FaithFest 2025: Revival Fires are Burning and the Harvest is Ripe

It’s Wednesday June 11, 2025 and here I am again struggling under the weight of a deadline that I am determined to make. It’s going to take a miracle, but I believe in miracles, so here goes! Today marks day 258 since Hurricane Helene rocked our worlds on September 27, 2024 here in the High Country. The week before the storm hit us I had the great privilege of attending a Christian worship celebration called Faithfest 24. This annual event in Wilkesboro, NC features some of the best contemporary music and gifted speakers you will ever have the privilege to hear. The huge, beautiful venue for Faithfest resembles a football field, only much larger, anchored by an incredibly tall, massive cross that can be seen from Highway 421! Whenever I am driving back to Boone on that highway, it’s thrilling to see that cross for what it means to Christians personally, but also as a testimony to the great thing God has done in bringing an annual event of this caliber to our region. This yearly event and all the prayer and planning that it takes to do something of this magnitude, is a demonstration of God’s love in action. It is truly a celebration of and proclamation of the life-changing difference that faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior can make. So, at Faithfest 2024 with an All- Access Media Pass in hand, I got to see for myself this phenomenon in Wilkes County. Little did I or anyone else know, on the beautiful weekend of September 21-22 that a STORM OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS was about to rock Western North Carolina to the core. So, the Faithfest cover story I had planned to hit High Country news stands on November 26, 2024 was scuttled and we did a “Stories From the Storm” edition which we weren’t able to publish until mid-January of 2025. So now we’re determined to make our July edition of “The Journey Magazine and website” actually come out in July! The first Faithfest event was located at Wilkes Community College at the same venue that Merlefest has been held for years. That was in the hot summer of 2017.

It was Merlefest that inspired Craig Church and other believers in Wilkes County to launch a Christian music festival. The history of that will come later in the magazine but for now I want to share the spiritual impact of my first in person visit to this iconic celebration. I also want to share a vision the Lord shared with me this very day about how Faithfest is like the epicenter of revival fires that are already burning in these mountains. On the heels of Hurricane Helene, where Christians crossed denominational lines to work with other churches, we also worked with those who would not darken the doors of a church, to literally rescue the perishing. I believe it’s God’s will to now stoke the revival fires that started burning then to make deep changes in those of us who need to return to our first love. I heard about Faithfest since its inception and intended to attend for years but on the beautiful weekend of September 20-21 I found myself, not only covering the event, but fully immersed in worship, praise and my own personal revival that seems to be intensifying in my life on a daily basis!!! That personal renewal has given me a sense of divine purpose in writing about what faithfest has meant to our region and how the Lord is going to use the model of what’s happening here in wilkes county to spark fires of revival and spiritual awakening that the church in america desperately needs to see. Therefore, what follows is what God the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart this morning as a part of my daily Bible study and journaling time. I believe that Faithfest serves as a powerful example to the Church in America of what can happen when God’s Church comes together in a spirit of unity and purpose. In order for you to know why I feel so strongly about this, you need to know a little of my personal background and history.

I moved to Boone, NC 48 years ago with a fire in my heart and a call on my life to serve as a Pastor in the Body of Christ. It’s what I went to Mars Hill College to begin studying for. But, sadly I backslid badly, taking a four year detour off the straight and narrow path I knew God wanted me to follow. So, in a wonderful encounter with the Holy Spirit while I was reading John 15 Jesus let me know in a personal way what John15:5 emphasized “Without Me you can do nothing.” So I dropped my Bible to my lap, raised my hands in full surrender and repented on the spot. That same week my wife had a similar encounter with Jesus and everything changed for the better in our marriage and in the trajectory that our lives would take!! In that same time frame the Holy Spirit directed us in many different ways to “go to Boone and wait.” So it was here in Boone where God’s call for me topastor was realised when I was ordained as an associate pastor at a church that was planted in Watauga County in the Fall of 1977 called Watauga Christian Center. WCC was a church plant of a mega-church in Anchorage Alaska. I started attending soon after arriving in Boone at the same time as the team from Anchorage got here to plant the church. The history of the church in Anchorage was rooted in the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s counter-culture. That’s when many hippies were saved, discipled and then sent out to the United States and abroad to plant churches from their church in Anchorage. So here Connie and I were as 2 newlyweds, looking like hippies ourselves ready to join this church where we stuck out like sore thumbs because they all woresuits, ties and dresses. I was 22 years old at the time and 2 years later elders of Watauga Christian Center ordained me as an associate, bi-vocational pastor.

