Tens of Thousands of Youth Shout ‘Fill Me, Holy Spirit’ at The Send Crusade by STEVE REES for Charisma News
With shoes lifted above their heads, tens of thousands of young people at Arrowhead Stadium — and 200,000 more watching via live stream — shouted in unison, “Fill me, Holy Spirit” and “To live is Christ; to die is gain,” after 12 hours of worship, prayer and messages at The Send in Kansas City, Missouri, this past weekend.
Thousands of teenagers and Gen Z flooded Kansas City before The Send, sharing the gospel with nearly 5,000 homes and providing 6,000 more families with food and goods during the week leading up to the missions and prayer event at Arrowhead.
Eight hundred churches in Kansas City collaborated with The Send and partner ministries Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and Awaken The Dawn, sowing $1.5 million into needy Kansas City neighborhoods during a week of ministry training, outreach, prayer and worship called The Flood.
Now is your chance to support Gospel News Network.
We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
“Now I’m thinking, as a Kansas City guy, this is an incredible gift to our city,” said Mike Bickle, founder of the International House of Prayer (IHOPKC).
“I’ve been a pastor here for 40 years,” added Bickle. “My point is, this group comes into our city, witnesses to 5,000 homes, gives food to 6,000 other homes, mobilizes 800 pastors, touches the whole foster-care system, and asks for nothing,” Bickle said before receiving an offering for The Send.
It plans to take outreach to Norway and Argentina this year, then to Nashville, Tennessee, for The Send in 2023.
Foster care, adoption, high schools, colleges, communities and nations are mission fields The Send hopes to fill with committed laborers in the harvest.
Leading the culminating cry “To live is Christ; to die is gain,” YWAM’s Andy Byrd presented a compelling call to missions. Watch a replay of The Send here.
“There are 3.2 billion people who will go to bed tonight, never having heard the name of Jesus,” said Byrd, who believes 200,000 new missionaries are God’s plan to reach them.
There are more than 2,000 languages of the earth that still don’t have a single page of the Scriptures, and only 0.1% of American church members are missionaries.
“There are 424,000 missionaries in the whole world,” said Byrd. “There are six times as many people working at Walmart as there are reaching the 3.2 billion people around the world,” he said.
He’s hopeful that studies of Gen Z — conducted by Christian research groups like Barna — are accurate gauges of interest in global missions.
