Intro by Patricia King
Jim Wies is an Extreme Prophetic Webpastor and Itinerant Minister. He is a teacher and is very prophetic. He actively ministered in the Toronto Outpouring and engaged in the Pensacola Revival. He now writes an exciting prophetic overview of the progression of the Spirit unto the current revival in Lakeland.
You will enjoy the Chronicles...I have.
Patricia King
Extreme Prophetic Ministries
The Impartable Anointing
Awesome things are happening in these days of visitation. Revival fire has ignited in Lakeland, Florida, and has exploded into multiple thousands of people gathering each night in stadiums and arenas receiving healings, miracles and fresh fire from Heaven. Many from all over the world are being ignited with a fresh anointing of grace and taking the revival fire back to their homes and churches.
Much has been said about the "contagious" and "impartable" nature of the revival fire breaking out in Florida and other places, making these truly exciting times to be alive. Since there are some valuable lessons we can learn from some of the recent predecessors of this current outpouring, that will help us rightly respond to these current events, I pulled together what I am calling "chronicles of revival" from events I personally experienced and first person accounts I have heard from some of the primary people involved with the progression of revival over the last 20 years.
But long before there was the "Toronto Blessing" or the "Brownsville Revival" we see a story that exemplifies the reality of chasing mantles and catching anointings right from the Scriptures. The story is from 2 Kings 2:1-2; 9-15 and is about Elijah and Elisha:
"And it came to pass, when the LORD was about to take up Elijah into Heaven by a whirlwind, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal. Then Elijah said to Elisha, 'Stay here, please, for the LORD has sent me on to Bethel.' But Elisha said, 'As the LORD lives, and as your soul lives, I will not leave you!' So they went down to Bethel...
"And so it was, when they had crossed over, that Elijah said to Elisha, 'Ask! What may I do for you, before I am taken away from you?' Elisha said, 'Please let a double portion of your spirit be upon me.' So he said, 'You have asked a hard thing. Nevertheless, if you see me when I am taken from you, it shall be so for you; but if not, it shall not be so.' Then it happened, as they continued on and talked, that suddenly a chariot of fire appeared with horses of fire, and separated the two of them; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into Heaven.
"And Elisha saw it, and he cried out, 'My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and its horsemen!' So he saw him no more. And he took hold of his own clothes and tore them into two pieces. He also took up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and went back and stood by the bank of the Jordan.
"Then he took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and struck the water, and said, 'Where is the LORD God of Elijah?' And when he also had struck the water, it was divided this way and that; and Elisha crossed over. Now when the sons of the prophets who were from Jericho saw him, they said, 'The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.' And they came to meet him, and bowed to the ground before him."
The lesson is obvious: Elisha pressed in and received not just the same anointing Elijah carried, but in fact, a double portion of the anointing his mentor had.
The History Behind Current Lakeland, Florida, Outpourings
The story of this current outpouring can actually be traced back 20 years ago to an obscure Bible College teacher in South Africa who felt called of God to surrender his life to become a missionary to America. His name was Rodney Howard-Browne.
He arrived in the USA in 1988 and started traveling as an evangelist preaching the Gospel. One of the earmarks of his life and his message was a deep and unquenchable hunger for God and the power of His Spirit. By the early 90's he began to experience an unusual level of anointing on his ministry and people began to receive powerful touches of refreshing and joy in his meetings, as well as healings and other miracles.
By 1993, he was gaining attention by what God was doing in his meetings; and in a series of meetings he held in Lakeland, Florida, there was such a powerful move that he went into extended meetings where thousands of people began to come and receive a fresh touch from God.
The Buzz in 1993 Concerning Lakeland Revival Meetings
During that time, I was pastoring a church in the Florida Panhandle, and I remember all the buzz about the meetings. A number of people I knew flew in from across the USA to Florida to receive a fresh empowerment from Heaven. I also remember, to my chagrin, the thoughts that passed through my mind at the time, about how I had God in my life, and I had an anointing on what I was doing, and I certainly did not need to travel anywhere to chase after "more of God." (I was soon to radically change my mind on those issues.)
Not everyone held my opinion on the matter, and during those days in 1993, there was a certain burned-out Vineyard pastor in St. Louis, Missouri, who had, himself, seen seasons of visitation and healing in his past; he was so hungry to experience it again, that he chased Rodney Howard-Browne down and attended some meetings he was holding in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That man was Randy Clark. By his own admission, he tells about how he got into the prayer line for "impartation" five times in one night just because he was so hungry for more of God and His power in his life.
