New Room Group to Highlight PTS Event
David Thomas, and leaders from the New Room Renewal Movement leadership team will be guests at the Pentecostal Theological Seminary on Wednesday, March 20, 2019 at 11:00 a.m. in the Cross Chapel.
The New Room Conference grew out of Seedbed, a Wesleyan Group dedicated to sowing the seeds for another Great Awakening and is named after the first meeting house of the Wesleyan-Methodist movement in Bristol, England, aspiring to be a humble meeting with a holy God. What began a few years ago with a couple of hundred people today exceeds 2,000.
The special chapel is part of an annual service sponsored through the Robert E. Fisher Chair of Spiritual Renewal and Christian Formation at the seminary. Professor of the chair is Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns.
“Seedbed began as a discipleship/renewal resource for the United Methodist Church,” Johns said. She stated Seedbed supplies churches with materials on discipleship, Bible study, and prayer. New Room was birthed in the Seedbed community as an annual gathering for prayer and worship which meets in Nashville. The first year they had 250 in attendance. Last fall they had over 2,200.
“I have worked with the New Room people in incorporating more openness to the Holy Spirit, and have been pleasantly surprised at their receptivity,” Johns stated. “Right now, the New Room Renewal Movement consists of United Methodists, Wesleyan Churches, all stripes of Pentecostals, and Evangelical Anglicans. At the last conference, I was deeply moved at the long periods of travailing prayer, powerful worship, and preaching. Seedbed and New Room have official connections with Asbury Theological Seminary, but they are open to more official ties with PTS.”
Members of the New Room worship and leadership team regularly appear on college and seminary campuses in order to bring a taste of their renewal movement to a larger audience. The day before, on Tuesday, March 19 the New Room team will meet with the Lee University prayer group and Dr. Rickie Moore of the Lee University School of Religion. The student prayer group is hosting the team in a gathering at North Cleveland Church of God on Tuesday evening at 8:00 p.m.
“Our hope is to encourage and equip this global community (and beyond) to recover its roots and extend its reach as an awakening movement, person by person, band by band, church by church, to every village, town, and city, in every state, country, and continent until the ending of all things broken and the beginning of all things new,” Thomas stated about the movement.
“This renewal combines the Wesleyan quest for holiness and the Pentecostal quest for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.”
Johns summed up the group by saying, “In my opinion, they offer the best of both traditions, and I see both Seedbed (the parent organization for New Room) and New Room as a significant move of God. I have been in several meetings with their leadership team, and I participated in the last New Room Conference in Nashville. I don’t have adequate words to describe the holy fervor for renewal I have found among these people.”
To learn more about the movement, visit www.seedbed.com.
