So - what happened?

So what happened when Benny Hinn came to town? History will settle it out, but it may not be premature to make a couple of observations. For two nights, some 18,000 people (I forgot to count the 2,000 chairs set up on the floor of Boston Garden) experienced a joy and a unity which many had not thought possible. And there were two major new cracks in the egg containing an eaglet called Awakening.

Alex said it was the greatest expression of unity he's experienced in forty years of ministry. Ditto. I've been writing about what goes on in the Body of Christ for nearly that long. I was at the Kansas City Charismatic Conference, the first Washington for Jesus, and Promise-Keepers "Stand in the Gap." What we experienced at the Garden belongs on the same shelf with those events.

Curiously (but not surprisingly) there was no mention in the Boston Globe. In Sunday's Ideas section, there was a front-page article on the abortion-rights movement rediscovering religion, but not an inch on what happened at the Garden.

It is reminiscent of New York City in the fall of 1857. Jeremiah Lanphier's Wednesday Noon prayer hour had become an underground phenomenon. His church, "Old North Dutch, could not hold all the people who came to pray. Neither could all the other churches in lower Manhattan" or the firehouses and police stations, the restaurants and theaters.

Word reached the uptown editorial offices of that city's two great newspapers: Something extraordinary was going on downtown. "Nonsense!" scoffed James Gordon Bennett of the Herald. "If it was news, we would have heard about it!" His arch-rival, Horace Greeley of the Tribune, had exactly the same response.

Nevertheless, on the remote chance that something might be going on, they each sent their best man to cover it. When their ace reporters came back born-again and praising God, the astonished editors realized something significant was afoot. They began to cover it, and word began to spread of the Great Prayer Revival of 1857, which eventually went around the world and sparked revivals in both the Union and Confederate Armies.

When the one who controls secular media does not like a newsworthy event, he renders it a non-event by withholding coverage. That happened in Washington in 1980. Other than couple of photos of bizarre fringe elements and two column-inches of copy, the Washington Post ignored the fact that a family event of epic proportions had taken place on the Mall. But other newspapers did cover it, and the further west one got, the wider and deeper the coverage.

Twenty-six years later, there are many more vehicles to get the word out: ipods, live-streaming video, Christian radio and television networks, email, and the Internet itself. All who should know, will know.

So pass the good news on and keep an eye on that egg in Boston....

-David Manuel