for other forms of fraud. Some lost their ministries because of spiritual abuse.

In recent years my staff and I have had long discussions about how to profile Christian leaders without setting them—and us—up for disappointment. We think our subscribers enjoy reading about people who have been successful—pastors, musicians, authors, athletes, businesspeople or missionaries. Yet we are less prone to do such profiles these days if we think there is any chance a celebrity might do something crazy two years from now.

We want to ask you to join in our discussion.

We are currently mapping out our editorial plans for 2010. Not all of our covers will focus on personalities because we know there are key moral and cultural topics that need our attention. But we are planning to feature up to six people on our covers next year.

A few weeks ago I stirred the waters a bit by asking this question on Twitter. The feedback was fascinating because more than half the people who replied said they didn’t want to read about a celebrity at all. Several people said they wanted to read about the faceless persecuted Christians who suffer for Christ in places like Pakistan or Afghanistan. Others said we should write about unknown ministers in the United States who feed the poor, run homeless shelters or fight child trafficking.

Of those who suggested a real celebrity Christian, the most votes were cast for California pastor Rick Warren—who is known as being a champion of the little guy. Many suggested evangelical leaders who are not even directly identified with the charismatic movement—people such as Atlanta pastor Louie Giglio or Southern Baptist soul-winner Perry Noble.

Is there a significant sea change happening in our movement? Has the egotistical behavior of America’s limousine-driving prosperity preachers nauseated us to the point that we are actually rejecting that entire scene? And have the excesses of our movement driven people away from flashy preachers and back to evangelical churches that don’t focus on the charismatic experience?

I’d like to hear your opinion. Where do you think our movement is headed? Are there Christian personalities you really would love to read about? And do you know of “nameless,” unsung heroes in your local community who are serving Christ in obscurity but who deserve attention?

Please let us hear from you. We’ll be compiling your feedback and using it in our planning sessions over the next several weeks.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. He is ministering in Africa this week. You can give Lee your feedback about Charisma’s 2010 covers by leaving a comment below, or you can send him a message on Twitter at leegrady.

On the anniversary of 9/11, I learned that we need extraordinary prayer in this time of national crisis.

Last week I attended a prayer gathering across the street from the World Trade Center site in New York City. Several dozen Christian leaders met in a cramped room overlooking the place where terrorists destroyed the tallest monument to America’s financial power and killed more than 2,700 people in the process.

It was the eighth anniversary of 9/11. Flags in the city flew at half-mast while a drizzling rain made the gray mood even more somber. New York City firemen and police officers got respectful applause as they marched in a small parade along Church Street. A few blocks south, in Battery Park, thousands of people filed past a mobile monument that bears the names of all 9/11 victims—including those killed in Washington, D.C. and Shanksville, Pa.

The 50 or 60 Christian leaders who met that day at the Millennium Hotel in lower Manhattan did not come to create a spectacle. No one on the street knew we were there. And no one in the room was making small talk or working deals. Billy Wilson, the leader of the Awakening America prayer initiative, told us at the beginning of our two and a half-hour gathering that we were there to simply cry out to God for a spiritual awakening in the United States.

We were originally supposed to have our meeting on the 55th floor, in a room with sweeping views of the city. But Billy explained to us the night before that a group of lawyers who were working on an important case needed their meeting suite for an extra day. So we were moved to the fourth floor.

I later realized how fitting that was for a gathering of this kind. We did not need to be high. God wanted us low.

There was nothing fancy about the event. Robert Stearns, leader of the Eagles’ Wings Ministries, led us in worship with a single keyboard. Denominational executives from the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), the Assemblies of God and the Foursquare Church wore casual shirts instead of their trademark suits. Mart Green, the Christian millionaire who owns the Mardel company, read from the book of Proverbs and then led us in a simple prayer for a restoration of integrity in the American workplace. A group of students from Lee University sang their songs a capella.

And Vonette Bright, the widow of Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright, reminded us of how God answered prayers in the 1970s when a group of leaders cried to God for revival. She said the Jesus movement of that era was triggered by prayers for the youth of the nation.

