By Michael Catt (Nashville, Tennessee: B & H Publishing Group, 2010, 305 pages) 

Is the ‘prosperity gospel’ hindering revival? Pastor Michael Catt, senior pastor of Sherwood Baptist Church of Albany, Ga. believes so.

Pastor Catt makes a number of observations about revival in his new book:  “The Power of Surrender: Breaking Through to Revival”

Here’s what he has to say about Revival and the Prosperity Gospel:

“Sometimes the prosperity gospel and the feel-good gospel tell people what they want to hear, But] when you lay that by the side of Jesus’ teaching [to] take up the cross – the only reason for the cross in the first century is to die – and to die daily, to crucify your flesh then you have to think how does this fit?”

“I can’t go to a guy that only has a towel around his waist and lives in a dung hut and tell him the good news you’ll get a Mercedes and you’ll go from dung to stucco because it probably won’t happen. But the power of the life changing Gospel can happen.”

The actual focus of the book is on sacrifice and revival and eliminating everything in the church that stands in the way of a new revival coming to America:

“If we’re hungry and thirsty after God, if there is a desire for more, if there is a holy dissatisfaction with the way things are, believing that surely God died for more than what we are seeing in our typical church today…”

In the book pastor Catt talks about how God is moving in his own congregation doing a sovereign work bringing many closer to God:

“We are now seeing people walk through the baptismal waters. People are being saved. Members are inviting their lost friends and unchurched neighbors. Attendance shot up. Why? Revival produces evangelism.”

Sherwood Baptist is famous for producing such movies as “Facing the Giants” and “Fireproof.”                *Top

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