Randy left those meetings changed forever. He was healed of a nervous condition that had been plaguing him for a while, but more significantly, when he got home he discovered a whole new level of grace and anointing in his ministry. Randy has gone on since then to build an international, apostolic ministry that is touching nations with healing and impartation of revival fire.
Not long after that, another hungry Vineyard pastor named John Arnott heard of what had happened in Randy's life and invited him to come and do four nights of meetings at his church in Toronto, Canada, in the cold and snowy January of 1994. What happened next certainly changed my mind about the impartation and transferability of anointings and mantles. But way beyond that, it has had major impact on the Church worldwide. The impact felt from the visitation of God that occurred at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship is with us to this day, and there is much we can learn from it.
Hungry for MORE!
"O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water. So I have looked for You in the sanctuary, to see Your power and Your glory. Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise You. Thus I will bless You while I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name. My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips." Psalm 63:1-5
God will accommodate the hungry with revival. Not long after Randy Clark received a fresh impartation at Rodney Howard-Browne's meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, another hungry Vineyard pastor named John Arnott invited him to his church in Toronto, Canada. When the meetings began on a cold Thursday night in January, there were about 120 people in attendance. But God showed up in a powerful way, and what was intended to be four nights of meetings quickly blossomed into extended meetings.
John convinced Randy to stay on to help, and the meetings grew in intensity and in numbers. It seemed like overnight word got around that there was an unusual visitation of God, and the hungry began to come from throughout the USA and Canada--then came the nations. Nightly meetings extended week after week, then month after month. The hungry kept coming, catching the fire, and taking it back with them to their homes and churches in nations all over the world. At one point, they said there were over 6,000 churches experiencing the outpouring in just England alone.
My first knowledge of the outpouring came in the Spring of that year (1994) when a friend named Steve Witt, who himself was a Vineyard pastor in eastern Canada, began to tell me stories of how he took a team from his church to the Toronto meetings. And when they got back to his church in New Brunswick, his church caught ablaze and was experiencing the same powerful visitation from God, with the accompanying signs and wonders.
Suddenly I got hungry. We immediately set up a series of meetings for Steve and his team to come to our rural church in the Florida Panhandle. They came, and sure enough, the same thing happened in our congregation. And my hunger became insatiable. I wanted MORE! So off I went with numerous visits over the next six months to Toronto, to Rodney Howard-Browne meetings, to Randy Clark conferences, etc., as did thousands and thousands of people over the next several years. Our small, rural church of 120 people caught the fire as well. We doubled in size over the next three years (but that is a different story).
The Toronto meetings grew from hundreds to thousands, and the fire spread. Healings and miracles were taking place, and people continued to be powerfully touched by the love of God and His presence. This truly was an impartable and contagious anointing. Smaller versions of the same outpouring began to occur in churches all over the world. One such place was an Anglican church in England called Holy Trinity--Brompton.
There was another church in the sleepy, gulf coast town of Pensacola, Florida, who had not heard of the Toronto outpouring at this point. But they were hungry for revival to such a degree that they had set Sunday nights aside for a solid two years just to pray for revival. After two full years of praying for revival at the Brownsville Assembly of God, some of the core staff heard about and decided to go check out the Toronto meetings, and they took a trip up in the Spring of 1995. They came home more hungry than ever for revival fire. Part of the group was the pastor's wife, Brenda Kilpatrick, and worship leader Lindell Cooley.
While that was going on, a friend of Brownsville pastor John Kilpatrick, who was a traveling evangelist named Steve Hill with the Assemblies of God denomination, had heard of what was happening at Holy Trinity Church in England. In one of his trips abroad he stopped into the church and talked to the vicar there, named Sandy Miller, and received prayer and a fresh impartation of fire for himself and his ministry.
In one of those divinely orchestrated events, it turned out that the Brownsville Pastor, John Kilpatrick, decided to invite evangelist Steve Hill to preach at his church on Father's Day Sunday in the Summer of 1995. It was like a match hitting gasoline. They exploded into nightly meetings, and suddenly this large, respectable Assembly of God church in Pensacola, Florida, became another hot spot for revival, as God poured out another powerful demonstration of His power and presence in that place.
Revival Phenomena
"Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles." Acts 2:43
Through the mid to late 90's there were revival "hotspots" burning all over the world, the most prominent of which was the "Toronto Blessing" and the "Brownsville Revival" in Pensacola, Florida. People were being saved, healed, delivered, encouraged, strengthened and refreshed. But it was not without controversy. Many signs and wonders were happening, and that alone received lots of attention. Much of the controversy centered on the signs and wonders "phenomena."