At one point in the middle of the program Wilson interrupted the schedule. He asked if we could have a time of unscripted prayer, and he encouraged us to “cry out” to God in a humble entreaty for His mercy.

I really cannot explain what happened next. I felt compelled to fall on my knees, so I slid to the floor and buried my head in my hands. Suddenly I felt overcome with emotion. I had not felt stirred that day by any of the 9/11 events, and even being near the World Trade Center site had not evoked sorrow in my heart. But all of a sudden I was sobbing.

These were not like the tears that occasionally well up in my eyes when I attend a wedding or when I hear a particularly moving song. This was different. These tears were guttural. They were being pulled out of the deepest part of my soul. It seemed as if this weeping did not even originate with me. It felt like a holy cry that God had initiated.

What I was praying went something like this: “Lord, please forgive us. God have mercy on the United States. Forgive Your church, Lord, for our backslidden condition. Cleanse us from our moral failure. Reach down and awaken us. Set our hearts on fire again, for You and for the mission You called us to. We are crying out to you for another chance to reach our generation before it is too late.”

I can’t tell you exactly how long that time of weeping lasted, but I could hear people sobbing in other parts of the room. I knew I did not make this happen. God was in it. And His Spirit was orchestrating the prayers that He needed to hear.

We can’t force moments like this. But I believe that at this critical time in our nation’s history we must release the tears and the travail of the Lord if we expect to see His miraculous answer.

The prophet Joel told wayward Israel: “Let the priests, the Lord’s ministers, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, ‘Spare Your people, O Lord, and do not make Your inheritance a reproach, a byword among the nations.'” (Joel 2:17a, NASB). And the Lord spoke through Jeremiah and said: “Consider and call for the mourning women, that they may come; And send for the wailing women, that they may come! Let them make haste and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may shed tears and our eyelids flow with water.'” (Jer. 9:17-18).

Tears have always preceded the outpouring of the Spirit. The fallow ground must be broken before the harvest can come. The alabaster box must be broken before the fragrance of Christ can be released. We must know true brokenness! We must allow the Holy Spirit to pray through us, even if that means He will intercede “with groanings too deep for words” (see Rom. 8:26).

This is the time to cry out. I encourage prayer groups around the nation to dispense with your normal routine and shift into extraordinary prayer. We must weep for our national sins and for the church’s faithlessness. Please cry out until He sends a tsunami of His power to save us.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. You can find him on Twitter at leegrady. For more information about the Awakening America Alliance, go to www.awakeningamerica.us.   

From reading some old books I’ve discovered a missing spiritual dimension. The Lord is inviting us to reclaim it.

A few months ago I went on a special diet. I put aside all newly published books and limited my reading to a small collection of Christian classics, mostly devotional works by Andrew Murray, Watchman Nee, E.M. Bounds, Charles Spurgeon, A.B. Simpson and Corrie Ten Boom. I knew God had a message for me in those musty pages.

I had noticed a similar theme in all these books, but it took me a while to crack the code. These writers from the 19th and 20th centuries wrote from a spiritual depth that I rarely see in the church today, and I wanted to know their secret. I slowly began to figure things out while reading A.B. Simpson’s book, A Larger Christian Life, which he wrote in 1890 when the Holiness Movement was at its zenith in the United States.

Simpson often preached about Abraham’s offering of his son Isaac on the altar at Mount Moriah, and he called Christians to the place of self-sacrifice. Mount Moriah, Simpson wrote, “signifies the deeper spiritual experience into which the fully consecrated person must come. In this act of obedience, the sanctified self is laid on the altar just as Isaac was.”

I read similar comments about consecration, or full surrender, in Watchman Nee’s The Release of the Spirit, which was first published in China in 1955. Nee taught us that the path to spiritual fruitfulness—and to true, intimate knowledge of the Lord—is the brokenness of the outward man. He explained that God uses tests and trials in our lives to break our selfish nature so that Christ’s nature can flow through us.

