Jeff Finley
By Jeff Finley
College campuses aren’t the only places experiencing an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual awakening is also occurring in the local churches of western and central New York where B.T. Roberts and likeminded friends formed the Free Methodist Church in 1860.
“Just this week, I had multiple pastors reach out to me and say, ‘Hey, God is on the move,” Genesis Conference Superintendent Pam Braman said on a recent episode of “The Light + Life Podcast” in a conversation with Brett Heintzman. “I was talking to one church that is baptizing eight people. They had two people they baptized all of last year, and so it’s a significant shift.”
She shared that a few days “after we started seeing things going down at Asbury, [a pastor] walked in just sort of going, ‘OK, what is God up to today?’ And a young person said, ‘Hey, can we add this song [‘Holy Spirit’] on the worship team?”
The pastor agreed and later reported to Braman, “We started in on that, and we just started sort of spontaneously praying and worshipping. … I never got to my message. Somebody was healed who didn’t even know that happened. They were like ‘What just happened to me?’ because they’re fairly new to the faith.” Another person “gave a very large check [$25,000] on the way out the door. [The donor] just felt led, and this was a church that was hit very hard during the pandemic financially.”
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“Genesis is particularly seeing God move among young adults.”
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Like at Asbury University and other campuses where awakening has spread, Genesis is particularly seeing God move among young adults. Braman reported that one church plant in a performing arts center is “seeing college students come in right and left. They baptized 11 people a few weeks ago,” and the pastor told her “there’s a hunger. … People are just on their face before God upfront longing for His presence.”
Members and attendees increasingly come from divergent backgrounds.
“In the past year, their congregation has become radically more diverse in their ethnic makeup,” she said. “We see that as a movement of the Spirit that there’s this wonderful gathering of people who don’t look like the original church did.”
When the Asbury outpouring started, Braman posted in the Facebook group for Genesis pastors: “Stay alert to the movement of the Spirit. I don’t know what God’s up to, but just stay alert.” Since then, she’s received multiple reports of Spirit-fueled movement.
“Overall, little churches and big churches are encouraged,” Braman said. “God seems to be doing a new thing in many places.”
Burning Again?
Things seemed different in 2016 when Braman arrived in the Genesis Conference from the North Central Conference, which covers much of the Upper Midwest.
“My first year here I just did a lot of driving around and getting to know people and getting into churches and taking pastors to lunch,” Braman said. “Our region is very much the Rust Belt. …. It’s a depressed area in a lot of ways, and there was just this sense among way too many people — not just in the church but just in the region — that our better days are behind us.”
That perspective seemed common whether in cities or rural areas. The regional depression seemed both economic and spiritual, but some people noted things used to be different in “the Burned-Over District.”
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“What I began to realize was that this was an area in the past of significant revival that really changed the country, and that got me excited…” – Superintendent Pam Braman
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“I would say I don’t know what the Burned-Over District is, and basically what I heard is something like this: ‘Well, this has been an area where a lot of spiritual stuff has swept through,” Braman said. “I started doing research. The Second Great Awakening was headquartered right in Rochester. What I began to realize was that this was an area in the past of significant revival that really changed the country, and that got me excited — and got me excited even more when I discovered that the original person who used the Burned-Over District was Charles Finney himself, and he called it the Burned-Over District because he said, ‘The fires of evangelism had burned so hot there’s nothing left to burn.’”
Braman told conference members that she and her husband, Marshal, previously would “go up to northern Minnesota and pick wild blueberries every August. We would always take one rainy day with the map, and Marshal would know where the fires had been years before because that was where the blueberries grew.”
She added, “If this is the Burned-Over District, I’ve never lived in a place where revival is in the soil, and revival’s in the soil here.”
When she sees a church in a challenging location and wonders how it survives, “I conclude that God’s still answering prayers from people long dead.”
Stewarding for Long-Term Revival
Braman doesn’t want the present awakening to be temporary.
“I think revival isn’t a short-term thing,” she said. “Even as I talk about God on the move, I’ve said to people, ‘I feel like we’re stewarding something here.’ I’m trying to be careful because I don’t want anything to be manipulative, and I don’t want people to feel like, ‘Oh, at that church this happens, so that’s what should happen here,’ or even, ‘That’s what happened at Asbury, so it should happen here.’”
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“I think that if they can have a true experience with God, I think we could see an entire generation coming to know Him, and so that’s very much part of my prayer.” – Superintendent Pam Braman
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The superintendent said she wants “to hold things loosely and say, ‘Let’s be open to whatever God’s doing at the moment, however the Holy Spirit’s leading at the moment,’ but I want to see revival in that. I want to see the multiplication of ministry. I want to see new people reached. I want to see a new generation come in. I believe that there’s a new generation hungry for something, and I think that if they can have a true experience with God, I think we could see an entire generation coming to know Him, and so that’s very much part of my prayer.”
During the Second Great Awakening in the 1800s, Rochester “had to lay off police because the crime rate went down so significantly, and that’s keenly on my heart. Rochester is a really violent city. When you take into account its size, it’s got one of the highest murder rates in the country, and I would love to see the Spirit of God come on this place.”
Prayer and Expectancy
Genesis has a prayer team that prays fervently for the conference.
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“We’re expecting that God’s going to do something, and we’re not going to tell Him how.” – Superintendent Pam Braman
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“Prayer prepares the way,” she said. “I just want to keep encouraging people to come expecting God to be at work. … We’re expecting that God’s going to do something, and we’re not going to tell Him how. We’re not going to put Him in a box, but we’re coming expecting and asking Him to be at work.”
Braman said that when driving around the conference initially led to her sensing the call to talk about revival, she wasn’t sure it would happen in her lifetime.
“I am incredibly grateful to even get a taste of that right now and to see God at work in a new way,” she said.
Click here for the full conversation on “The Light + Life Podcast.”
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