Common to many of these meetings, were people roaring and groaning, falling and shaking, and people wondered. One friend of mine astutely commented, "Of course, a sign is designed to make you wonder." Hmm...a common bush in the desert would not have captured Moses' attention. But a bush that was on fire but not consumed, made him wonder and caused him to turn aside to see what it was. So is the effect of the unusual signs of revival.
A "sign" is an abnormal, unusual attention-getter, designed to point to something. Where I lived for a while in Northwest Florida, there were lots and lots of trees. In fact, I lived in the midst of miles and miles of pine forests. If I were to tell someone to drive down the road for a few miles until they saw the pine tree on the left and turn there, they would most certainly become lost, since there are hundreds of pines, all looking pretty much the same. If, on the other hand, I said, "Look for the pine tree that has been sawed into planks, nailed together, painted white, and has an arrow on it pointing left" (i.e. a sign), it would be much easier to find the destination the sign points to.
The fact is, a sign is simply that--an unusual "something" that gets our attention. A sign is of necessity an unusual, abnormal phenomenon, otherwise it would not serve its purpose. The validity of the sign is found in not what the sign is, but what the sign points to. The sign phenomena itself cannot be the solo criteria by which we judge whether it is divine or counterfeit. A sign is meant to point to something--WHAT it points to makes all the difference.
The Sign Should Point to Jesus
And that leads to another principle. The sign is not the destination, but points us to the destination. Which, in all cases, should be Jesus. THAT is the criteria by which to judge. The accuracy of a word, validity of a sign or anything else is not measured by whether it is an authentic or supernatural miracle, but rather, if it glorifies Jesus. In the meetings being described, is the name of Jesus being lifted up? Is the Gospel being preached? Are people being provoked to deeper devotion to Jesus? Are they recovering their first love for the Lord? These are the real criteria.
In Rodney Howard-Browne's meetings there was overwhelming joy and laughter. In Toronto, people shook and fell, or broke into what some called "exotic prophetic manifestations." Similar things happened at Brownsville. And people wondered.
But this kind of phenomena is not new to revival. One reporter observed about the famous Cane Ridge Revival in the 1800's that the scene looked more like a battlefield than an outdoor meeting--with people strewn all over the countryside and laid out under the power of God's presence. But history tells us that the Cane Ridge Revival had a significant and positive effect on the morality of the nation.
The Fruit Speaks for Itself
Of course, throughout Scripture there were occasions where the powerful presence of God caused people to fall under the presence of His glory. One clear example is in 2 Chronicles 5:13-14:
"...in unison when the trumpeters and the singers were to make themselves heard with one voice to praise and to glorify the LORD, and when they lifted up their voice accompanied by trumpets and cymbals and instruments of music, and when they praised the LORD saying, 'He indeed is good for His lovingkindness is everlasting,' then the house, the house of the LORD, was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the house of God." (See also Genesis 17:17; 2 Chronicles 7:1-2; Numbers 22:31; Daniel 8:17,18; Acts 9:3-6.)
So the fruit speaks for itself. I knew a teenage girl whose mother attended our local church. She visited the Brownsville Revival one night, more out of curiosity than anything else. While there, she received prayer, fell down, then levitated about six inches off the floor while she was being delivered from demons. Needless to say, she was changed forever. And so was about half our youth group who was there and saw it.
John Arnott, the pastor at Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, gave an interesting response when challenged about the shaking and quaking that often happened to people who received prayer in their meetings. Someone asked, "What if it is a demon?" To which he replied, "Even if it was a demon, the more important question is whether the demon was coming or leaving." It is in the overwhelmingly convincing results of the encounters people experienced in these meetings, that the answer was found. They consistently left more in love with Jesus, more passionate for God, more refreshed, encouraged and empowered for ministry. As John also commented, "Why would the devil want to do that?"
One such case was a certain tired, sick and discouraged woman who had been on the mission field in Africa for many years with little fruit. She went to the meetings in Toronto, was prayed for by Randy Clark, and fell down in a pile on the floor. She was so overwhelmed by the power and presence of God that she could hardly talk and was unable to walk for a week, or even get to and from the meetings without help.
