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Revival, Truth, and Persecution: An interview with Eugene Bach

| March 5, 2019 | no comments

PneumaReview.com: The Back to Jerusalem ministry that you work with recently released a new study resource called Chasing Revival: A Road Trip Bible Study, where did the idea for this resource come from?

Eugene Bach: I travel more than 300 days a year for ministry and see a lot of different types of Christians. I speak at big churches and small churches. I work with underground house church Christians in Iran and traditional conservative churches in Europe and as different as they are all are, there is a common thread that binds us all together – our desire to see revival.

It is a universal desire among Christians world-wide.

I have been working in China for almost 20 years and during this time I have witnessed the world’s largest revival. Being involved with grassroots missions in China has thrown me into the fires of cultural immersion and allowed me to experience this revival firsthand as it was happening.

Traveling with Chinese missionaries into many closed nations has provided me with a unique perspective of the pain that exists in nations where revival has tarried.

Six years ago, I decided to start from the beginning, trace the history of revival, identify it’s characteristics, and see what we could learn to help push forward into the nations that have not yet experienced revival.

 

PneumaReview.com: The word “revival” means many things to many people. How would you define it?

Eugene Bach: I want to be very careful to not create a rigid definition of revival that excludes a movement of God, so for our road trip Bible study, we start in the book of Acts chapter 1 and follow what happens in the first century church.

For Christians around the world, there is a common thread that binds us all together – our desire to see revival.

So for our definition of revival, we use Acts 2:41 as our example – where a sizable group of people in a defined geographical area came running to Christ in a relatively short amount of time as a result of followers of Christ completing the Great Commission.

During our road trip Bible study, Chasing Revival, we found this definition to be more accurate than others.

We believe that revival is not necessarily spontaneous – appearing out of thin air, but is rather continuation of what Jesus promised in Acts chapter 1. The revivals happening in China today are not new, but their roots can be traced back to Acts 1 in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.

 

PneumaReview.com: What are some of the places you traveled to while making Chasing Revival?

Eugene Bach: We started in Jerusalem and followed the book of Acts into Judea, Samaria, Asia Minor, and to the “ends of the world.” This led us in a mainly western direction.

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Category: Ministry, Winter 2019

About the Author: Eugene Bach is a pseudonym for a member of the Chinese underground church who does not wish to be identified. He was trained in U.S. military special operations and served two tours in the Persian Gulf and Asia–Pacific region, serving primarily as a member of a rapid response team focusing on targeted threat elimination, counterterrorism, and security. He has been working with the underground church in China for about twenty years, helping them to establish forward mission bases in closed countries around the world, including Iraq and Syria. Eugene leads the Chinese mission movement called Back to Jerusalem, which provides essential support for Chinese missionaries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. He is the author or co-author of I Stand with Christ: The Courageous Life of a Chinese Christian (2015), The Underground Church (2014), Leaving Buddha: A Tibetan Monk's Encounter With the Living God (2019), Jesus In Iran (2015), and other books about the underground church in places like China, North Korea, and Iran.

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