at very night.”
After that the Osborns ministered to millions, preached to crowds of 20,000 to 250,000 in crusades in 76 countries, and led hundreds of thousands of people to Jesus Christ. Vast numbers were healed, including the deaf, blind, and crippled. Body organs have been recreated and restored, cancers died and vanished, lepers were healed and the dead raised.
Most of their powerful evangelism and healing ministry was huge crowds in developing nations. They regularly established 400 churches a year in these nations.
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1948 – February: Saskatchewan, Canada (Sharon Schools)
A revival movement which came to be called the Latter Rain revival (from Joel 2:28) began suddenly in the Sharon Orphanage and Schools including the Bible School in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada. Previously, teachers from the Bible School had been deeply impressed by the words of knowledge and healings at meetings conducted by William Branham in 1947 in Vancouver. They and the students began praying and fasting and studying the Scriptures with new intensity from November that year.
The staff and most of the 70 students had gathered in the largest classroom for devotions on Thursday, February 12, 1948, when the Holy Spirit fell on their gathering. Ern Hawtin, a teacher there described it in their magazine the Sharon Star:
Some students were under the power of God on the floor, others were kneeling in adoration and worship before the Lord. The anointing deepened until the awe was upon everyone. The Lord spoke to one of the brethren, ‘Go and lay hands upon a certain student and pray for him.’ While he was in doubt and contemplation one of the sisters who had been under the power of God went to the brother saying the same words, and naming the identical student he was to pray for. He went in obedience and a revelation was given concerning the student’s life and future ministry. After this a long prophecy was given with minute details concerning the great thing God was about to do. The pattern for the revival and many details concerning it were given.
They spent Friday studying the Scriptures for insight into these events, and then Ern Hawtin reported that on Saturday, February 14, “It seemed that all Heaven broke loose upon our souls, and heaven came down to greet us.” Visible manifestation of gifts was evident when candidates were prayed over, and many were healed. Hawtin continued, “Day after day the Glory and power of God came among us. Great repentance, humbling, fasting and prayer prevailed in everyone.”
Through their publications, camp meetings, conventions and visits of pastors and teachers from Sharon to churches and meetings across Canada and America thousands were touched by God in this fresh outpouring of his Spirit. Stanley Frodsham, then editor of the Assemblies of God magazine Pentecostal Evangel, visited churches touched by this revival and gave it strong support.
Many Pentecostal denominations rejected this move which emphasized laying on of hands for the impartation of spiritual gifts, the recognition of apostles and prophets in the church, and the gift of prophecy for directing and commissioning ministerial candidates and for church government. However, the Latter Rain revival and the healing revivals through the fifties had a strong influence on the charismatic renewal of the sixties and seventies.
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1949 – October: Hebrides Islands, Scotland (Duncan Campbell)
Following the trauma of World War II, spiritual life reached a low ebb in the Scottish Hebrides. By 1949 Peggy and Christine Smith (84 and 82) had prayed constantly for revival in their cottage near Barvas village on the Isle of Lewis, the largest of the Hebrides Islands in the bleak north west of Scotland. God showed Peggy in a dream that revival was coming. Months later, early one winter’s morning as the sisters were praying, God give them an unshakeable conviction that revival was near.
Peggy asked her minister James Murray Mackay to call the church leaders to prayer. Three nights a week the leaders prayed together for months. One night, having 