It is my conviction that we are never going to have revival until God has brought the church of Jesus Christ to the point of desperation. As long as Christians people can trust religious organization, material wealth, popular preaching, shallow evangelistic crusades and promotion drives, there will never be revival. But when confidence in the flesh is smashed, and the church comes to the realization of her desperate wretchedness, blindness and nakedness before God, then and only then will God bread in.
Yes, there must be the point of desperation but there must also be the point of intercession. Oh, that God would bring us to this place of intercession! We cannot think or talk, let alone taste of revival, without intercessory prayer. Indeed, the reason for an unrevived church in the last analysis is the sin of prayerlessness. Certainly there are individuals who are praying for revival, and God is graciously meeting them at the point of their need, but where are the prayer groups, where are the companies of intercessors, where are the churches united in an agonizing that God would rend the heavens and come down and cause the mountains of hindrance and sin and unbelief to flow before His presence? Yes, there is only one thing that will save us in this hour of desperation and that is prayer.
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Educated in Britain at St. Luke's College, Mildmay, and the Missionary Training Colony in London, his evangelistic crusades throughout Britain were interrupted in 1939 by the war, when he worked with the troops, and for seven years preached in a Forces Center in South Wales, reaching almost a thousand men a week. After the war, he returned to crusading on a much larger scale in major cities of the British Isles, Canada, and the United States, and was a frequent speaker at Keswick, in England. He held a six-year pastorate in Richmond, Surrey, before coming to New York.
In 1966 Wheaton College conferred upon Stephen Olford the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and Houghton College awarded him the Doctor of Letters degree.
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Stephen F. Olford is well known as pastor of New York's Calvary Baptist Church, radio and television preacher, conference and crusade speaker, as well as author of several books and pamphlets. As pastor of Calvary Baptist Church since 1959, Dr. Olford's leadership has led to an expanded radio ministry, "The Calvary Church Hour" being heard each week throughout the Caribbean, Great Britain, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. He has also pioneered a gospel program on television with the weekly "Encounter," which has a potential audience of some twenty-seven million in the New York area. His conference and crusade ministry has taken him around the world.