Healings. Salvations. Miracles. Changed lives.
When a pastor and a church get tired of “business as usual” and pursue the Lord in passion, anything can happen. That’s what Pastor Mike Fehlauer of New Life Church in Corpus Christi, Texas, has learned through the ongoing revival his church has experienced since 2018.
It all began, not with crises or problems in the church, but with what he says was an “increasing dissatisfaction” on his part.
“I just really felt like we’d put a lid on the expression, the movement, the activity of the Holy Spirit at New Life Church,” Fehlauer says.
For four Wednesday nights in a row that July, the church decided “to give the Holy Spirit room—space to move, space to do something. … just see what He had to say,” he says.
By the first night, Fehlauer says, he could tell something was different. First of all, the church’s thousand-seat auditorium was almost full. And “there was a sense of hunger; something was going on.”
When he closed the service on the second Wednesday, the Lord told him to give an altar call for salvation rather than having people bow their heads and raise their hands. But “I really struggled with that, because that was not our culture,” Fehlauer says. “That wasn’t what our folks were used to. It was completely out of our norm, and so I didn’t do it.”
But God wouldn’t leave him alone. The next Wednesday, after sharing his burden with some of his co-pastors and an elder, he did give a gospel invitation, and as many as 150 people came forward. The following Wednesday, he did the same, and 250 people came forward to receive Christ.
“We did a Thursday night right after that,” Fehlauer says of his next service. “And I gave an invitation. And I preached maybe 15 minutes after worship, and we probably had around 250 or 300 responses; many of them were running to the altar. I’d never personally seen that before. They were just running. And we ended up baptizing spontaneously 31 people that night. And healings just started happening.”
From July to December of that year, the church baptized around 1,000 people. And the revival has only grown from there, Fehlauer says. He shares stories of marriages restored after infidelity, healings from terminal cancer and more.
For more from Pastor Mike Fehlauer about the Spirit-birthed revival fires still burning at New Life Church in Corpus Christi, Texas, listen to this entire episode of the Strang Report podcast here. And be sure to subscribe to the Strang Report on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform so you don’t miss the news about what the Holy Spirit is doing across the world. {eoa}
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