Most people have heard of Azusa Street and the Welsh Revival. Very few have heard of Galiwin’ku.
I live in Australia, and I had never heard this story told in a church here. It is one of 40 in my new book. Here is part of the chapter.
A community in trouble
Elcho Island lies off the coast of Arnhem Land, at the top of Australia’s Northern Territory. Its main community, Galiwin’ku, was home in the late 1970s to about fifteen or sixteen hundred people, most of them Yolngu, the Aboriginal people of northeast Arnhem Land.
Djiniyini Gondarra was a Yolngu man who was appointed to the parish of Galiwin’ku and ordained in 1976. He came home to a community under strain. More liquor arrived on the island every day. Gondarra wrote of fights at night, of injuries and deaths from drinking. Many people left the church, and some said openly that they wanted Christianity gone from the island.
At the end of 1978 only about twenty-five people were active in the church. A few faithful Christians on the island kept praying for renewal.
A question on the beach
Early in 1979 Gondarra and his family were about to go away on leave. On the morning they left, he walked on the beach and asked God plainly:
“Lord, why have you called me to the ministry?”
At half past six it was his turn to lead devotions, and four people came. He read from Ezekiel 37, where the prophet stands in a valley of dry bones and God asks him, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
March 14, 1979
The family was away for about four weeks. On March 14 they flew back to Galiwin’ku, landing late in the afternoon. A crowd met them and asked Gondarra to start the Bible class again that night.
After dinner seven or eight people came. Gondarra thanked the few who had kept praying while he was away. Then he asked them all to hold hands, and he began to pray for the church.
“Suddenly we began to feel God’s Spirit moving in our hearts.”
The whole group began to pray aloud, and the room filled with the sound.
The news went through the community that night. He and his wife, Gelung, did not sleep. People came through the night, bringing the sick for prayer and bringing problems they had carried for years. Families and clans forgave one another.
“Wherever I went, I could hear people singing and humming Christian choruses and hymns!”
What the numbers show
End of 1978: about 25 people active in the church
End of April 1979: about 200
May 1979: double that again
Then they went out
In 1981 a team from Elcho traveled more than two thousand kilometers to the Warburton Ranges in the Western Australian desert. Over one weekend hundreds of people committed their lives to Christ. At Wiluna, more than 250 people were baptized in a community of about four hundred.
It began with a discouraged minister reading about dry bones to four people, and with a Bible class of seven or eight on the night he came home.
Take it with you
The chapter goes on to tell what came after, including what did not last. I do not hide that part in any of these stories.
Here is the step the chapter ends with. Read Ezekiel 37:1-14 this week. Name the place in your life, church or town that looks like dry bones, and pray over it every day for a month.
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They Prayed and God Moved runs more than 370 pages and tells 40 true stories of revival, from a village in Saxony in 1727 to a college chapel in Kentucky in 2023. Six continents, more than twenty nations, and almost every story about people with no title and no platform.
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Next week I will share another revival you have probably never heard of.
