Wilmore, Ky. Feb 3, 1970

THE ASBURY REVIVAL

Asbury Methodist College, Wilmore KY, 1970

Tuesday, February 3rd began as an ordinary morning for the students of Asbury Methodist College, but the events of the following few days would trigger a chain of events that affected the body of Christ for decades to come.
As the first weekly morning chapel of the new month began, College Dean Custer Reynolds invited students to come forward and give testimony to what God was doing in their lives.
As the first few students came forward to take the microphone, the Presence of God descended in the room in such a powerful way as to impact everyone there.
Wrote one witness “A few minutes ago there came a spontaneous move of the Holy Spirit. I have never witnessed such a mighty outpouring of God upon His people. The scene is unbelievable!”
For the next 185 hours, there was a continuous unbroken stream of students and later, faculty and staff stepping to the microphone to confess and publicly repent of sin, and to tell of the change God was making in their heart.
By the second day, reporters from nearby Lexington KY began media coverage of the event and by the end of third day, the meeting had received nationwide attention.
Most classes were cancelled, the few which continued became smaller reflections of the larger meeting going on at Hughes Auditorium.
By the end of the seventh day, requests were flooding in from college campuses, churches and christian organizations all over the United States asking Asbury College to send teams of students to share their experiences.
In many cases, similar outpourings of the Holy Spirit came as Asbury students shared testimony of revival fire across the country, and as far away as Canada and Latin America.
Southwest Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth, Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, and North Park College in Chicago all experienced extended meetings in similar fashion, and over the next two years, visibility and participation in college groups such as Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ blossomed.
In June of 1972, Campus Crusade for Christ’s Explo ‘72 was attended by nearly 80,000 students and laypersons.
When asked what led to the Asbury Revival, Dr. Dennis Kinlaw, then President of Asbury College in an interview with Nancy Leigh DeMoss of “Revive Our Hearts” Radio shared his insights:

… that’s the way we felt about it. You couldn’t keep us out of Hughes Auditorium. There’s where the Holy presence was. You say, “OK, how did it come, what caused it?”
No question in my mind, that one of the things was our need. We needed it a lot worse than anybody else around. God honors me in His mercy, in His infinite mercy.
But another thing, we had some students who were interested in prayer. One young lady became deeply concerned for the blessing of God on our campus. So she gathered a group around her, and they started praying.
In October, before the Spirit came in February, six students came together and banded together in what they called the great experiment. They covenanted for 30 days to take 30 minutes every morning to spend in prayer with the Word, writing down what truth they got from the Word that they were to obey that day, sharing their faith somewhere in the course of the day and meeting once a week for those 30 days and checking up on each other to see that each one had done his discipline that week.
So for 30 days they met that way and they worked that way. At the end of those 30 days, we came toward the end of the fall term. At the beginning of the winter term, each one of those six picked up five people, znd so there were six groups of six that were getting up every morning for 30 minutes extra to pray and spend in time with God.
That experiment ended the 31 of January. On the 31 of January they had the chapel, and there were 36 of them on the platform. Those 36 shared what that experiment had done for them, and they had in every seat in the auditorium a commitment slip. They asked every student in the student body to commit himself to become a part of a group of six — who would just for 30 days engage in this experiment.
That was on Saturday, the 31st of January. In some ways that was the most impressive chapel I think I ever saw at Asbury, students sharing what time with God had done for them. That was on the 31st. The next chapel was Tuesday, the third of February.
In addition to this, the young lady I told you about and her group, they had gone to the proper authorities and asked for a chance to have a place for prayer and so forth. They would meet for prayer, and then they started having night prayer meetings. They called an all-night prayer meeting in Hughes auditorium; a large group of them gathered around the altar.
Now, here’s the way they worked. They were praying for God to come and when they would finish a prayer meeting, they’d look at each other and say, “Do you think He’ll come today?”
It takes students; it takes young people, doesn’t it? They’d finish their prayer meeting, and they’d look at each other and say, “Do you think that He’ll come today?”
They had run an all-night prayer meeting, and somewhere around 2:30 they got each other together and stood around the altar and held hands and said, “That’s enough; He’s coming” and went home and went to bed. And He did.

Full text of the interview can be found online at
Other sources include: Dr. Richard Riss, “20th Century Revival Movements” pp 153, 154