Lord,
bend me.
A missionary from Wales stood up in Waverly and asked the question nobody wanted to answer out loud: if we all say we want revival, why are we still dry?
Lem Turner planted the question early and didn't let the room look away from it. He and his wife pastor Compassion Church Bridgend in Wales, a country he described as post-Christian, where old chapels are closing faster than churches can be replanted. He didn't come to Waverly with a strategy. He came with one question: if we all say we want revival, why are we still dry?
His answer wasn't about tactics. It was about the difference between wanting something and being desperate for it.
A fire
nobody could
explain
Turner told the room about a night outside his home in Bridgend when he walked into the back garden and found the night sky lit up orange. His son called from the highway, asking the same question everyone on the road was asking: what's going on in Bridgend? Turner drove toward the light with his older son, into a line of cars already pulled over, people out with their phones and drones trying to catch it.
The fire turned out to be a toilet paper distribution center burning down. But in the minute before he knew that, Turner heard a question he couldn't shake: what if the church in Wales was like that? On fire enough that people pulled off the road just to see it.
That's not a want, he told the church. Wanting is casual. You want Chick-fil-A for dinner, and you manage fine without it. Desperation is different. Desperation is the 2 a.m. phone call. It's your kid underwater longer than a dive should take. Nobody stays polite in that moment, and Turner's point was that the church doesn't get to stay polite about revival either.
The ones
who got
desperate
Turner pointed to two men in Scripture who ran out of other options and got specific about it. David, hiding from Saul in the wilderness, wrote down exactly what he felt:
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Psalm 63:1
Then Mark 9. Jesus comes down off the mountain from the transfiguration to a father whose son has suffered for years, thrown into fire and water by something the disciples couldn't cast out. The father had already tried everything, including the disciples, who were busy debating theology with the religious leaders instead of helping him. When he finally reaches Jesus, he doesn't lead with confidence. He asks for help if Jesus can do anything at all, and Jesus corrects the if. The father's honest answer is the only one that fits a man out of options: he believes, and he needs help with the unbelief still in him (Mark 9:14-24).
That's the line Turner kept coming back to. Not hunger by itself. Hunger that has stopped being manageable.
Lord,
bend me
Turner went back further, to 1904, to a small Welsh chapel where an evangelist named Seth Joshua had come to train young men for evangelism. Before he taught them anything, Joshua prayed a prayer in Welsh that Turner translated for the room: O Lord, bend us.
A young man in the room, a coal miner named Evan Roberts, wasn't the kind of man anyone expected to lead anything. Turner said Roberts had spent months praying through the night, desperate enough that his landlady wanted him out of the house. When Joshua finished praying, Roberts didn't stay in his seat. He fell to his knees and cried out a different prayer: Lord, bend me.
By Turner's account, the revival that followed brought more than a hundred thousand people to Christ within a year, in a country of three million, starting from that one prayer. He also told the church he believes that fire reached as far as California within the following decade. His point wasn't really the history. It was that revival has never started with a strategy. It starts with somebody willing to pray the dangerous prayer.
"That prayer is not for the faint of heart," Turner said, "but I believe that prayer is for the church today."
What are
you holding
onto?
Turner asked the room to name whatever is standing between them and that kind of desperation before they leave the building. If you're still working out the answer, Sunday is a good place to keep working on it.
Hope changes
everything.
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.