Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire: What Happens When God’s Spirit Invades the Hearts of His People is by Jim Cymbala with Dean Merrill, published by Zondervan.
What it is
The story of what happened at the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Cymbala took a struggling church of about twenty people in a difficult part of Brooklyn, with no training and no plan beyond prayer, and watched it become one of the more remarkable congregations in the country. The book is the account of that, and of what he concluded from it.
His conclusion is simple and repeated: the Tuesday night prayer meeting is the engine, and everything else is downstream of it. Cymbala argues most churches have programs where they should have prayer, and he is not gentle about it.
Why it has lasted
It was published in 1997 and it still sells, which for a book of this kind is unusual. The reason is that it is testimony rather than method. Cymbala is not offering a transferable system, and he says so; he is describing what happened when a church that had nothing else left prayed.
The other reason is honesty about cost. This is not a success story told from a comfortable distance. The hardest chapters involve his own family, and he does not tidy them.
Know the tradition
Cymbala is charismatic in the ordinary sense: he expects God to act, and the book contains accounts of dramatic conversions and answered prayer presented as straightforward fact. Called to Better holds that the gifts of the Spirit remain active and does not flag a book for assuming so. If you are cessationist, you will read this differently, though the book is far more about prayer and dependence than about any particular gift.
What we removed
The old review quoted a reader saying the book “rekindled my faith in the Lord” and ran an invented FAQ. Both are gone. Dean Merrill, the co-writer, was also uncredited and now is.
Where we land
One of the few books on this site we would hand a man without qualification. Read it if your own praying has become a formality, or if you have concluded that a church needs a better strategy. Cymbala’s answer is older and harder than that.
Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire by Jim Cymbala on Amazon