After her week of power encounter, Heidi Baker returned to the mission field with a fresh empowerment from the Holy Spirit--and since then she and her husband Roland have set Africa on fire, planting somewhere close to 10,000 churches. They have seen many significant healings and miracles, including a number of resurrections from the dead, multiplications of food, and other notable miracles.
Another minister who was powerfully touched by the Toronto Revival was a woman who already had an effective ministry in Western Canada during that time. As a prophetic visionary and effective author and teacher, she took what she received and began to train people to experience their own ongoing personal revival through her "Glory Schools" and other seminars and materials. Her name was Patricia King.
Catching the Fire and Giving it Away
The revival at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship had some distinctive aspects to it. One of the significant aspects of what happened there (in this writer's opinion), was that it was not so much "personality based" as it was "presence of God" based. The amazing feature of this outpouring of the Holy Spirit was that the power and presence of God was there night after night, regardless of who was speaking, who was leading worship and what else was happening. The "felt" love of God and intimacy with Him were the biggest features, although there were plenty of salvations, healings, prophetic ministry, excellent teaching and so on.
Many people acknowledge the Toronto Outpouring as a significant benchmark of revival for this generation. Through the wise apostolic leadership of John Arnott, the revival that happened there was stewarded and administrated in such a way that there has been an establishment of ongoing fruit. Many current ministries also trace their release into new levels of effectiveness to the fresh anointing they received from the Toronto Revival. One of those ministries was that of Patricia King.
Patricia became a "carrier" of the "renewal anointing" and took it back to her spheres of ministry in western Canada. It was there, during the late 90's, that she was in a meeting where she prophetically identified and called out a young man named Todd Bentley to launch out into an evangelistic ministry, and prophetically "commissioned" him into a ministry of signs, wonders and miracles.
Todd grabbed the mantle and ran with it. The next ten years saw growth in his effectiveness as an evangelist and healing minister, but also some grueling dealings with God, as God prepared the vessel--as He so adequately and lovingly does.
It was 10 years later, in the beginning of 2008 (February 20-23), that Patricia King invited Todd to be a keynote speaker at an "Extreme Prophetic" conference she held in Phoenix, Arizona, called "Raising the Dead." That conference turned out to be a significant milestone in the ongoing chronicles of revival. A man named Denny Cline, Pastor of the Vineyard Church in Albany, Oregon, who had been a friend to Todd and had hosted meetings with Todd in the past, came to the conference on a prophetic mission. He came with the sole agenda of proclaiming to Todd that there were new angelic hosts being assigned to Todd and his ministry to assist in a new wave of healing and revival fire.
A Dawning of a New Day
It was on one of the last nights of that conference that a prolonged and holy silence settled in upon the meeting at the end of a time of worship. After a long pause, a prophetic word came forth over the meeting, declaring the following: "For those in this place who sense that you have crossed over a new threshold, the Lord declares,
'Surely you HAVE crossed over a new threshold and have, as it were, turned the corner into a new day, says the Lord. For surely this is a new day, not only for you, but also for the entire Body of Christ. And even as there have been times in which historians looked back and said, "That was the dawning of a new day for the Church," even so, those with spiritual perception will look back upon these meetings and this time as the time when a new day dawned and a new level of breakthrough occurred for the Body of Christ.'"
A few short weeks later, Todd began what was supposed to be a short series of meetings in Lakeland, Florida. They began with about 700 in attendance, but God poured out a glorious gusher of His glory and healing power, and the crowds quickly swelled into thousands. Many signs and wonders and dramatic miracles are taking place.
As of the time of this writing, there have been 12 reports of RESURRECTIONS FROM THE DEAD. Many are heralding this as the often-prophesied and long-awaited beginning of an end time harvest that will spread to arenas and stadiums all over the world.
Once again, there is a tangible and transferable anointing of power and glory that is spreading to revival hotspots all over the world. And with the Divine providence of a prophetically sensitive satellite TV station--GOD TV, founded by Wendy and Rory Alec--broadcasting the meetings over much of the world, along with the advance of internet technology, there is a rapid spread of the knowledge of this outpouring that has resulted in thousands of saints and leaders converging from all over the world to catch the fire and then take it back and give it away.
As exciting as it is that there is a portal of open heavens occurring in Lakeland, Florida, even more exciting is the fact that it is contagious and transferable and available wherever hungry believers are crying out for more of God's revelation, power and presence. These are truly wondrous days of glory and grace.
Jim Wies, Itinerant Minister and Web Pastor
Extreme Prophetic Ministries
Email: jwies@xpmedia.com
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