At the second Revive Europe conference at Karlsruhe, Germany at the start of 2023, 2,300 students from 86 nations (mainly European) gathered in their desire to see revival in their generation across the continent.
It focused on repentance, forgiveness and awakening as delegates were equipped to be strong witnesses of Jesus in their universities and beyond.
The conference promoted revival based on how Tim Keller defines it: ‘sleepy Christians wake up, nominal Christians get converted, and the hard to reach are dramatically brought to faith’.
Its three strands were Revive our Hearts, Revive our Universities and Revive Europe, which were based on Acts 16 –19, when Paul first took the gospel to Europe and ‘turned the world upside down’, as Acts 17.6 describes it.
‘Our prayer is that students and young adults are filled with God to change this continent’s history once again’, says Sarah Breuel, director of Revive.
The students’ hearts were set on fire and hungry for God through testimonies of people putting away the idols in their hearts, being set free from addictions and experiencing new freedom after releasing forgiveness.
Revive placed a strong emphasis on prayer, with its largest team covering pastoral care, personal prayer, and intercession. It also held multilingual worship sessions and 40 seminars, on themes such as ‘God and Science’, with Professor John Lennox.
The Bible was also at the heart of the gathering. Ramez Atallah and Zef Nikolla gave expositions on Acts while Danielle Strickland and Pete Greig led the conference in prayer for every region in Europe.
‘This is a special conference for us, as we are very excited for the future. We have all heard that Europe is the prodigal continent, secular, or even post-Christian. But we are seeing many testimonies and transformed lives, so we believe that God is not done with Europe, and we are living in pre-revival times’, said Breuel.
