More than 11,000 people attended one night of Mario Murillo’s evangelistic meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now, as a direct result, there are 20 cities in America asking his team to show up in speedways, stadiums, arenas and tent sites.
Murillo explains, “They say, ‘You need to come. We’re ready for you. We’ve got an army. We’ve got thousands that want to do it.'” And Murillo needs thousands, because his evangelistic meetings are not just a one-man show. Thousands of volunteers are needed to knock on doors before the meetings and perform a variety of tasks during the meetings, including ushering and praying with new converts.
In October of 2021, Murillo held four days of meetings that attracted over 4,000 people in Batavia, New York, even though it was raining. Although he saw God move in that meeting, he recently canceled the follow-up meeting.
His workers went to the city streets of Batavia, Buffalo and Rochester beforehand and found that each city was open to the gospel. “Hundreds of people want Christ,” Murillo says. “Our workers found out that the fish were practically jumping in the boat. That wasn’t our issue.”
Murillo says that the issue was a lack of volunteers willing to step up to the plate and go get the harvest. He attributes the lack of volunteers to a group of ministers who have “a very strange view of Trump and the Democrat Party.” He says they also have a strange view of what unity is and what revival is. Because of their strange views, he says that the group of ministers discouraged the army of volunteers that each one of his meetings needs.
Murillo says that back in April they had the “most fiery pastors’ brunch ever.” Although 900 pastors showed up, a group within the 900 ministers didn’t agree with Murillo’s support of Trump, so those ministers discouraged their people from volunteering.
“I don’t talk about Trump a lot. They do,” Murillo says. “They talk about him all the time. I found out that the rule was it isn’t that I can’t talk about Trump, it’s that I can’t say anything nice. It’s very strange. I never encountered it to that degree.”
The tent his team was going to use needed 3,000 volunteers, and because of the vocal lack of support from those ministers, only 300 people volunteered to support the meeting. “How were we going to handle this massive infrastructure?” Murillo asks. “It became very clear that we were going to end up in a situation that was really not sustainable.”
Murillo began to weigh the level of exhaustion the 300 volunteers were facing on the street, and he made the decision to cancel his evangelistic event. “It was a very painful and heart-rending decision,” he says.
Murillo likens what happened in New York to the verses in the Bible where Jesus says that the leaders decorated the tombs of the prophets and even acknowledged that it was their ancestors who killed them. (See Matthew 23:29-32 and Luke 11:47-51.) Murillo says that the leaders in New York like to talk about the revivalist Charles Finney, but although they want revival and they celebrate the revivals of Charles Finney, something different would happen if somebody like Charles Finney showed up.
“Charles Finney would be a lot less friendly than I am,” Murillo says. “And they would not accept him. They would not.”
He concludes, “The funny thing is, they say, ‘We want revival.’ But last October 3-6, in the rain, 4,000 people came out. They repented of their sins. They were healed in their bodies. They heard messages that were not political but were entirely focused on healing and salvation, and they (the ministers) didn’t accept it. The very thing they were praying for, they saw it with their own eyes, and they didn’t accept it.” {eoa}
Rob Vischer is a freelance writer for Charisma Media.
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