One morning during his freshman year of college, Gary Wright headed to the 10 a.m. Tuesday chapel service.
He never made it to his next class. Or to lunch. Neither did the others gathered there.
Over the next several days, reports of a revival at Asbury College (now University) drew the attention of national news magazines and began to garner mention on evening newscasts.
Wright has written a book that includes recollections of that week on campus in Wilmore, Kentucky, plus what happened in weeks following as teams of Asbury students traveled to other cities and shared about it. He also tells of a similar response at Bethel College (now University) in 1991 when he was a guest speaker for Bethel’s Spiritual Emphasis Week and told the Asbury story.
“He Just Showed Up! An Eyewitness to Revival” is more than a memoir of past times of spiritual intensity, though. In it, Wright also shares theological concepts of revival and strategies for churches feeling stuck and trying to experience renewal.
“I don’t know why he (God) allowed me to be there … but he did, and I felt like I needed to pass it on,” he said.
Wright was 18 when he took his seat in the balcony of Hughes Auditorium on the Asbury campus that morning. The academic dean shared his personal faith story, his testimony, and invited students to share too. Some got up to do so. Later a professor said they would sing, and if anyone wanted to come to the altar and pray during that song, the altar was open. One student came, then another.
“Immediately, the entire altar was completely lined with students praying,” Wright writes in the book. “In fact, there was not enough room at the altar … Students sitting in the front rows evacuated their seats so students could kneel and pray.”
He describes himself as “a typical preacher’s kid raised in the church.” He was sincere, but struggling to live what he felt he should be doing. He too eventually approached the altar to confess sin.
“I realized that the Lord really did love me and there was a possibility that I could please him,” he said. He looks back on it as a pivotal moment of his life.
The praying, singing, and testimonies at the microphone continued for several days. Wright said he didn’t go to bed that first night. He and other students would eventually duck out at different times for a meal or a shower or a little sleep, he said, but people were reluctant to leave at all, afraid they’d miss something.
He recalls students admitting wrongs, seeking reconciliation with each other, and asking those gathered to pray for loved ones.
“Students would publicly ask all of us to pray for family members, friends, who needed Christ, then they would go call them on the phone and tell them how Christ had met their need,” he writes in the book. “Time and time again, the doors … would open and a joyful student would rush to the microphone to report how those on the other end of the phone had received Christ.”
Some Asbury students began to go to other communities and tell what had happened. Colleges in California, Illinois, Oklahoma and other states heard the story and began to experience similar events. Wright was part of a team that shared about the revival at Anderson College (now University) in Indiana.
“If you left the campus and went and told somebody about it, it would happen there,” Wright said.
People at Bethel say that’s what happened in 1991.
Over the intervening years, Wright had become a pastor and founder of World Renewal International, which has its headquarters in Hancock County. He was a guest speaker for Bethel’s Spiritual Emphasis Week.
“We went to chapel thinking … We would get out and teach our 11 o’clock classes as usual,” said retired music professor Marilynn Ham. “It didn’t stop … people just streamed to the front.”
As students lined up at the open mic, admitting wrongs and working out grudges, Wright felt as if God wanted him to leave, that his role there was done. So he left.
“He just looked at himself as a conveyor of the message,” Ham said. “He didn’t take any credit” for anything that happened.
To this day, Dennis Engbrecht has a note a chemistry professor passed to him that day: “We’ve got to keep this going.” He kept it and framed it.
Engbrecht, vice president emeritus of Bethel University, said what happened in chapel in 1991 was not about an emotional response but was “an ongoing thing.” Teams of students went out and shared what was happening.
He saw serious disciplinary actions that had been a weekly occurrence drop off sharply. Enrollment doubled in the years that followed.
“It changed the trajectory of the college, really, forever,” Engbrecht said.
Engbrecht also points to how, in the rest of the 1990s, Bethel’s athletic teams won multiple national championships: men’s basketball, men’s tennis, women’s volleyball and softball. He doesn’t hold the revival up as a good-luck charm for the teams, though. Rather, he points to the personal refinement of individual character going on and the emphasis on coaches having a more pastoral, mentoring presence. Amid that culture, teams came together and achieved.
In recent years, Wright was invited to speak in Oregon to a gathering at George Fox University when his audience’s questions turned to 1970 Asbury and to revival in general. That spurred him on to write the book — to pass down the story of what happened and to encourage those also seeking a revival.
“You could say those of us who experienced it never got over it,” he said. “I’m just hoping someone, or groups of people, would be encouraged at what God could do. … These things can still happen. …
“One person totally committed to Christ can make a difference.”
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Gary Wright will sign copies of “He Just Showed Up! An Eyewitness to Revival” at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 16 at Hancock County Public Library, 900 W. McKenzie Road, Greenfield. He will appear as part of the library’s Local Author Showcase series.
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