What about “The Turning” revival in Reading, UK?
Question 60073
In the late spring of 2016, news began spreading through British evangelical and charismatic networks that something unusual was happening on the streets of Reading. The Gate Church, a Baptist congregation led by Yinka Oyekan, had invited American evangelist Tommie Zito to lead a week of street evangelism. The week became four weeks, and by the end of it, claims were being made of 1,850 people praying to receive Christ at an average of sixty-five decisions per day. The initiative was branded “The Turning,” and within months churches across the country were requesting to host it. The questions raised by Prophecy Today‘s historian Tom Lennie and others deserve a careful hearing, because not all that glitters in the church growth world is gold, and not all that is wrong is entirely without merit.
What The Turning Claimed and Where It Came From
The language used by The Turning’s leaders from the outset was revival language. Oyekan described the events as an “outpouring,” compared them to Azusa Street, spoke of seeing angels in the streets of Reading, and suggested that if properly stewarded the movement could see over a million people reached across the UK. Tommie Zito, the American evangelist at the heart of it, markets an international ministry of “awakening” nations hallmarked by what he describes as the heavy glory of God, unique signs and wonders, and an unprecedented anointing. These are substantial claims, and the first question any biblically grounded Christian should ask of substantial claims is whether the evidence supports them.
The Turning’s methodology involves training volunteers in a scripted approach to evangelistic conversation, taking them onto the streets in teams, and leading people through a sequence of questions designed to bring them to a prayer of commitment. Oyekan himself acknowledged in his own learning review that the script required more scriptural content, having been revised since the Reading outreach because it had appealed primarily to the heart through emotional encounter rather than to a clear gospel explanation. That is a candid admission worth noting, and it came from the movement’s own leadership rather than from its critics.
The Question of Fruit
The most pressing concern raised by Tom Lennie in Prophecy Today‘s two-part analysis is the one that matters most: what happened to the people who made decisions? By Oyekan’s own admission, two-thirds of those who made a decision on the streets of Reading had subsequently brushed off attempts at follow-up and had not wished to continue the dialogue. If the figures claimed are taken at face value, that means roughly 1,200 people out of 1,850 had no continuing relationship with the gospel or with a church. The movement’s own reporting acknowledged that follow-up systems buckled under the volume of responses, with some local leaders asking for fewer follow-up cards because they could not cope with the quantity. These are not the words of opponents; they are the movement’s own account of what happened on the ground.
Historical revival movements provide a useful comparison. The Welsh Revival of 1904 under Evan Roberts, the 1859 revival that swept through Ulster, Wales, Scotland, and England, and the earlier evangelical awakenings under Whitefield and Wesley all left structural evidence of their permanence: new churches, lasting conversions, transformed communities, sustained prayer movements, and measurable changes in public morality. They were assessed by their fruit over years, not by the count of raised hands over days. When Lennie, as a careful historian of genuine revivals, looked at The Turning and asked whether it met those criteria, his conclusion was that what had occurred was a well-organised evangelistic campaign with genuine heart behind it, but not a revival in any historically defensible sense of the word. The Turning’s own website at one point acknowledged honestly that “it’s not revival yet — but it’s revival-shaped.” That admission did not always characterise the language used in 2016, when “outpouring” was the preferred term.
The Sales Script Problem
The comparison to a salesman leading a customer toward a predetermined conclusion is not uncharitable; it reflects a real structural concern about methodology. The Turning’s street approach trains volunteers in a prescribed sequence of questions designed to guide the conversation toward a prayer of commitment. The logic is that a consistent, reproducible method will produce consistent, reproducible results. This is church growth pragmatism applied to evangelism, and the results it produces are exactly what church growth pragmatism always produces: impressive numbers that do not translate proportionally into lasting disciples.
There is nothing wrong with training believers to share their faith, equipping them with a framework for starting conversations, or giving people who are nervous about evangelism a way into the subject. All of that is genuinely valuable. The problem arises when the method becomes the mechanism, when the scripted sequence is treated as the thing that produces decisions, and when counting those decisions becomes the primary measure of whether God is at work. Lennie noted a near obsession with recording decisions, with daily counts posted in bold type on social media, with followers celebrating each figure as evidence of an extraordinary move of the Spirit. The concern is not with enthusiasm for evangelism. It is with a culture in which the number of hands raised becomes the evidence of the Spirit’s presence, and in which a street prayer prayed under social pressure is treated as equivalent to genuine conversion.
Paul’s description of his own evangelistic method in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 is instructive: he came not with eloquence or human wisdom, and his preaching was not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that faith might not rest on human wisdom but on God’s power. The demonstration of the Spirit’s power Paul describes is not a technique producing responses; it is the convicting and regenerating work of God attending the plain proclamation of the cross. A scripted question sequence is human wisdom, however sincerely deployed. It can start a conversation. It cannot produce new birth. That distinction matters enormously when deciding what the numbers actually mean.
The NAR Connections
The Turning has connections to the World Prayer Centre, and Zito’s ministry presents itself in the language of awakening nations through signs, wonders, and an unprecedented anointing. The World Prayer Centre is a significant node within the broader NAR network, and Zito’s self-presentation draws on exactly the apostolic and revival language that characterises that world. This does not automatically invalidate everything The Turning does, but it does explain certain features of its culture: the prophetic framing of the initiative, including Oyekan’s prophetic dream about a river flowing from the church roof said to be fulfilled in the Reading mission, the impartation expectation whereby teams travel to receive the grace that was given to Reading, and the wave language through which the movement understands itself.