Nee wrote: “No life manifests more beauty than the one who is broken! Stubbornness and self-love have given way to beauty in the one who is broken by God.”

Perhaps the reason I find so much nourishment in these old words is that I don’t hear much today about the crucified life, suffering, brokenness or surrender. We rarely talk of altars and we avoid altar calls. We don’t invite people to a deeper spiritual realm because few even know about such a place; often even our leaders are too busy using God to boost their egos or to amass personal wealth.

Today’s shallow, “evangelical lite” culture focuses on self, self and more self. Christian books today are mostly about self-improvement, not self-sacrifice. We teach people to claim their “best life now”—and to claim it on their terms. Our message is one of self-empowerment: God wants to make you happy, so just add a little bit of God to your life (on your terms of course) and He will bless you, prosper you and make all your dreams come true.

How strange that message seems when contrasted with the old hymns Christians used to sing back in the days of holiness revivals. This song written by Adelaide Pollard in 1907 seems eerily foreign today:

Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Thou art the potter, I am the clay;

Mold me and make me after Thy will,
While I am waiting yielded and still.

Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Hold o’er my being absolute sway!
Fill with Thy Spirit till all shall see
Christ only, always, living in me.

The woman who penned those words was an itinerant Bible teacher who was discouraged because she didn’t have the funds to make a missionary journey to Africa. She found great comfort when she put all her plans and desires on the altar and freshly surrendered to God’s will for her life. The song that sprung from her anguish blessed millions, but today it has lost its popularity because we simply don’t relate.

I believe we must reclaim the forgotten message of consecration. It is not enough to know Christian doctrines or to paint a nice Christian veneer on the surface of our lives. God wants our hearts. We must embrace the cross daily. It is not enough to simply avoid the sins that our Christian culture says are the “worst”; we must also allow God’s knife to slay the pride, the self-will, the self-confidence and the self-glorification that our backslidden Christian culture encourages.

I invite you to reclaim this lost message by praying a “dangerous prayer” of consecration. Let God assume the throne of your life while you abdicate. You can pray something like this:

“Lord, You are the potter and I am the clay. Forgive me for my selfishness. I consecrate my life to You afresh today. I give You permission to break me, mold me, bend me and make me according to Your perfect will. This is all the work of Your grace. I choose to embrace whatever circumstances You must send into my life in order to rid me of pride and self-will. I choose to live on Your altar. As I empty myself, I ask You to fill me with Your Holy Spirit. Amen”

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. You can find him on Twitter at leegrady. On Sept. 11 he will be participating in the National Sacred Assembly, held near Ground Zero in New York City. Local Christians are gathering that day at county courthouses to pray for the nation. For more information go to www.awakeningamerica.us.

Facing a difficult situation? You need to release the shout of the Lord.

According to the rules of proper grammar, exclamation marks should be used rarely, and only when conveying extreme emotion. I’m sure you agree there is nothing more annoying than an article or e-mail FILLED WITH ALL CAPS AND PROFUSE EXCLAMATIONS!!! An overuse of such punctuation is the journalistic equivalent of screaming in a public library.

Yet exclamation marks do appear in the Bible, especially in the Psalms. Apparently there are times in our spiritual lives when extreme emotion and pumped-up volume are necessary.

The Message version of the Bible is particularly known for its liberal use of exclamation marks. It paraphrases Psalm 47:1 this way: “Shout God-songs at the top of your lungs!” Psalm 95:1 is rendered like this: “Come, let’s shout praises to God, raise the roof for the Rock who saved us! Let’s march into his presence singing praises, lifting the rafters with our hymns!” More noisy emotion is packed into Psalm 98:4: “Shout your praises to God, everybody! Let loose and sing! Strike up the band!”

King David used this kind of lung power. Even when he was alone with God, in what he called “the secret place,” he was noisy. He wrote: “I will offer in His tent sacrifices with shouts of joy” (Psalm 27:6, NASB). His worship experience was hardly sophisticated or subdued. It was downright boisterous.

