Lives Transformed in Asbury Revival
Students shouted for joy, hostilities melted, and new lives started at the spontaneous revival that began at Asbury College early in 1970. At the end of a routine chapel service at this Kentucky college, a professor said in a quiet voice, “I wonder if there are any here with hungry hearts who would like to come and accept Christ as your personal Saviour.” Students began pouring toward the altar rail, and the air became “electrified with God’s presence.” Classes were suspended indefinitely. The scheduled 50-minute chapel service lasted day and night for 168 hours, attracting thousands of visitors from all over the country.
The revival’s effect on students’ lives was revolutionary. A Jewish student from a nearby college testified to finding his Messiah when the movement touched his campus. He said, “I’ve never been happier in my whole life.” An Asbury senior said, “I had taken trips on everything…drugs, sex, booze, gambling. But with drugs you get ‘high’ and then come down hard. With Christ, I’m going to try to stay on an even keel and try to get all my friends to do the same.” He said that it had taken him 40 hours of prayer to “get saved.”
“God gave us a new baptism of love,” a professor said… “this was no sentimental emotion or momentary effervescence, but ‘the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.’” Someone would stand up to ask forgiveness from another seated nearby, and the two would meet in the aisle and embrace. A pastor’s wife stood up and confessed her secret aversion to the townspeople and asked everyone’s forgiveness. “The adults were hitting the altar like flies the minute she got through,” the pastor said. “I have never seen such an awesome demonstration of the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit,” he said later. Students, faculty, and townspeople united in singing. “They counseled together, quoted scripture to one another, wept, and smiled through their tears.”
The editor of the college newspaper cut chapel the morning the revival started and came later only to get a news story. “Then something happened,” he said. “I knew…I was a sick and miserably lonely young man. Yet I sat there or two hours refusing to do anything about it. About that time a girl on my staff came up and apologized for ‘being mean’ to me. That really got me, because it was I who had mistreated her. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I went down to the altar to see if I could do anything about the lousy condition my life was in. I put up a terrible fight. Still there were two things I could not deny: I was lonely, and my friends had a joy I did not have. Finally, I decided to put a little faith in Jesus—something I have not done for a couple of years now. Today I am trying to reconstruct my life according to God’s will.”
Asbury Revival Spreads Across the Nation
Early in 1970, a feeling of expectancy was stirring Asbury College. Groups of students had begun to meet together before breakfast to pray for the college, which is near Lexington, Kentucky. During a regular chapel service on February 3, a spontaneous revival began and ran non-stop for 185 hours, closing down classes for a week.
The awakening began when large numbers of students responded to an invitation to pray at the altar. “Other students began standing to give praise to God…cries for mercy, shouts for joy, were heard.” The college president described the scene: “There is a presence of God here. He walked in here Tuesday morning and He is still here.”
Asbury students had filled the auditorium and held a meeting which lasted day and night. Pulpit and microphone were made available to those who wished to testify. Students of all classes, freshmen to seniors, responded—telling of God’s help in their lives, confessing sins and personal faults, and urging others to obey God’s call on their lives. Prayers and hymns were offered up with enthusiasm. “To God be the Glory” became the unofficial theme song of the Asbury Awakening.
The revival quickly spread to neighboring Asbury Theological Seminary. Although the seminary president was skeptical about the movement, the college president defended it: “Such movings of the Spirit of God have firm historical precedents in the life of American colleges and universities. Such happenings were not considered suspect in the early life of such schools as Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale.”
“Such movings of the Spirit of God have firm historical precedents in the life of American colleges and universities. Such happenings were not considered suspect in the early life of such schools as Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale.”
Asbury students began leaving the campus and spreading out across the States and into Canada, bearing news of the revival. By the first weekend it had spread to twenty other college campuses. Soon sixteen colleges from coast to coast joined in a College Prayer Net over shortwave radio, providing daily contact with the happenings of the nationwide revival and exchanging requests for prayer.
The Associated Press carried almost daily accounts of the Asbury Awakening. A college official said, “The role of the secular press has been amazing in these weeks of revival. Hundreds of people have been converted to Jesus Christ because their first knowledge of the revival was either from a newspaper, radio or television account of the revival.” Secular newsmen who had come to the campus commented, “It is God’s doing” and called it a “Divine Happening.” One A.P. newsman said, “We are sick and tired of demonstrations and riots. It is heartwarming to report something good for a change. If they run out of something to pray for about 2 a.m. ask them to pray for me.” They did.
One television newscaster told his listeners to drop everything and listen to the report on Asbury, since he had never been so impressed in his 34 years of news experience. A newspaper editor wrote of the revival: “You all know me, a busted-down Catholic, a sometimes dissident Christian who drinks and smokes too much. But it somehow reassures me. While the wind of conflict sears our cities, I can join no other battle line than that formed by the young people at Asbury College.”
The scheduled 50-minute chapel meeting at Asbury College was extended to an entire week, and the revival itself continued and spread. Students from other colleges still poured onto the campus, and three hour-long meetings every night were instituted by popular request. Over a thousand “teams” of Asbury students went out preaching, and by the end of one month the revival had spread to thirty-five other colleges.
The complete results of the Asbury Awakening can never be tabulated, since its effect has been on human lives. It has restored broken friendships, healed troubled personalities, and given peace and joy to hundreds of students. “It has been a unique and meaningful type of happening: young people are finding lasting answers to nagging problems.”