The church was growing fast with many people getting saved and discipled. It was an exciting thing to be a part of. Then, in 1982 the church was able to afford to bring me on staff full time. Because we outgrew that church that was located on Hwy 421, we relocated from there to where it is currently located beside the only Bowling Alley in Boone. We sold the building that we first occupied and bought the Old Mann Drug Store which had been out of business for a while and was in bad shape. So, we had to completely renovate that abandoned building to make it into an auditorium and classrooms that could fit our needs. The building that we sold was used for other purposes for a while, but I am now happy to say that another church meets there called New Life Fellowship. I met their founding pastor and did a cover story on him and his miraculous recovery from cancer in the Winter 2020 edition of this magazine. And now I have gotten the chance to know and pray with the current pastor at New Life Fellowship in our Watauga County Christian Pastors Prayer Fellowship. Together we pray with other pastors for God’s Kingdom to come and His will to be done among us in this High Country region. Shortly after moving our location into Boone City limits in 1984 I was set in as the senior pastor because our founding pastor took a team of 50 people to plant a church in Boca Raton, Florida. Not too long after that transition had taken place, we felt led to change the name of the church from Watauga Christian Center to Living Water Christian Fellowship. Part of the reason we did that is because people thought the Christian Center was a bookstore and we wanted a name that made it clear we were a church. But the other reason we did it is because we wanted people to know that we believed that the power of the Holy Spirit that was poured out at Pentecost is still needed today to help us advance the Kingdom of God in a world that desperately needs to know the healing, saving power that only Jesus can bring. So, after much prayer about what to call the church, we felt led to the name Living Water Christian Fellowship based on this passage of Scripture in John 7:37-38: “On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this He meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.”

From those days until now, I have heard many followers of Jesus up here proclaim that God’s Spirit is going to fall on the High Country and flow down to the valleys. However, after my time at Faithfest I believe that the revival has already begun in Wilkes County and it’s flowing up to us and about to catch fire. I believe that Faithfest can serve as a model to other regions in our nation where followers of Jesus can join together in large numbers once a year, to produce an event where believers can come together to worship, praise and celebrate the joy we have in knowing Jesus!! Furthermore, in this context, gifted and Spirit filled teachers can proclaim from the Holy Bible about who Jesus is and the magnitude of what He came to do for Planet Earth and we humans who inhabit it. By making a safe space for the Church to come together in celebration and proclamation of the love and justice and mercy we have found in Jesus to those who don’t know Him yet, we will be taking part in what He commanded us to do! It’s the last thing His disciples heard Him say as He was ascending to the Father!! He had been preparing them for 3 years and forty days for His departure. But He and the prophets of old along with John the Baptist also spoke about Jesus’ intention to not only save our souls, but to also “baptize us with His Holy Spirit and with fire!!” Luke 3:16b So, in the safe place called Faithfest, where gifted musicians and church leaders have been properly vetted and Prayer, Prayer and more prayer has accompanied lots of hard work, we the redeemed people of His Church are doing what Jesus left us here to do.

