Tuesday Night Revival - Christianity Today

Andrew Taylor was discouraged about his congregation. He’d planted Northpoint Community Church in Fishers, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis, several years earlier. The church had grown in numbers, but Andrew’s concern was for its spiritual depth. The congregation, made up of “good, nice people,” was comfortable with the climate.

Andrew was not.

Like so many pastors, Andrew wanted to turn up the thermostat. He wanted for his congregation a hotter faith. He wanted to see them grow passionate about their walk with Christ. He wanted them often on their knees in prayer. He wanted more for his people than pleasant moments on Sunday morning.

The pastor shared his frustration with his father, also a minister. Andrew’s dad recommended he read Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire by Jim Cymbala. The story of Cymbala’s church, the Brooklyn Tabernacle, further enflamed Andrew’s desires. But it also frustrated him.

Brooklyn Tab’s Tuesday night prayer meeting is legendary. Nearly 3,000 people pack the sanctuary for three hours or more and cry aloud for their drug-riddled, prostitute-infested community. And who hasn’t heard of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir? Led by Cymbala’s wife, Carol, the award-winning choir has influenced church music around the world. The church is definitely on fire.

But how could Andrew do that— without Grammy awards and reformed drug addicts? He struggled to minister to a small Indiana congregation. It hardly seemed the stuff of Brooklyn Tab.

Then Andrew heard about the Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire Conference. He determined to go.

After the book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire was published in 1997, Brooklyn Tabernacle got bombarded with letters and emails pouring in from church leaders across the country. “People are hungry for renewal, for the Spirit of God to do something in their lives,” said Ann Broomfield, coordinator of the conferences. “They connect with what Pastor Cymbala says in his book. And they want to hear from God.”

They also want a taste of what they’ve heard about from the church’s stirring worship services. Cymbala and his team took a bit of Brooklyn on the road for the first time last year. In five cities this year, the conference featured a slate of speakers, including Cymbala, one of the church’s worship bands led by Carol, and some of the singers.

The format is simple: praise and worship (including the church’s own Grammy award-winning soloist Damaris Carbaugh), teaching (exposition by Warren Wiersbe), then prayer, lots of prayer.

A very public secret

“I was so impressed that everything really revolved around prayer,” said Anthony Pelt, pastor of Cathedral Church of God in Deerfield Beach, Florida. He flew to Chicago especially for the conference; his was one of 19 states and 3 countries represented. “I attended the conference because I wanted the how-to, the steps to get my church to breathe life, and to get my people to show up and be excited about prayer meeting,” Pelt said. “But the conference didn’t give me any procedures. That’s actually a good thing; I discovered something much better. I’m glad we spent time seeking the Lord. That’s what the church should be about.”

Cymbala would be glad to hear that.

A reluctant expert, Cymbala resists any discussion about procedures or growth principles. He insists there’s no magic formula for spiritual renewal.

“You want to know our secret?” he asked expectant conferees, pointing heavenward. “Seek God. Pray! The fact is, you can follow all the procedures—and there’s a place for procedures, don’t get me wrong. But you can follow them all and still fail.”

It sounds simple. It sounds hard. And it’s the heart of the conference—and of the movement, if you will—Cymbala’s simple message and his hard-knocks story.

“Pastor Cymbala, would you tell about your ministry, how you got started with all this—praying?” The man who asked the question may have been the only person in the room who hadn’t heard the story. But even those who had read the book were eager to hear it again.

Young Cymbala was at wit’s end. Sitting in a fishing boat, tired and sick, he poured out his heart to God. His church of 20 was in seedy downtown Brooklyn, home to prostitutes, addicts, and their suppliers. Inside, his church was no better. One of the ushers was helping himself to the offerings, one unmarried choir member was pregnant by another, the building was falling apart, and the church was always one mortgage payment away from foreclosure.

“God, I don’t know how to be a successful pastor,” he prayed. “The church is struggling. If the gospel is so powerful … ” He couldn’t continue, the tears choked his voice.

Then he felt God speak deep within his spirit: If you and your wife will lead my people to pray and call upon my name, you will never have a building large enough to contain the crowds I will send in response.

At this point, Cymbala’s experience takes on a Field of Dreams quality: if you pray, they will come. And they did.

What builds momentum

The pastor started a prayer meeting on Tuesday nights that would become the church’s barometer. He informed his congregation that what happened in prayer meeting would determine their success or failure. Then they began to pray. The first Tuesday night about 15 people showed up.

From that point, on Tuesday nights Cymbala came to the church with no agenda. He simply led the people in singing and calling on the Holy Spirit to do a mighty work in the church, in Brooklyn, and in the lives of its people. And the church began to grow—slowly at first, but it did grow.

