by Dan Jones
What if I told you there’s a huge revival going on right under our noses and we don’t even know about it?
This past Friday, I happened to be on the road at 5:00 a.m. Of course, my car radio was tuned to Kinship Christian Radio, and a program called “Haven Today” was on. It’s not a program I commonly hear because I’m sound asleep at that time.
So, here I was, driving along and Charles Morris is talking about how desperately Bibles are needed in Cuba because there’s an huge revival going on and hundreds of thousands of people want Bibles.
This caught me off guard. I knew Fidel Castro had passed away recently, but Cuba had been a Communist country under his rule for… well for pretty much as long as I had been alive. And, as is typical in Communist countries all over the world, the official government religion under Communism is atheism. This is because Communist governments are god and do not tolerate competition from other gods and especially not from the One True God.
But when I started sticking my nose in what’s been going on in Cuba, lo and behold, in 1985, Castro met with religious leaders issuing messages of peace and help to both Catholic and Protestant churches. The following year, the Communist government of Cuba announced that atheism would no longer be the primary ideology of the government!
To me, that’s nothing short of a miracle. It’s like a crocodile suddenly declaring it is no longer a reptile. Only the Holy Spirit could do that.
Then, in the early 1990’s Cuba experienced what the government called the “Special Period” which meant a time of intense economic hardship as the Soviet Union was on the verge of economic collapse. This meant a huge cut-back in petroleum exports to Cuba, which devastated it’s economy. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds of body weight during this period, but it was also a time of miraculous church growth throughout the island country known as “The Great Awakening.”
Cuba had a long history of Roman Catholicism, but during the Great Awakening, the number of Protestants (400,000) came to nearly equal the number of Catholics. (500,000)
Then, in 1999, Pope John Paul II visited Cuba and met with Castro, further increasing religious tolerance and acceptance. As a result of his visit, Castro lifted his 30 year-old ban on Christmas and made it an official government holiday!
Even though the Cuban government became more tolerant of Christians, it still would not authorize the construction of new buildings, and suggested the believers meet in homes. This resulted in many, many “house churches” where 80 or 100 believers meet in an apartment or in vacant lots. Still, even though those who come to worship may have to stand for the whole service in crowded conditions, they don’t mind –and they keep coming, and the numbers keep growing.
Somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 evangelical churches have opened in Cuba in just the last 20 years. Pastors there say it’s actually the adversity and the difficulty that have spurred church growth.
This doesn’t mean things are perfect in Cuba. Recently, 2,000 Assembly of God churches in Cuba were declared illegal and 1,500 were torn down. And, it’s still illegal to broadcast Christian programming on television and radio there, so the adversity and the difficulty still exist.
Nonetheless, churches are now providing the social services that the government once monopolized. Projects include AIDS prevention, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, clean water, medicine distribution and disaster relief. Churches have even organizing baseball leagues for the youth in their community.
Morris said on the program that there are now close to one million Catholics and one million Protestants in this country of 11 million where Christianity was illegal not so very long ago.
And Cuba’s current President, Raul Castro, after meeting with Pope Francis about two years ago, said he may return to church and start praying again. “I’m not joking,” he said.
So, the next time you’re tempted to think God has withdrawn from our little blue planet and all is lost, remember that the Holy Spirit is moving in great power just 80 miles south of our border, right under our very noses.
Today’s Praise
“He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” Luke 1:32-33 (NIV)