Beginning in November of 1949, two sisters, Peggy and Christine Smith, 84 and 82 years old–Peggy completely blind, and Christine bent over with arthritis—were burdened due to the depressed spiritual state in their Barvas village church. They sensed the Lord speaking to them: “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground.” (Isaiah 44:3).
This led them to pray in their small cottage two to three nights per week, from 10 p.m. till 3 a.m. After several weeks of praying like this, Peggy had a vision of her church being crowded with young people, and an unknown minister preaching from the pulpit.
Peggy then sent for their minister, Rev. James Murray MacKay. She told him they sensed the Lord was going to send a revival and that he must get his church leaders and spend every Tuesday and Friday night in prayer, and that they would pray simultaneously in their cottage.
MacKay respected the sister’s spiritual judgement and the call to pray was made. There was also a group of pastors in the region that met to discuss the spiritual declension on the island. Together they composed a resolution to be read on a certain Sunday in all the Free Churches of Scotland. It was an appeal for all believers to “view with concern the barrenness of the parishes” so they would “turn again unto the Lord whom we have so grieved with our waywardness and iniquities.” It also involved asking the people to pray that the villages would be “visited with a spirit of repentance.” Many of the believers in the Hebrides immediately went to their knees, petitioning God to visit the islands.
The announcement was also placed in two newspapers, the Stornoway Gazette and West Coast Advisor on December 9, 1949.
►Following that proclamation, two times per week, Peggy and Christine Smith prayed in their cottage from 10 p.m. till 3 a.m., while the ministers and others prayed in a barn-like structure and in other locations. They prayed this way for weeks .
►Prayer was conducted in unheated buildings—in the middle of the winter. That was a sign of desperation.
►People all over the islands had the sense that God was telling them to “ask Me for revival.” This was a divinely orchestrated movement to petition God for revival.
Revival began one night in a barn, after a young deacon read from Psalm 24:3-5. When he closed his Bible he looked at the minister and the others and said,
“It seems to me to be so much humbug to be praying as we are praying, to be waiting as we are waiting, if we ourselves are not rightly related to God.”
He then prayed, “God, are my hands clean? Is my heart pure?”
Immediately, at around 3 a.m., the presence of God gripped every person present. It wasn’t only them that sensed this, for the entire village and larger surrounding area sensed that same awareness of God. The following day everyone was absorbed by the reality of eternal things.
That group of intercessors left the barn at that early hour and found men and women kneeling along the roads, crying out to God for mercy. Every home had lights on in it, as no one could sleep with the awareness of God being so overwhelming.
Peggy Smith then sent for her minister, Rev. MacKay, and told him that he was supposed to invite someone to come and preach during the revival, but she didn’t know who he was. She only saw an unfamiliar face in a vision.
Through another contact, MacKay contacted Duncan Campbell and asked him to come. Campbell was at that time in the midst of an evangelistic campaign on the island of Skye, with conversions taking place. When he received the letter inviting him to the Barvas Free Church on the island of Lewis for 10 days, he replied that he couldn’t make it because he was scheduled to be a speaker at the convention on Skye.
Upon receiving Campbell’s return letter informing him that he couldn’t come, Rev. MacKay regretfully told Peggy Smith the news. Peggy Smith responded; “Mr. MacKay, that is what man is saying. But God has said something else and he will be here within a fortnight” (14 days).
Due to a change of events, the convention on Skye was cancelled and Campbell arrived on the island of Lewis in ten days. When Campbell arrived at the pier he was greeted by the minister and two church leaders. The minister asked him to go straight to the church and address the congregation at 9 p.m.
Three hundred people were gathered at the church when Campbell arrived. After preaching a sermon, nothing significant happened. There was an awareness of God’s presence, more powerful than what Campbell had experienced since a revival he was involved with in 1921, but nothing extraordinary beyond that, and the service was closed at approximately 10:45 p.m.
With everyone having departed from the church, and Duncan Campbell and a young deacon being the only ones left, that young man, knowing God was going to do something much more that night, in the middle of the aisle, said to Campbell: “Nothing has broken out tonight, but God is hovering over us. He is hovering over us, and he will break through any moment.”
That young man then lifted his hands and started to pray, “God, you made a promise to pour water on the thirsty and floods upon the dry ground and you are not doing it.” He then intensely began interceding in prayer for a considerable period of time then collapsed to the floor.
At around 11 p.m. the back door of the church opened and a man entered saying, “Mr. Campbell, something wonderful has happened. Mr. Campbell, we were praying that God would pour water on the thirsty and floods upon the dry ground and listen, He’s done it! He’s done it! Will you come to the door and see the crowd that is here?”
It was then that Campbell witnessed many hundreds of people entering the church. No one had invited them. They had been drawn sovereignly by God, at that late hour of the evening. By 12 midnight the church was crowded out.
