Building Big (Part 1) – The Early Days with Terry Virgo

Listen to the Audio

Terry first got saved at the age of 16 after visiting John Stott’s church and hearing him clearly preach the gospel.
This was followed by a season of backsliding. Terry was at a good church, but between the ages of 16 and 20 his life was entrenched in a lot of ungodly behaviours.
Terry then heard a sermon and felt God saying ‘I want your life and I want it now – and this is the last time I will talk to you about it’.
This completely changed Terry’s life.
After this, Terry began reading lots of biographies of great men and women of God.

At the time, there wasn’t much community in the church. People came, listened and then went home. None of the Biblical ‘one anothers’ were happening.
Terry met a guy who was starting a home Bible study and he joined the group.
The approach taken in this Bible study was to believe every promise and obey every command.
There were about 8 people in the group. Within a year, everyone had been filled with the Spirit (which was quite an unknown thing at the time).
At this point, Pentecostals were treated as outsiders by the mainstream church.
‘Revival’ was a respectable thing to pray for amongst evangelicals.
Terry was warned off the Holy Spirit by some church leaders, but eventually he was filled with the Spirit.

Terry was called by God to leave his secular job.
He felt challenged to more devotion and more prayer.
He would meet up with a couple of other people to pray every morning and would spend the afternoons evangelising door to door.

About this time, Terry felt God give him a promise – ‘I will bring you back’. This seemed strange as Terry wasn’t planning to go anywhere.
God then led Terry to go to Bible college in London.
Whilst at Bible college, Terry met Wendy, who is now his wife.
They went to a great church – made up of people who had been recently filled with the Spirit. People travelled in for it from all over London.
There was a dramatic sense of the presence of God There was lots of prophecy and healings.
This was a very formative time for Terry. He didn’t feel as though he could go back and be a baptist pastor.

Terry was invited to lead a pioneering church in Seaford. He said that he would lead them but would do so in a charismatic way. They said that if he led them from the Bible then they would follow.
Terry and Wendy began praying for people that they would get filled with the Spirit, and one by one they did.
There was a lot of opposition, but gradually things began to open up (Terry tried to introduce ‘open worship’)
The opposition was both external and within the meetings. Terry had to fight against a religious atmosphere and ‘horizontal praying’.
A prophet came in and prophesied that those who opposed the work of the Spirit would be removed and that young men should prepare themselves for ministry.
He saw the tide coming up the beach and three men stood trying to stop it – but they can’t stop what God is doing.
Over the next few weeks one of the key opponents died, another left his wife and ran off with another woman and the third lost his temper and stormed out.
The young guys came through and the church radically changed. It meant they could lead it in the way they wanted to.

A friend of Terry’s held an annual new years prayer meeting and Bible week where people would pray for revival and preach.
Through this, Terry began to connect with others who were like minded throughout the country.
It was here that he first heard about the Ephesians 4 ministries.
He began to rethink his eschatology.
He started to discover the church – both the local church where God is immediately present, and also the glorious church to which all of history is tied.
Some people would say that the church’s biggest problem was evangelism, but at that point in history, evangelism’s biggest problem was the church.
They needed new wineskins in order to be relevant to their generation, and also to make room for the Holy Spirit.
When they began starting new churches, people were very hostile to it.