This past weekend I spoke to a group of pastors and missionaries at a prayer retreat in the mountains of East Tennessee. Some of these leaders came to the gathering with heavy hearts. Some were spiritually weary; others were downright depressed. So I was not surprised when the Lord directed me to teach on the topic of the shout of the Lord.

I shared with my friends three biblical reasons why we need to lift our voices and break the silence with extravagant praise.

1. Shouting awakens us to God’s ability and supreme authority. Sometimes it is simply not enough to pray quietly. Our soul must be stirred. We must forcefully declare what we believe with passionate conviction. Shouting is an act of faith that can break the power of fear, doubt, heaviness and grief. When the devil has turned up the volume of his clamorous attacks, we must retaliate by lifting our voices in raucous praise.

I spend a lot of time in ethnic churches, and I’ve noticed that my African-American, Hispanic, Brazilian and Indian friends are quite comfortable with a high decibel level in their worship. Some white Christians think this is just a cultural preference. But I wonder if we have allowed our more reserved nature to stand in the way of a biblical principle. The Bible does not tell just certain ethnic groups to shout.

In the church I grew up in, we worshiped with our hands at our sides, and we usually held hymnals. We sang wonderful songs, but I missed out on the full impact of praise because I was never taught that the Bible also calls us to raise our hands, clap, bow, shout and dance in worship.

Some Christians are just too sophisticated for exuberant praise. It embarrasses them. They assume shouting to God is something that uneducated, backwoods Pentecostals do while they roll in sawdust. Yet those same Pentecostals are simply emulating David, Isaiah, Jeremiah and a whole host of saints who set aside their pride and self-consciousness in order to praise God with total abandon.

2. Shouting releases spiritual victory. We all know the walls of Jericho didn’t collapse until the people of God “shouted with a great shout” (see Joshua 6:20). That familiar story tells us that unrestrained praise has a direct effect on the enemy’s work. When directed by the Holy Spirit, the shout of the Lord is the nuclear blast that dismantles demonic resistance.

If you have been staring at an immovable wall of depressing circumstances, it may be time to declare with all your might that God is bigger than your problems. Remember what happened in the Philippian jail. Paul’s situation was bleak and his feet were bound with stocks, but when he and Silas praised God the ground shook, the doors flung open and every chain in the prison broke (see Acts 16:22-26). Shouting God’s praises will have that kind of impact on the locks and chains around you.

3. Shouting brings fruitfulness and expansion. Isaiah declared: “Shout for joy, O barren one, you who have borne no child; Break forth into joyful shouting and cry aloud, you who have not travailed; for the sons of the desolate one will be more numerous than the sons of the married woman” (Isa. 54:1). This verse tells us that the shout of the Lord can release a long awaited promise.

When I was in the Smoky Mountains last weekend I encouraged my friends to write down on a sheet of paper the promises God had made to them. Some were praying about financial issues; others were trusting the Lord to work in the heart of a family member; others were believing for the publishing of a book or the growth of a church. I asked everyone to stand on their slips of paper. Then Sam, a worship leader from Virginia, led us in a spontaneous time of singing and shouting.

That might sound like a silly exercise, but we could sense walls crashing around us that evening. Shouting to the Lord puts circumstances in the right perspective. We saw how big God is, and how little our problems are. Childlike faith was ignited and many promises came to the point of delivery. Praise can trigger birth pangs!

If you have felt stuck in a place of spiritual dryness, if your ministry seems barren, or if you feel the devil has backed you into a corner, don’t get comfortable in that place of despair. YOU NEED TO SHOUT!

Go in your prayer closet and forget who can hear you through the door! When you are driving your car, put on some praise music and shout during your commute! And when you are in church, forget about what everyone else thinks and be a noisy fool for Christ! Even if you feel as if you have been conquered, raise your voice in triumph and LET OUT A SHOUT OF VICTORY!