On this same evening there were one hundred young people at a dance at the parish (county) hall. During their dance God suddenly fell upon them (right at the time the young man was praying in the aisle of the church). The music at the dance hall stopped, and the young people, being overcome by conviction of sin, fled the hall as if they were “fleeing from a plague,” and they made their way to the church.
In addition to these 100 young people, there were hundreds more who had already been in bed but simultaneously, without any explanation, got out of bed, dressed themselves, and went running to the church.
A hunger and thirst for God overwhelmed the people in the area. In the church the gathered crowd began singing Psalms. The church that would seat over 800 was packed. People in the aisles and in the pews were on their knees, crying out for God to have mercy.
That meeting continued till 4 a.m. There were no altar calls nor appeals to accept Christ. It was just a sovereign work of God. Several of those saved that night became ministers.
At 4 a.m., as Duncan Campbell was leaving the church to go to the parsonage where he would spend the night, someone approached him and asked him to go to the police station, as there were at least three hundred people that had gathered there.
During the one-mile walk to the police station, he saw people all along the road, kneeling and crying out to God in repentance, pleading for mercy.
Upon arrival at the police station, Duncan Campbell didn’t preach a sermon, but the crowd that had mysteriously gathered themselves there were crying out to God for mercy due to the overwhelming conviction of their sins that they were experiencing. Now the sergeant there was a God-fearing man. He was in the meeting. But people knew that this was a house that feared God. And next to the police station was the cottage in which the two old women lived. I believe that that had something to do with the magnet, the power that drew men.
Many of those assembled had come in buses from locations up to twelve miles away. When asked why they had come there, they didn’t have an answer. They just said they had a hunger in their heart to go to the village of Barvas (where the church was located).
On the second night of Duncan Campbell’s ministry at the Barvas church, people from all around the island of Lewis came in buses, and the church was packed out. Some fell under severe conviction of sin on their way there and were converted before they arrived at the church. During Campbell’s sermon people were crying loudly all over the sanctuary, burdened by the weight of sin.
Soon after, the following account, in the words of Duncan Campbell,
“We were in a village where things were really difficult. A certain section of the Christian community were bitterly opposing me on the grounds that I was not teaching truth, because I proclaimed the truth that John Wesley proclaimed and the New Testament proclaims, that there is a Savior from sin. Now I proclaimed the truth and I was opposed, and the opposition was so successful that only seven from this community came near the meetings in the Parish Church. “At the close of one meeting the session-clerk of this particular congregation in which I was ministering, came to me and said, "Mr. Campbell — these go not out but by prayer and fasting — so we are meeting tonight in the farmhouse; we are going to spend the night in prayer.”
“So we met. There were about thirty of us, and prayer began. I found it a very hard meeting. I found myself battling and getting nowhere as the hours passed. After midnight, between 12 and 1 o'clock in the morning, I turned to a young man in the meeting and said, "I feel led of God to ask you to pray," and that dear man rose to his feet and prayed, and in his prayer he uttered words such as I had never heard in a prayer before. He said, "Lord, You made a promise, are You going to fulfill it? We believe that You are a covenant keeping God; will You be true to Your covenant? You have said that You would pour water on the thirsty and floods upon the dry ground. I do not know how others stand in Your Presence, I do not know how the ministers stand, but if I know my own heart, I know where I stand, and I tell Thee now that I am thirsty, oh, I am thirsty for a manifestation of the Man of Thy right hand" — and then he said this — "Lord before I sit down, I want to tell You that Your honor is at stake."
“Have you ever prayed like that? Here is a man praying the prayer of faith. I love to believe that angels and archangels were looking over the battlements of Glory and saying to one another, "This is a man who believes God; there is a man who dares to stand solid on the promise of God and take from the throne what the throne has promised." Believe it, or disbelieve it — and you can verify this if you like — the house shook like a leaf, the dishes rattled on the sideboard, and an elder standing beside me said, "Mr. Campbell, an earth tremor." I said, "Yes!" and I pronounced the benediction immediately and walked out to find the community alive with an awareness of God. Men and women were carrying stools and chairs and asking "Is there room for us in the church?"
“The revival did not break out because Duncan Campbell was there. No, a thousand times no, but because God found a man whom He could trust, a man who dared to believe the promise of God. I hear men say at meetings, "Lord, I am claiming revival; I'm claiming revival." We ought to be careful what we say. If we claim it, we have it; yes, this is a glorious possibility. Indeed I would go as far as to say if I did not believe this I would go back to business, and I believe that WHEN GOD FINDS THE CLEAN HANDS AND THE PURE HEART WE SHALL SEE SPRINGS IN THE DESERT AND RIVERS IN THE DRY PLACES.”