Today, 29 years later, Brooklyn Tabernacle is in its third building and they’re refurbishing an old theater that seats 4,000, which they plan to occupy next spring. Attendance is about 10,000 in four services on Sundays, and Cymbala says it’s all because of prayer.

“Look, prayer’s not pretty,” Cymbala said. “Have you ever seen a mother giving birth? Have you seen her in hard labor in a delivery room? That’s prayer. There’s nothing entertaining about prayer. It’s work.” And a capacity crowd labors in Brooklyn every Tuesday night.

The service also draws pastors trying to figure out the how this ministry works.

“My wife and I arrived a little before 6:00 and were able to get seats in the balcony,” said Tim Russell, senior pastor of Christ Community Church in Brazil, Indiana. He described his experience at Brooklyn Tabernacle. “I felt this indescribable sense of peace when I walked in. God was there, that’s for certain. People were already praying—and the service hadn’t even begun! I thought, Man, I wish I could get my people to come out in droves for our prayer service!“

The doors open at 5:00 p.m.—the service begins at 7:00—and the seats are filled by 6:00. Then the ushers bring out chairs to fill the narthex, chapel, platform, and any other spare space they can find.

One Tuesday night in May, people were still arriving an hour into the meeting and sitting in the aisles. There was simply no more room. Finally Pastor Cymbala asked all the teenagers to stand and make their way to the platform to sit on the floor so the new arrivals could have chairs. When the platform was filled, he had to ask the remaining teens, who were still trying to squeeze in, to return to their seats.

At 7:00, a few musicians begin playing softly. “The minute the music started,” Russell said, “the congregation began to sing. No one was leading them. But they were ready to start worshiping God.”

There’s no choir or special music. The pastor teaches about 15 minutes on a passage of Scripture, usually relating to prayer. The service is mostly about praying and worshiping God. Cymbala leads the service, and he gives worshipers specific things to pray about. Sometimes the whole congregation prays together, sometimes they pair off woman-to-woman and man-to-man, a method he also uses in the conferences.

The service is a steady stream of intercession for the broken and heart-broken of Brooklyn and the world. And the pray-ers themselves are evidence of answered prayer.

Cymbala has told the story of Chrissy, his runaway daughter who returned saying she knew someone had been praying for her. They had, on Tuesday night. At the conference, she is the smartly dressed blonde woman standing with the singers to Cymbala’s right. Now married, Chrissy ministers with her husband, Cymbala’s senior associate pastor, Al Toledo.

“The key to our prayer service is not to guilt people into coming, with such statements as ‘You ought to be praying. You ought to worship the Lord,'” Cymbala told pastors in Chicago. “It’s a matter of saying, ‘You get to pray! You get to talk to God! You get to worship Jesus.’ People pray because they believe God will answer.

“Start with something dear to them that God may change. Then your prayer time will start to build,” he assured them. “The spirit of prayer builds a momentum.”

That’s what the pastors wanted to hear. Andrew Taylor returned home to start a low-pressure prayer meeting. “If only the three of us who attended the conference show up, we’ll still be faithful,” he said. A week later, six attended. He’s pleased. It’s a beginning.

We’re not Brooklyn, and that’s OK

Cymbala’s message is being received in Brazil, Indiana. “We’re trying to impress upon the people that Monday night prayer is even more important than Sundays,” said Terry Wilson, youth minister at Christ Community Church. “And our youth are showing up. And they’re bringing their unsaved friends!” Wilson said. “We have almost more youth at the prayer meetings than we do adults. The Holy Spirit is moving and I don’t want to do anything to mess this up.”

Randy Schoof, pastor of the Warehouse Church in Aurora, Illinois, started a Thursday night prayer meeting. He was expecting about 12. Instead, 25 people came. In the middle of the meeting, a man who had visited the church before came in and accepted Christ. “Obviously, not every salvation story will be that dramatic,” Schoof said, “but that was as if God was giving our prayer meeting his stamp of approval.”

Craig Loscalzo read Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, then attended a prayer service in Brooklyn last year. This year he sent his entire pastoral staff to the conference. In the meantime, Loscalzo, preaching professor, author, and now senior pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, passed out the book to everyone on his staff and to every new member.

The church now hosts a Saturday evening prayer service averaging about 35. They’ve also started a prayer network on their Web site with a link to Brooklyn Tabernacle’s 24-hour prayer band.

“We’re an old, established church,” said Glen Cummins, Immanuel’s minister of education. “We’re not the Brooklyn Tabernacle. We can’t do the things they do. But we can take their principles and apply them.”

James Stillwell, Cummins’s co-worker, agrees. “Every church can pray.”

That’s exactly the message Cymbala wants to convey: “We’re the Brooklyn Tabernacle, that’s who God has called us to be. You be who God called you to be.

“Diligently seek God and wait on him. He will answer and show you what to do.”

Ginger E. Kolbaba, a pastor’s daughter, is associate editor of Today’s Christian Woman.