Prayer Matters Part 2

Why doesn’t it happen in the West?

Reinhardt Bonnke was an evangelist who was invited to come to Australia twice late in the twentieth century. Across Africa, millions of people had attended his vast open-air meetings. It is well documented that in those meetings, thousands of people were miraculously healed of all sorts of major infirmities. But in his two visits to Australia, in his weeks of ministry there was not a single instance of anyone being healed or freed from demonic bondage.

Why is that?

Why is it that in the West, compared with any other era in Christian history, our clergy are the best trained to the highest accredited academic standards, they have the best technology to share their message, from the best facilities money can buy. Yet, in every country in the West, the church is in a state of rapid decline, lurching seemingly blindly toward a chasm of extinction.

One published report claimed that by the 2090s, there may be no current mainline denomination left in the UK. Here in Australia, we are closing churches at a rapid rate and selling the buildings to become housing units, theatres, restaurants, or for use by other non-Christian religions. By the 2090s, our Christian landscape may look even bleaker than that in the UK.

Conversely, there are other countries in which I get to minister, where followers of Jesus are booming on all fronts, growing exponentially in spite of poverty and persecution.

Recently, I was working on the manuscript of a book that will be published in 2025. The subject is about just one twenty year old movement in which there are 452,319 members in 20,651 churches. They have no church buildings, no finance-sapping Bible Colleges, no hierarchical structures, and no trained clergy in our understanding of that office. Their founding leader is still alive and in the prime of life.

And there are many other movements like them.