Christian leaders are calling on one million people, particularly youth in the United States, to fast and pray, at the beginning of each year this decade, for a spiritual awakening. The Roaring Twenties Fast (see thinke.org) aims to cultivate expectant hope for another great spiritual awakening in America and in the nations around the world amid bitter divisions and political turmoil.
At a gathering of young leaders in 2019, Passion Movement founder Louie Giglio used the phrase The Roaring Twenties to refer to what he expects God will be doing on earth in the upcoming decade.
Dr. Malachi O’Brien, a pastor and leader within the Southern Baptist Convention, sees many direct correlations between the 1920s and the 2020s—politically, spiritually, and economically. “The decade began one way; it ended a vastly different way,” O’Brien says. He senses God’s direction to call one million young people to fast and pray through the next decade—especially given the way prayer has shaped recent decades.
In 1995, Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade (now Cru), issued a call for fasting in hopes of spiritual revival. The idea was considered radical at the time, O’Brien notes. But by the end of the 1990s, two global 24/7 prayer movements were launched, one in the United Kingdom and one in the United States.
O’Brien believes the Lord wants to mark a new generation with spiritual hunger and thirst. He longs for them to know that “there is something powerful that happens when we really consecrate ourselves to a place of fasting and prayer.”
Jon Groves, digital mission director of Think Eternity, says, “The younger generations have rarely been taught about fasting and thus do not know the power of it.”
Groves explains the vision: “Throughout history, communication shifts and true revivals have walked hand in hand. The printing press and Martin Luther. Movable-type printing and George Whitefield. Television and Billy Graham. And today, in the biggest communication shift in 500 years … social media apps and networks exploding by the millions every single day.
“There has never been a greater opportunity to flood the world and saturate the air with the message of the gospel—to raise up digital Billy Grahams, cultural missionaries, to take Christ to culture,” Groves says. “My prayer is that [this vision] does not end in January, but that its ripple will be seen and the roar will be heard for generations to come, the next great awakening.”
–Brandon Showalter, adapted from The Christian Post.
