WILMORE, Ky. (LEX 18) — After about two weeks of song and prayer on the campus of Asbury University, their on-campus revival services have reached a conclusion.
The final service ended late Thursday night, with people allowed to stick around in Hughes Auditorium until midnight.
The revival caught the attention of people across the globe, bringing tens of thousands into the small town of Wilmore. The university earlier announced the services to wrap up to allow their students to return to a normal academic schedule, and for people who live in the community to get relief from traffic and other challenges. The revival “exceeded capacity” on Sunday.
Earlier in the week, anyone over 25 had to watch via a live stream from a church across the street, and before that hours were limited, putting an end to what was once a true non-stop service.
Asbury students Caleb Rushing and Lucy Kate Gray were at the first service on February 8. They returned for the final service on Thursday.
“I have personally rededicated my life to Jesus, my faith has been transformed through this,” Rushing said.
Rushing and Gray consider the revival itself to not be ending because they say you don’t need to be physically at Asbury to experience it.
“It’s not going to end,” Rushing said. "Everybody who’s seeing this, everybody who’s experiencing it whether it’s here in person, whether it’s over the phone, whether it’s halfway across the world, Jesus is in those places the same way they are seeing him here and so revival can happen anywhere at any time."
God, Gray said, is just starting something new.
Across the street from the university, area businesses have seen the past few weeks as both a blessing and a challenge.
“It kind of put us on the map,” Fitch’s IGA Grocery store owner Leonard Fitch said of the revival’s impact on Wilmore. Until the city helped them out, he said there were few places for his customers to park as people going to the revival filled them up. He admits many of his regular customers are going to Nicholasville and hopes they come back.
For Subway franchisee David Wier, the main challenge has been running out of food. They have done in almost a week the amount of sales they usually do in a year.
“It'll be nice to get back to a normal day but again I'm excited for what God has done for people's lives here,” Wier said.
Some people told LEX 18 they plan to return to Asbury tomorrow, even if they can only be on the lawn. A university spokesperson said they would not remove people, and would even still have prayers teams on site that are happy to speak with anyone who remains and pray with them.
“We recognize if someone did travel here we don’t want to just say ‘sorry see you later,’” said Abby Laub, the university’s communications director. “We believe in hospitality.”
She said the coolest thing to come out of all this is to see the unity among college kids, saying more than 210 colleges and universities were represented.
Thursday’s service was part of the National Collegiate Day of Prayer. Normal services at Hughes auditorium will resume.
