When Twitter, Instagram and Facebook permanently banned former President Donald Trump during his final days in office, Youth With A Mission leaders knew the time was right to share prophetic words from 2004 about a pandemic, racial unrest, homelessness, rioting and censorship.
YWAM’s Andy Byrd and Brian Brennt, along with prayer leader and The Send’s Lou Engle are encouraged by the 17-year-old prophetic words and vision because their predictions of doom and gloom—fulfilled in 2020—precede a harvest of 80 million souls in America.
Prior to this year, the prophetic words from 2004 were filed on Brennt’s computer at the home he shares with his wife, Christy, in Huntington Beach, California.
In 2004, the Brennts lived in the Pacific Northwest, where they preached the gospel from a flatbed truck. The couple, who years later co-founded YWAM’s Circuit Riders with Byrd, enjoyed favor with city leaders and saw people coming to the Lord—the fruit of their labors.
But watching Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke, the Brennts despaired that, comparatively, few were saved through their ministry of sharing the gospel.
So the Brennts prayed, “God what are you saying to us? Either we’re the worst evangelists or …” Brian recalls saying before his wife saw a vision of waves hitting the nations. Christy believes the Lord told her the waves were intended to produce an urgency, interest and desire in people to know Jesus Christ.
With a yellow legal pad and pen in hand, Brian recorded his wife’s words:
“There’s a wave of pandemic coming for America and the nations,” she said. “There’s a wave of homelessness. There’s a wave of economic difficulty. There’s a wave of social unrest, and then there’s going to be a protest.
“There’s going to be an uprising that’s going to come into the Capitol building, and then the American flag is going to be bent down for a period of time,” Christy told him. “Then it will come back again.
“And the president is going to be silenced,” Brian recalls from his wife’s prophecy.
As the Brennts continued to pray for America, they sensed there would be great opportunities for evangelism and the salvation of 80 million people, as happened in Africa with Bonnke, who later boldly declared, “America will be saved.”
Brian transferred the words on paper to his computer later that evening.
“It was a horrific vision,” he says. “I never shared that word with anyone. The Lord really broke me that year to say, ‘Hey, look, it is part of the season in which I’m creating the conditions for harvest.’ And that’s really where it sank into my heart.
“I told the Lord, ‘I don’t want to get up and start prophesying all this doomsday,” Brian says.
“He said, ‘You don’t need to. Let it happen, and when it happens, then declare the word.'”
In late December 2020 and into the first week of 2021, Brian was stunned by Twitter’s ban of Trump’s robust use of its platform, followed by other social media during his final 10 days in office. “That was such a specific thing,” he says of the 2004 vision and prophetic words about censorship.
With Byrd and Engle by his side in January 2021, Brian read the words publicly for the first time at an online prayer, missions and evangelism conference with ministry leaders Daniel Kolenda, Michael Koulianos and Todd White, who prayed for viewers in Europe, Africa, South America and the United States.
Engle calls the prophetic vision and words “stunning.”
“I have this sense that over the past year God has been shaking everything that can be shaken before the greatest harvest,” Engle says. “God says you can’t find answers in government. I’m going to come with my glory, and there’s going to be fire on the lips of the church.
“This is not an hour to shrink back and say I’m living in pain,” he says. “What are we going to do? I believe this, right now, is the hour.”
Early in 2021, Engle had a dream. In it, he saw a church building bigger than most. Inside the church, Engle preached on the prayer of Jabez, whose pleas were for blessing, increase, favor and deliverance.
“Jabez was born in pain, but he didn’t stay in his pain; he turned his pain into a prayer,” Engle says.
“God says, ‘I’m going to extend your boundaries this year,'” he adds. “‘Your impact [will be] all over the world. I’m going to lay my supernatural hand of power upon you.'”
Brian Brennt, Engle and Byrd believe it is harvest time.
“2021 is wild,” Byrd says, “and in the midst of it, God spoke to us out of Isaiah 6. We believe this passage has so much significance for the hour that we’re in right now,” he says.
The passage begins with a crisis: the death of King Uzziah, a period marked by a transition of power, fear, chaos, instability, unrest and difficulty, when Isaiah had an encounter with God.
“God wants to give an encounter to the global body of Christ,” Byrd says. “That we would see Jesus high and lifted up above the crisis of our times. That we would have a bigger vision than the difficulty around us,” he says.
Brian agrees. “What we see is the real hunger for Jesus Christ in America. And so the way we interpreted that word from the beginning was, when we saw these signs, we knew we were in the season,” he says.
As the Brennts joined Engle to pray about 2021, they identified with the great pain and isolation people are experiencing due to COVID. “We really have this enormous increase of great love for people as they’re going through such a challenging time.”
When the pandemic ends—which they hope is this year—there’s a sense that open doors and mission fields await them. “All these shakings have created a new playing field of hunger,” Brian says.
With YWAM and Circuit Riders, The Send hopes to reignite a global evangelism and missions movement quashed by COVID this year with a worship and prayer event at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, sometime in the spring or early summer of 2022.
The Send/Brazil filled three stadiums with people stirred by prayer, missions and evangelism last February before COVID ended plans for a large U.S. event in the fall; the pandemic’s continuation in the first two months of 2021 prevents capacity seating at Arrowhead any time this year—an event Engle and Byrd announced, then canceled.
The Send has benefited numerous times from Christy’s prophetic gifts, and the missionary herself experienced an instantaneous miracle in 2019 at the first event in Orlando, where she was healed from a 38-year, near-fatal bout with Lyme disease—an experience she prophesied years before her radical recovery.
“Christy functions as a dynamic person of prayer,” Brian says. “She was healed at the first Send in Orlando when [Pastor] Bill Johnson prayed for her. And it was Christy who, seven years before, prophesied on Feb 23, 2012, that The Send would begin in Orlando. She even said that would be the place where her health would have a radical turnaround,” Brennt says.
Before that time, Christy suffered with daily seizures, forcing her to remain in bed.
“I took her to The Send,” Brian says. “Sure as can be, at the end of the night, [Pastor] Bill [Johnson] prayed for her. He put his hands over her and said, ‘Lyme’s disease is no big deal to God.’ And the glory of God came down on Christy.
“What Bill described was like a washing machine of the water of the Spirit washing through her body, flushing out disease, as friends and family watched, weeping. I would say it’s all on video, 10 to 15 minutes,” Brian says.
The next morning Christy woke up, running and cheering like a teenage girl in her pajamas around a swimming pool at their lodging in Orlando.
Engle remembers when, in 2011, Christy told him The Call—a youth-dominated prayer and fasting movement he founded—would transition to The Send, which would fill stadiums and that Billy Graham’s evangelistic mantle would rest on the nation.
When Christy told Engle and others that The Send would experience two pauses due to COVID, they first experienced discouragement, then hope when they realized the time is right to share the gospel in advance of the global-sending movement from Arrowhead Stadium in 2022.
On Feb. 1, The Send began livestreaming 28 nights of worship featuring Circuit Rider Music, Bethel Music, IHOPKC, Upper Room, YWAM Kona, Jesus Image, Dunamis Music, Antioch and Maverick City at its website, thesend.org, followed by 40 days of fasting beginning March 1.
“[This is] a global ministering to the Lord—coupled with fasting—[that] may lead to an explosion of apostles and evangelists [going] to the nations. A global fast, a global sending,” Engle says. {eoa}
Steve Rees is a former general assignment reporter who, with one other journalist, first wrote about the national men’s movement Promise Keepers from his home in Colorado. Rees and Promise Keepers Founder Bill McCartney attended the Boulder Vineyard. Today Rees writes in his free time.
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