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. You can find him on Twitter at leegrady. He encourages you to forward this article to a friend who might be discouraged.

Don’t let the sensationalism of eschatology distract you from the priority of evangelism.

You might remember Edgar Whisenant. He wrote a best-selling book called 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988—and a much less popular sequel, The Final Shout: Rapture Report 1989. The second book said Jesus didn’t come back in 1988 because the author, who was a former NASA engineer (!), missed his mathematical calculations by a year.

The mood of the 1980s was uneasy. After Ronald Reagan was elected president, some Christians began to surmise that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was the Antichrist. When he died they gave the title to the next Soviet leader, Yury Andropov, and then to his successor, Konstantin Chernenko. When Chernenko died unexpectedly, people were certain that Mikhail Gorbachev was the Antichrist because he had that awful red birthmark on his forehead.

But Jesus didn’t return during Gorbachev’s tenure. In fact the Soviet system crumbled and Christian missionary activity began to blossom all over the cold Russian landscape. The people who expected the sky to fall any minute found someone else to fill the Antichrist’s shoes. First it was Bill Gates, then Osama bin Laden. Today it’s a toss-up between Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan despot Hugo Chávez.

Through the years there have been gloomy rumors about computer chips and global conspiracy. I remember one story warning us that JCPenney credit cards carried the mark of the beast. Today if you believe everything you read on the Internet, that same evil mark is on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

All this date-setting and foolish prognostication bothers me because Jesus said it is strictly off-limits. He told His disciples before His ascension, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority” (Acts 1:7, NASB). That means we don’t have the right to predict the date of His return or to make guesses about the timeline of final judgment.

The apostle Paul also warned the early church to stay away from date-setting. He told Timothy: “But refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels” (2 Tim. 2:23). Paul wanted his followers to keep their focus on the main thing—the spreading of the gospel—so they wouldn’t get sidetracked.

Christians hold different views of the last days. Pre-millennialists focus on the imminent rapture of the church—an event that is described in the New Testament. Post-millennialists focus on the triumph of Christ through history—something that is also reinforced in the book of Revelation. Preterists emphasize the ever-increasing government of God—which Isaiah and other prophets spoke of.

I am not writing here to push a particular view of the end times. When people ask me about my eschatological position I tell them I am a “pan-millennialist”—as in: “It will all pan out in the end.” I know Jesus will return in triumph. But we can’t figure out these things beforehand. Anyone who claims to be an “expert” in the mysteries of Christ’s return has forgotten that Jesus Himself said, “Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Matt. 24:36).

What concerns me most about an unhealthy focus on eschatology is that it distracts us from the ultimate priority of evangelism.

People who get carried away by rapture fever can become escapists. I’ve met Christians who want Jesus to come back tomorrow even though they know there are entire tribes and people groups in Asia and Africa that have never heard the gospel. On the other hand, I’ve known smug post-millennialists who were so happy that God’s kingdom is advancing that they felt no personal responsibility to reach the lost. I also know people who are so focused on what God is doing in Israel that they forget He has a plan for Nigeria, Bolivia or Indonesia.

In all these cases a wrong emphasis on eschatology caused Christians to lose sight of the Great Commission.

If you study the great Christian revivals of the past you find that none were triggered by date-setting, rapture fever or Bible prophecy seminars. We must preach the cross. Of course we tell the world that Christ is returning. But we do not have permission to muddle our message with nonsense about dates and global conspiracies.

John Wesley and George Whitefield preached repentance, the atonement of Christ and the reality of hell. William and Catherine Booth wept for souls and preached the message of salvation throughout England. Evan Roberts begged God to close the gates of hell in Wales for a year so that he could preach the simple gospel of a perfect redeemer. In all these cases genuine revival was the result. How I wish we could adopt this passionate focus on what really matters.

