When I spoke at Birmingham Christian Centre yesterday morning, 29 people responded to the evangelistic invitation to become and Christian, and 16 people reported an immediate healing by coming to the microphone and describing what had just happened. BCC, led by Mark & Kathy Ryan, was founded in the late 1920s early 1930s in the wake of George Jeffreys’ famous Bingley Hall campaign, when 10,000 people were converted to Christianity and a total of 16 churches were planted, most of which still exist as Elim Pentecostal Churches in Birmingham today. George Jeffreys was from Wales, but first formed an evangelistic Elim (Exodus 15:27) band operating in Northern Ireland. By the early 1920s George and his brother Stephen were planting churches in England too. Their practice was to arrive with little advance publicity and hire a hall or use a tent and pray for the sick and preach the gospel until they saw a major healing breakthrough. Often these significant healings were reported in local and then national newspapers, which would then gather sometimes huge crowds. They then moved venues several times until they found somewhere big enough (e.g Bingley Hall, which at the time was one of the largest indoor arenas in the world, and was on the site where the Internatonal Convention Centre now stands.) In the opinion of many, George Jeffreys, for a 10 year period in the late 1920s and early 1930s became the most prominent British born evangelist since George Whitefield and John Wesley. You can listen to George Jeffreys speaking here elim.org.uk/Articles/410269/Listen_to_George.aspx Yesterday at BCC, at the 9.00am service, when I prayed a prayer for healing over the congregation, 12 people said they were immediately healed. We had all of them forming a queue at my invitation on the stage to share their stories about what had just happened. I then preached an evangelistic sermon and 5 people came forward in response to the salvation message. Two more responded subsequently but I did not ask them to come forward. In the 11.15am meeting, which was much larger, a man called Dave told us in tears that he’d been immediately healed of a long standing knee injury that he was due to have an operation on. Then there were a further 3 healing testimonies. I then preached the gospel message again, and this time 17 people came forward in response, and an additional 5 responded to a subsequent invitation I made at the very end of the meeting, when it was nearly 1.00pm. I had some great fellowship with Pastor Mark Ryan and his wife Kathy, and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting this vibrant black-majority city centre church. The previous day I spoke twice at BCC at a joint conference of Elim’s evangelism department, called “REACH” and also their missionary department. I was asked to teach on healing both morning and afternoon, and despite feeling that I couldn’t really teach Pentecostals anything about healing they didn’t already know, I got some encouraging feedback from delegates who’d come from all over the UK to the evangelism conference and all over the world to the missions conference. One lady had flown in from Iraq the day before and told some harrowing stories of what’s going on there at the moment. After a great lunch with Mark and Kathy Ryan yesterday, it was then a 4 hour drive back down the M40 and M25 to the Everyday Church “Pray for this City” prayer meeting. I arrived half an hour late, but it was great to see everyone, and we heard a testimony from a new member of the church that probably all of us there will never forget
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 08:17:30 +0000
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