For over 2000 years, in spite of all its problems, the Church has been proclaiming Jesus as the God who lived among humanity for 33 years. He was perfectly submitted to God the Father who sent Him, while also being connected to and filled with the Holy Spirit who directed Him in His 33 year pilgrimage on Planet Earth. With His Father’s watchful eye upon Him and all of heaven’s cooperation, even the angels got involved in announcing His birth and protecting Joseph and Mary’s holy baby from harm. Thus, when Jesus officially began His earthly ministry at the age of 30, He first demonstrated His power over Satan before He demonstrated His power over all the sin and misery and darkness that exists in our fallen, broken world. He told His disciples that He and the Father were One and that when they saw Him they saw exactly what their Heavenly Father was like by healing all the sick people who came to Him for help. The blind, the lame, the deaf and dumb, the lepers and the demon possessed He set free and He even raised people from the dead. In addition to this, Jesus taught His disciples and the multitudes with great authority explaining the Holy Scriptures to them in a way that their own teachers of the Law could not. He revealed to them God’s plan before He even created our planet! God knew then that He would demonstrate, through His chosen people, how His ways are higher than ours. He is perfect in all His ways, while they were far from perfect. Even His chosen people were self-willed, stubborn and in desperate need of a Savior. It was His plan then and it still is to send a Messiah who would ultimately conquer death and hell and sin and triumph over the evil forces that have dominated many of us humans and which have also existed in the world since the beginning of time as we know it. Yet, even though their own Scriptures prophesied a first and second coming of the Messiah, Jesus was rejected by His own people who persuaded their Roman conquerors to crucify Him. But let me hasten to say that, though many of the religious leaders rejected Jesus as the Messiah there were many who received Him along with thousands of other Jews. These first believers were and still are the foundation upon which His Church, consisting of Jews, Gentiles and every tribe and nation under heaven was built. The people who rejected Jesus then, and those who reject Him now, are identified by Jesus’s own teaching with these powerful words found in

John 3:16-21:

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.” In that and other Bible passages people need to understand that from before the earth was created God’s HEAVENLY PURPOSE AND PLAN HAS BEEN TO DEFEAT SATAN, HIS DEMONS AND ALL HUMAN CO-CONSPIRATORS WHO LOVE THE DARKNESS OF HUMAN REBELLION MORE THAN THE LIGHT AND THE ETERNAL FREEDOM, LIGHT AND TRUTH THAT ONLY COMES THROUGH GOD!!

We also need to realize that human co-conspirators with Satan have always been resisting God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit so they can erect homages to themselves as God instead of to our perfect King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The story has not changed since Jesus ascended on high and it’s a message that is clearly proclaimed at Faithfest and one that needs to be celebrated and proclaimed with power in our weekly celebrations of worship and the breaking of the bread of His word together. It’s only fitting to end this article here with a recap of the message we must proclaim in order to see revival come to the church and spiritual awakening come to those who are not yet believers.

• Jesus Christ was crucified by sinners for the healing and salvation of sinners

• He rose from the dead on the third day

• After He rose from the dead, He stayed on Earth fora 40 day period where He kept popping in and out among His disciples to explain to them again how their Holy Scriptures explained all this.
• Then at the great feast of Pentecost that took place once a year with many Jews from every nation coming to Jerusalem to commemorate the giving of the Ten Commandments to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, God sent his Holy Spirit.

• It was at this time God chose to pour out His Spirit to begin a New Covenant with His people where they would learn how to walk in the new way of the Spirit. On that very day, 10 days after Jesus’s ascension, He poured out His Spirit in a mighty way and thousands of people came to faith in Jesus as their Messiah. Those outpourings and those in-gatherings of thousands of people at a time kept happening in those days, in spite of great persecution and resistance from hard-hearted, prideful humans.

So now as we continue to await for Jesus to return 2000 years later, let us be reminded again that those of us who know the Lord must get serious about our Heavenly Father’s business. That means we must repent of playing church and business as usual of lukewarmness and divisiveness or whatever other sins we’re hindered by. Then we can be the Kingdom advancing force that God has redeemed us to be. May the revival fires that are being stoked in Wilkes County consume us, so “whosoever will” can receive the abundant and eternal life that only Jesus can bring.