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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Baptisms on the rise as church experiences revival
VIRDEN, Ill. (BP)--Revival has swept into a small church in rural Illinois as more than 60 people have professed Jesus as Lord within the past two years, and the pastor says it’s because the congregation decided that God’s plans for the church are more important than their own.
Grace Southern Baptist Church in Virden, Ill., a town of 3,500 people about 20 miles south of Springfield, was striving to have 100 people for a Sunday service two years ago, but now they easily surpass 200 each week.
“It’s amazing over the last two years what God has done,” Brent Williams, pastor of Grace, told Baptist Press. “I’m originally from Arkansas and grew up in church in the Bible Belt, and what I’ve found out over the last two years of being here is that people are so receptive to the Gospel, that their ears and their minds are open to hear about the Good News of Jesus Christ.”
In early November, five people accepted Christ during a service, and the next week the altar was filled with people praying and five more came forward for salvation, including a 70-year-old woman.
“We were about to close the service. No one had come on the last time we were going to sing, and then all of a sudden I looked out of the corner of my eye and up walks this little girl onto the stage where I was standing, and she pulled on my coattail and she asked me, ‘Pastor, can I be saved?’” Williams recounted.
“Of course it just hit me, after witnessing a 70-year-old woman who by statistics wasn’t likely to come to know Christ at that age and then to look into the eyes of a 6-year-old child and see that God is in the business of saving someone at the age of 6 and someone at the age of 70. It was a beautiful picture,” he said.
The following Wednesday night, the 70-year-old woman’s 74-year-old sister approached Williams in his office at the church and wanted to be saved. Williams had ministered to her husband when he was terminally ill with cancer and the couple didn’t have a church home.
“About once a week during the last month of his life I visited with him and got to know him and ended up doing his funeral,” the pastor said. Learn more...
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