Written by John LaShell (Elder) on February 28, 2023.
Jim Foulkes and his wife Martha are members of “The Last Class” at Alliance Bible Fellowship. They served as medical missionaries in Zambia, Africa, for nearly 40 years, and the members of the last class love to hear him share from time to time about his life and ministry.
When Jim was just a boy, his mother announced that she wanted him and his brother to become full-time missionaries. Jim’s call came after he served in the Second World War. At the triennial Urbana Missions Conference in 1949, he signed a pledge to serve as a foreign missionary. The Lord took him to Asbury College for his undergraduate training.
While Asbury was on break, Jim traveled to Wheaton College where he witnessed the outpouring of the Spirit during the revival there. The day after he returned to his own campus, revival broke out among the student body at Asbury. That was in 1950.
Seventy-three years later Jim was able to go to Asbury University to witness what God has been doing among the student body in our day. Perhaps there is no one else still alive who has been a part of both of those movements of the Spirit.
At one point in the video, Jim holds up and recommends a book on the Asbury revival of 1970. The title is The Asbury Revival: When God Used Students to Wake a Nation, by Wayne Atcheson.
In these revival recollections, it may not always be clear whether Jim is speaking about the revival of 1950 or his visit to the revival of 2023. The reason, I think, is that the two revivals form one powerfully emotional experience for him. When he entered the chapel at Asbury a few days ago, he was transported into the same joyful, Holy Spirit-inspired worship that he had known as a young man.
The present Asbury revival has now moved out of the college chapel to wherever the Holy Spirit decides to take it. “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). May our Lord be pleased to breathe His life into the student body here at Appalachian State University.