Revival Has Come to Canada Before
By Daniel Ziedins · · 8 min read
There is a quiet despair that creeps into Canadian believers, and it sounds reasonable. We look at the emptying churches, the sanctuaries turned into condominiums, the surveys that keep sliding, and we conclude that revival is something that happens in other countries, in other centuries, to other people. We pray for an awakening the way you might pray for snow in July — sincerely, but without much expectation.
That despair has one fatal problem. It is not true. God has moved on this land before. Not once, and not vaguely. Several times, in places you could drive to this weekend, on dates you can look up. And the pattern in every one of them should stop us in our tracks, because it is the same pattern, and it is the one thing we can actually do.
1776 — Nova Scotia, and a farmer with no credentials
Henry Alline was twenty-seven, a farmer and tanner in Falmouth, Nova Scotia, with no formal training and no ordination. He was converted in 1775 and began preaching publicly in April 1776 — at a moment when the colony was fractured and frightened, with the American Revolution tearing apart every relationship the Maritimes had.
From 1776 until his death in 1784 — eight years — Alline travelled Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, preaching and writing hymns that ordinary people could carry home in their heads. What followed has been called the greatest revival Canada has ever seen. He became known as the Apostle of Nova Scotia. He was dead at thirty-five. He never held an office, never built an institution, and reshaped the spiritual character of a whole region.
1890 — Ingersoll, Ontario, and the child nobody was watching
On October 9, 1890, a girl was born on a farm near Ingersoll, Ontario. Her name was Aimee Kennedy. She would become Aimee Semple McPherson, plant a denomination, and pioneer the use of radio for the Gospel on a scale nobody had imagined.
I include her for one reason. Nothing about rural Oxford County in 1890 suggested it. There is no version of that story in which anyone looks at that farmhouse and says, here is where this begins. Which should make us much slower to write off our own small towns — and our own children.
1971 — Saskatoon, and a church that prayed for nine years
This is the one that undoes me. In 1962, Bill McLeod moved from Winnipeg to pastor Ebenezer Baptist Church in Saskatoon. And then his church prayed. Not a prayer week. Not a campaign. Every Wednesday — all twenty-four hours of it — somebody from that congregation was on their knees asking God for a great spiritual awakening.
They did that for years. Through ordinary Wednesdays. Through Saskatchewan winters. Through nothing happening.
On October 13, 1971, Ralph and Lou Sutera arrived to hold an evangelistic crusade at Ebenezer Baptist. It was scheduled for a little over a week. It ran for seven. The crowds outgrew the church, then outgrew a larger church, and finally moved into the Civic Auditorium, which seated two thousand — in a city of about a hundred and forty thousand. Believers from around twenty different denominations came. It spread to Regina, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Toronto, and out to towns like Moose Jaw and Swift Current.
Nine years of Wednesdays, then seven weeks that moved a nation. Sit with the arithmetic of that for a moment.
1994 — Toronto, at the end of a runway
On January 20, 1994, Randy Clark came to preach at a small Vineyard church at the end of a runway by Pearson International Airport, pastored by John and Carol Arnott. He was booked for four days. He stayed more than six weeks. Within that first year the congregation tripled, meetings ran most nights of the week, and people flew in from around the world.
The Toronto Blessing remains contested, and I am not asking anyone to settle that debate here. I am pointing at something narrower and harder to argue with: within living memory, in this country, something happened that people crossed oceans to see. Canada was the destination.
What every one of them had in common
Line these up and the differences are obvious — three centuries, four provinces, very different theological streams. But look at what does not vary:
- None began in a centre of power. Falmouth. A farm near Ingersoll. Saskatoon. A rented unit by an airport runway. God has a documented habit of starting at the edges.
- All began with prayer that came before any evidence. Ebenezer prayed for nine years before anything visible happened. The praying was not a response to revival; it was the seedbed of it.
- None of them were scheduled. Every one overran its own plan — a week became seven, four days became six weeks, one decision became eight years. Human beings set the start date. They did not set the end date.
- All crossed the lines that normally divide us. Twenty denominations in one Saskatoon auditorium. Unity was not a pleasant by-product; it was the visible shape of the thing.
- All of them cost somebody something. Alline was dead at thirty-five. Faithfulness was expensive every single time.
So what do we do with this?
We stop praying like people asking for something unheard of, and start praying like people asking God to do again what He has already done here. That is a completely different posture. It is the difference between hoping and remembering.
“LORD, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, LORD. Repeat them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy.”
— Habakkuk 3:2
Habakkuk does not ask for something novel. He asks for a repeat. He had a history to point at, and he pointed at it. So do we. We can pray with Saskatoon in our mouths.
And then we do the unglamorous thing. Ebenezer Baptist did not have a strategy. They had a Wednesday. They took the one day a week they could actually control and gave it to God for nearly a decade before anything happened. That is not a story about a special church. It is a story about a normal church doing a small thing for a long time.
You have a Wednesday. Or a Tuesday, a lunch break, a drive home. Pick it, give it away, and keep giving it away long after it stops feeling meaningful. Revival has come to Canada before. Every time, it came to people who were already praying when it arrived.
Repeat them in our day.