 is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58 AV).
6. It led to significant outreach in evangelism, both personal and group. …
In the following years some of the young men and women served God in evangelistic teams, school teaching, urban witness, government appointments, and as pastors and elders to their own people. One of them has with his wife been an effective missionary… in Papua New Guinea.
Similar Spirit movements such as this characterize revival in the islands with their animistic involvement in spirit activity. Christians affirm the power of the Holy Spirit over traditional occult spirits. Many local revival movements have flared up in Vanuatu and the South Pacific. This typical report is from Ruth Rongo of Tongoa Island dated August 28, 1991:
“I’ve just come back from an Evangelism ministry. It lasted for three months. God has done many miracles. Many people were shocked by the power of the Holy Spirit. The blind received their sight, the lame walked, the sick were healed. All these were done during this evangelism ministry. We see how God’s promise came into action. The prophet Joel had said it. We people of Vanuatu say “The spirit of the Lord God is upon us because he has anointed us to preach the Gospel to the poor people of Vanuatu.” Praise God for what he has done.
“In where I live, in my poor home, I also started a home cell prayer group. Our goal is that the revival must come in the church. Please pray for me and also for the group. Our prayer group usually meets on Sunday night, after the night meeting. We started at 10.30 pm to 1 or 3.30 am. If we come closer to God he will also come close to us. We spent more time in listening and responding to God.”
These revival movements continue to increase in the Pacific, especially as indigenous teams minister in other areas with the Spirit’s fire. The church grows stronger, even through opposition. Indigenous Christians live and minister in New Testament patterns from house to house, from village to village.
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1965 – September: Soé, Timor (Nahor Leo)
Spirit movements of revival influenced many thousands of people in Indonesia during the troubled and politically uncertain times there in the sixties. Much of it happened outside the established church, with a later acceptance of it in some churches. Thousands of animistic Muslims were converted, the biggest Christian impact on Islam in history.
The Indonesian government and army’s victory over the attempted Communist coup opened the way for the savage killing of 400,000 suspected Communists or sympathizers, so the numbers of nominal Muslims and Christians multiplied. This external motivation explains only part of the rapid multiplication of the church during this period, however. Many nominal animistic Muslims turned to the church not out of fear but out of revulsion toward their fellow Muslim’s slaughter of suspected Communists.
The Indonesian Bible Institute, established by Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade missionaries in 1959 at Batu in East Java experienced revival in the sixties with deep repentance, confession, renunciation of occult practices, burning fetishes and amulets, and a new humility and unity among staff and students. Individual students and teams engaged in effective evangelism in many islands.
A team of Indonesian students accompanied by a German Lutheran missionary teacher visited Timor during 1965 and saw evidences of revival beginning which burst into unprecedented power in September 1965. Christians and new converts burned amulets, pastors and leaders broke with animistic practices, prayer meetings multiplied, giving increased, heavy drinking of palm wine and chewing the narcotic betel nut was curtailed, and youth, traditionally the hardest to reach became the most responsive. They formed evangelistic teams of their own to take this new- found gospel of deliverance to outlying villages.
This revival spread in the uncertain days following the attempted communist coup on the night of 30 September and 1 October, 1965 in Indonesia when six of the eight Indonesian army generals wer