Metro Voice News Celebrating Faith, Family & Community
One of the last great revivals in the United States was the Jesus Movement among young people in Southern California in the early 1970s. History may be repeating itself on a beach in the “Saturate OC” revival.
More than 200 Christians recently gathered on the shore in Huntington Beach to worship God, hear the gospel and learn how to share the good news with others. It first began as a vision God gave to its organizers, Parker and Jessi Green, four years ago. In the vision, the couple saw thousands of people being baptized along Huntington Beach Pier in Orange County (OC) and large numbers of people receiving Christ, according to the Saturate OC website.
https://www.facebook.com/SaturateOC/posts/1582135898622850
They had planned to do a conference at a hotel in Huntington Beach earlier this year, but on the day the Greens were about to sign the contract to reserve the venue, the coronavirus pandemic was just beginning to spike in the United States and they called it off.
“I assumed that we were just going to cancel or postpone it, and then I did a two-week fast and God said to me, ‘Just because it looks different than what you thought doesn’t mean that I lied when I told you [to give it] the green light,” Jessi said.
After praying some more, they decided to host a weekly event on the beach every Friday in July. Momentum has grown, with more churches participating in the past few weeks. Repentance and deliverance have characterized the past two gatherings
“People were coming to the front repenting of sexual sin, and falling to the ground and not knowing why they are falling to the ground, and then feeling the presence of God in a way they’ve never experienced,” Green said. “And this revival is really moving among the children. We are seeing tons, and I would say within the last two weeks 60 children chose to be baptized — ages 3 years old to 16.”
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Worship artist Sean Feucht, who has been leading worship with Saturate OC, believes the church is in a season that resembles the late 60s and 70s, a period in U.S. history marked by political strife, racial tension, government instability and economic volatility.
“What we’re seeing now is a return back to a gritty, raw gospel, Jesus People movement foundation,” he said. “A lot of that is in part because we can’t be in our churches. We are kind of forced to be outside of our buildings and forced to be innovative and creative and come up with alternate solutions. And I think what it’s doing is stripping off the sheen and the polished nature of what we’ve built in America, and it’s allowing us to return to the simplicity to the power of the raw gospel.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