At the core of its preparation culture is what its own materials describe as “soaking” in worship before teams go out to the streets — a passive receptivity to the Spirit’s presence that has no clear biblical parallel as a prescribed pre-evangelism practice, and which belongs to NAR-adjacent spiritual vocabulary rather than to straightforward New Testament teaching.
The Ecumenical Problem: All Churches, Whatever They Believe
One of the most theologically serious aspects of The Turning’s founding vision has received less scrutiny than it deserves. According to Oyekan’s own account, the prophetic mandate he received was explicit: unless he could get all the churches in his locality working together on the mission, there would be no blessing. And “all the churches” was not a loose figure of speech. The vision specifically encompassed Roman Catholic congregations, middle-of-the-road Church of England parishes, Liberal Methodist churches, Baptists, and evangelical fellowships together under the same evangelistic umbrella. People who expressed interest in the Christian faith as a result of the outreach would then be directed toward whichever church aligned with their preferences.
The problem this creates is not a secondary matter of ecclesial tidiness. It goes to the heart of what evangelism actually is. Churches that do not agree on the gospel cannot, in any coherent sense, do evangelism together. A Roman Catholic church teaches that salvation is mediated through the sacraments, that the Mass is the ongoing sacrifice of Christ, that the Pope holds supreme authority over the church, and that the treasury of merit accumulated by the saints is available for the benefit of souls in purgatory. A liberal Methodist congregation in 2016 Britain may have made no meaningful claim about personal conversion or the necessity of faith in the atoning death of Christ at all. To stand beside these institutions on a pavement and hand someone who has prayed a sinner’s prayer to them as a suitable spiritual home is not evangelism completing itself in discipleship; it is evangelism depositing converts into contexts where the gospel, as Scripture defines it, may not be preached. Paul’s instruction in Galatians 1:8-9 is not gentle: “even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.”
The follow-up card culture that The Turning generated makes this concrete rather than theoretical. Someone who prayed a short street prayer was directed to whichever church matched their existing background or preference. A person from a nominal Catholic family was pointed back to the Catholic church. A person with loose CofE connections was pointed to the local parish, which might be anything from genuinely evangelical to thoroughly liberal. The assumption built into this model is that church attendance is the goal and that almost any church will do. It is precisely the assumption that Billy Graham’s crusades were criticised for, and with reason — the concern that decision cards were directing people into churches where the gospel was not preached was a substantive objection then and it remains one now. Ecumenical pragmatism, however warmly motivated, cannot serve what it sets out to serve if the institutions it partners with are not preaching the same message.
It is also worth noting that the evangelistic script itself did not originate with Oyekan or with Zito. Oyekan acknowledged openly that it was “virtually identical” to the one formulated by Rodney Howard-Brown in his book The Great Awakening Power Evangelism Manual, and that Zito was Howard-Brown’s disciple. Rodney Howard-Brown is the South African evangelist most closely associated with introducing the “holy laughter” phenomenon that became a defining feature of the Toronto Blessing. The genealogy of The Turning’s methodology runs directly through one of the most theologically problematic figures in recent charismatic history, a fact that Oyekan disclosed without apparently regarding it as a cause for concern.
What Is Genuinely Positive
It would be dishonest to leave this as a purely negative assessment, and it would also be ungracious. The Turning has demonstrably mobilised ordinary church members who would not otherwise have shared their faith to engage strangers in conversation about Jesus. That is not nothing. Fear of evangelism is one of the great practical failures of the British church, and any movement that helps people overcome that fear and open their mouths about Christ in the street has done something genuinely useful. Some of those 1,850 conversations in Reading were real. Some of those prayers were genuine. Some of those people are in churches today because someone on a Turning team stopped them on a pavement and said something about Jesus. The genuine minority is not cancelled by the inflated majority, and the good impulse behind the initiative is real even where the framework around it is questionable.
The instinct toward unity across denominational lines, the emphasis on local churches working together rather than competing, and the aim of equipping the whole congregation rather than relying on professional evangelists all reflect genuinely healthy instincts. If The Turning had been content to be a well-run, cross-denominational evangelism training programme without the prophetic claims, the revival language, the decision-counting culture, and the NAR connections, it would have been a considerably less problematic thing.
So, now what?
The honest verdict on The Turning is that it contains a genuine desire to reach people with the gospel, some real training value for hesitant evangelists, and a welcome emphasis on lay participation in mission, wrapped inside a methodological framework that produces inflated decision counts and a theological culture that borrows from streams requiring discernment. If your church is considering involvement, the questions worth asking are straightforward: what happens to the people who respond after the team goes home, what is the scriptural content of the gospel actually presented, and what is the theological background of the network you would be joining? The hunger behind The Turning — the longing to see Britain turn to Christ — is a hunger every believer should share. The channel through which that hunger is directed does not always bear the weight placed upon it. Real conversions happen through the plain preaching of the cross, patient personal witness, and the regenerating work of the Spirit who moves as He wills rather than as a script directs.
“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”1 Corinthians 2:1-2
Bibliography
- Lennie, Tom. “The Turning.” Prophecy Today, Parts 1 and 2, 2017–2018. Available at: www.prophecytoday.uk
- Exiled Preacher blog, critique of The Turning, 2018. Available at: exiledpreacher.blogspot.com
- Oyekan, Yinka. Learning Review and Personal Statement, 2016. Available at: theturning.eu/learning-review
- Zito, Tommie. Official ministry website: www.tommiezito.com
- The Turning. Official website: theturning.eu
