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Longtime author Becky Tirabassi (The Burning Heart Contract: The Call to Prayer, Purity and Purpose, Integrity, 2005), through her work as a campus speaker, has become involved in prayers for revival at Christian and secular colleges. CT senior associate editor Stan Guthrie spoke with her about it.

How did you get involved in student revival?

It got started in [the] Azusa [Pacific University] chapel in October of 2004. I thought I would do my normal chapel talk. I basically told my testimony, but then really called kids to holiness, and I'm not a holiness preacher. In fact, I'm not even a preacher. But it just kind of came out of me because my testimony was such a radical, dramatic transformation from drugs and alcohol and sex and swearing that I just looked at this crowd and said, "From what I see [in this] Christian collegiate community, it's drugs and sex and drinking and swearing, and I don't get where the two come together." And I, really, kind of fell apart. I got very emotional and then they fell apart and it was kind of a time of confession following that chapel.

I had not turned in my manuscript for The Burning Heart Contract, which is a book about what was happening in my life. It was a call to a burning heart of prayer, purity, and purpose. I stood in a chapel with all these kids and I felt God's Holy Spirit really just come over me and call them to holiness. And then from that point, the chaplain said to me, "You know, if you can come back and talk about prayer, that would be awesome." So I proceeded to go back to the campus 15 weeks in a row and meet with this small group of kids who were praying for revival the previous summer. I'm not from that type of denomination or church that ever held revivals. I was in Youth for Christ and Campus Life on a public school campus. We didn't really preach or teach revival. I don't know how I missed it, but I did, until I met these kids. And now, it's like we're the revival generation and we're praying for revival. We started to exchange books and have prayer meetings, and the books were all 150 or more years old—[among them] Charles Finney, D.L. Moody, Jonathan Edwards, and the Wesleys.

I felt God saying to go to more campuses. Well, that's kind of the tricky part because no one was inviting me. So, I had to knock on doors, and most people were not that receptive and yet students were talking a new language: "We're the revival generation; God's calling us to revival; we're praying for revival." So I just started to pray with them, whoever called, and if they knew kids in another school, they'd call and then I'd go to their school. So I did go to about 20 or more colleges over the next year until this past October, November, from [U.C.] Berkeley to Southern California.

Kids from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, called me. They had gathered together after a coed had died on campus from alcohol poisoning. About a thousand or more kids showed up. Otherwise, I was invited to speak at some chapels on Christian school campuses. It was a mix of both state and Christian school campuses.

Were groups such as InterVarsity inviting you to the state schools?

No. Most groups I tried to contact are pretty busy. They've got their own agenda. But kids, if they heard about it from other kids, would invite me to come and just do a little prayer, talk, or share my story, or kind of give them "permission" to have revival. What I saw on Christian campuses was so much apathy and complacency and you know, for lack of better words, sin. The kind of stuff the world does.

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April (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50