Local pastor Malachi O’Brien is calling upon one million people to fast and pray for an awakening each year of this decade as part of the Roaring Twenties fast.
“I just began to really think on that, that there’s such a direct correlation from the 1920s to the 2020s,” O’Brien, a pastor at Church at Pleasant Ridge and former second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, stated. “So many things politically, spiritually, economically. The decade began one way, it ended a vastly different way.”
The Roaring Twenties fast is fundamentally about cultivating expectant hope for another great spiritual awakening in America and in the nations around the world amid bitter divisions and political turmoil.
In 1995, Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade, issued a call for fasting in hopes of spiritual revival, which was considered radical at the time, he noted. Leaders such as Ronnie Floyd, Jerry Falwell, Steve Gaines, Lou Engle, John Piper and many others joined him in fasting for revival. By the end of the 1990s, two global 24/7 prayer movements were launched, one in the United Kingdom and one in Kansas City.
“I believe that the Lord wants to mark a new generation, mark them with spiritual hunger and thirst that they rest not in what we can do when we have large stadium gatherings or when we do large events, but let them be marked that it’s not by might nor by power but by His Spirit,” O’Brien said. “And to know that there is something powerful that happens when we really consecrate ourselves to a place of fasting and prayer.”
Pastor Jentezen Franklin, whose Free Chapel church in Gainesville, Ga., corporately fasts and prays each January, also came on board to support the initiative. What they soon found was as they put forward plans for the Roaring Twenties fast, others were sensing the Holy Spirit calling them to similar things, O’Brien said.
Think Eternity’s digital mission director Jon Groves said that growing up as the son of an evangelist he was often exposed to “revival” churches and having revival meetings regularly. Yet when he became a pastor he started studying revivals of history, great awakenings and culture-shifting movements that shook entire continents.
“There has never been a greater opportunity to flood the world and saturate the air with the message of the gospel,” he said.
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
