August 2021
August 2021
August 2021
To Know, Love, Live, Serve & We are very much looking forward to starting these
Share Christ! two events. ***Protocols will be adhered to for
these events.
August Birthdays
Have you heard talk of revival recently? It’s been more than 150 years since the last great
revival in America took place. Now, revival is needed more than ever! Before I say more
about that, let’s look at some revival trivia from the past:
The (First) Great Awakening: In the New World a series of revivals, known as the Great
Awakening, spread through the American colonies between 1725 and 1760. Under preachers
like Gilbert Tennent, Jonathan Edwards and English evangelist George Whitefield, the reviv-
als reached their peak from 1740 to 1742. At the same time as the Great Awakening in
America was the Wesleyan revival in England. At the time of John Wesley’s death in 1791, Methodists numbered
79,000 in England and 40,000 in America.
The Second Great Awakening: America’s next revival began in 1801 at the Cane Ridge camp meeting in Ken-
tucky, where as many as 3,000 were converted. The banner year for camp meetings was 1811, when approximate-
ly one-third of all Americans attended one of them. By 1806 the Awakening had reached Williams College in
Massachusetts. There, five students prayed during a thunderstorm in the shelter of a haystack, four of the five com-
mitting themselves to becoming missionaries. The Haystack Prayer Meeting, as it came to be called, was the be-
ginning of the American foreign mission movement.
The Prayer Meeting Revival: Beginning as a prayer meeting of six people on Fulton Street in New York City in
1857, the Prayer Meeting Revival spread quickly throughout the world. Over the next two years, a million con-
verts were added to American churches and a million to churches in England and Ireland.
Wow! That’s pretty amazing! What if we had another Great Awakening in America? What if we were to see a
great revival in our time? It could happen! God seems to use difficult periods of history to bring about revival.
COVID has brought us to just such a time. Now, just as we thought we were about done with the pandemic, we
have a new variant and infection is on the rise again. So now we are still in an in-between time. This is the per-
fect time to pray for revival!
We’ll be hearing quite a bit about revival and the connection with prayer throughout August. In the meantime,
pray for revival and spiritual awakening in our church, community, and world in greater than usual ways!
On another note, several of you have asked about our vacation and the work on the property. Some of you were
hoping for some stories about it all. I’ll be glad to tell you all about it privately. If you want to know more, please
contact me directly. Otherwise you can view the videos on our website https://portaparsonage.weebly.com/
youtube to see the whole story to date!
With you on the journey,
Pastor Dave