British revivalist Charles Spurgeon rebuked the preachers of his day for their eschatological speculations. He wrote in Lectures to My Students:

“O that Christ crucified were the universal burden of men of God. Your guess at the number of the beast … your conjectures concerning a personal Antichrist—forgive me, I count them but mere bones for dogs; while men are dying, and hell is filling, it seems to me the veriest drivel to be muttering about an Armageddon … and peeping between the folded leaves of destiny to discover the fate of Germany. I would sooner pluck one single brand from the burning than explain all mysteries.”

If only the American church would leave this drivel behind. I pray we will reconsider our priorities and embrace a fresh anointing for evangelism.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. You can find him on Twitter at leegrady.

It has been 15 years since Rwanda’s darkest tragedy. Here’s how one pastor suffered in that holocaust—and now offers healing.

Unless you catch sight of the jagged scars on Emmanuel Kadege’s* legs, you wouldn’t know he is a survivor of Rwanda’s genocide. During a conference last week in Pennsylvania he greeted me with a warm hug, a bright smile and a cheerful “Praise the Lord.” But after we got to know each other, and I encouraged him to talk honestly, this 31-year-old pastor let down his guard and shared his horrific story.

A member of Rwanda’s minority Tutsi population, Emmanuel was only 16 when leaders of the majority Hutu tribe announced on the radio that it was time to kill the “snakes” and “cockroaches”—their ominous code words for Tutsis. For 100 days—from April 6 to July 14, 1994—Hutu militants and thousands of civilians slaughtered an estimated 1 million people.

About 400 people died every hour during that period—and as many as 500,000 Tutsi women were brutally raped, many in broad daylight while people watched.

Emmanuel, the son of a Pentecostal pastor, had been baptized in the Holy Spirit a few weeks before the slaughter began. His father told his mother and three sisters to prepare to die. But then his mother received a message from God that they would be spared.

Militants armed with sticks and machetes stormed into the Kadeges’ neighborhood in the Byumba province and herded all Tutsis into a field near Emmanuel’s church. They shot Emmanuel in the arm to wound him, then struck his legs several times with knives.

Says Emmanuel: “My mother cried out to them, ‘Please don’t kill my son in front of me.’ But they told her, ‘We want you to die with a broken heart.'” Then two men raped one of Emmanuel’s sisters in front of the crowd.

The whole scene was a like a dream to Emmanuel. He had his own wounds to deal with, but seeing so much horror all around him somehow numbed the pain. I asked him what was the worst memory of that day. He answered immediately: “Some men grabbed a pregnant woman and ripped her belly open with a knife. Then they kicked the baby across the field as if it were a ball.”

Amazingly, the militants left Emmanuel and his family without killing them. But armed men returned later and bombed their house. So the Kadege family fled into the woods while Hutu warriors hunted them like dogs.

“All our possessions were burned,” Emmanuel told me. “So we hid for five months without any real food. Finally some Tutsi rebels rescued us and took us to a hospital on the Ugandan border.”

It took nine months for Emmanuel and his family members to recover from starvation. But when they regained their health they went right back into Rwanda—to bring the message of Christ’s forgiveness to a fractured nation.

Emmanuel eventually surrendered his life to the ministry. Today, while Rwandan president Paul Kagame is trying to repair his nation’s economy and social structures, Emmanuel is teaching people to forgive. He is also trying to feed and house about 800 orphans whose mothers contracted the AIDS virus from the HIV-infected men who raped them. He hopes to purchase land and build a farm where the children can find work.

Both Hutus and Tutsis now attend Emmanuel’s church. “I am preaching reconciliation, and that is really touching the hearts of people,” he told me.

“We have forgiven the men who raped my sister,” he adds. “Those men are in prison, and she has actually visited them there.”

I cannot comprehend the level of demonic hatred that was unleashed in Rwanda 15 years ago, nor can I fathom how much grief still paralyzes people there today. But after meeting Emmanuel I was reminded of how our merciful God always brings His redemption. The sun always comes out, even after the darkest of storms.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. You can find him on Twitter at leegrady. *Pastor Emmanuel’s identity was shielded because some Tutsis in Rwanda still live in fear of violence.