Tony Cummings went to Kingston Upon Hull to talk to worship songwriter, pastor, author and broadcaster JARROD COOPER

Tony: What did the local media say about what was going on?

Jarrod: It hardly got noticed. Isn't it funny, sometimes you do these things and it gets noticed, sometimes it doesn't. I didn't make a big fuss of it: you want to do these things in God's timing. As much as reporting, they could also ridicule.

Tony: When in 2011 did it start?

Jarrod: The youth were impacted at the end of August, and something broke out at the end of September. Even now we see more miracles than we ever saw pre-2011: just last Sunday a deaf ear opened. We've done all sorts - fill city halls, these campuses we planted, toured. About three years in the BBC got in touch. BBC Education said, "We're creating a study forum for GCSE students. We want to come and film healing in your church, so every GCSE religion student studying healing today will study your church." Students came in - they were in a healing meeting with us - and they interviewed one of our ladies who six and a half years ago was healed out of a wheelchair. They also wanted to interview someone who was seeking healing and hadn't been healed, so they had those two contrasting interviews. The whole media side does begin to open up, but I wasn't going to go looking for it, because I wanted it to be done in the right spirit. God's his own advertiser.

Tony: The story has got out, at least within the churches. Christian media has created signs and wonders chasers.

Jarrod: People do visit us and want prayer. My angle on revival as a concept: I don't want to do nightly meetings and be looking down a screen begging people to come to Hull because "God is moving". I think there's a danger in that. Every revival ends because of insecurity, competition or ego. When God begins to move, God always makes men look good; but we're not very good at handling that. In '96, I was having something of a move of God - for me it was quite remarkable; others would go, "That's quite normal" - but something was going on with regards signs and wonders, the presence of God, and God was talking to me about revival. I was studying the life of Evan Roberts - without a doubt, a hundred thousand people saved, a nation deeply impacted - in connection with the Azusa Street and other things at the time. Something was happening with regards revival and the presence of God that would ultimately turn the world upside down and create Pentecostalism as we know it today. But that man had five nervous breakdowns.

Part of my life's work, I think, is this: when we pray for revival, we're praying for something we don't understand that could crush us as well as bless us. How many "revivals" end in relational fallout, conflict, adultery? Remember what God says about his glory: when flesh touches glory, something gives. So there has to be an understanding that we're dealing with the deep things of God. We're not in Ezekiel's river in Ezekiel 47 - we're not talking about ankle-deep, knee-deep stuff - we're talking about un-traversable rivers in the depths of God. So when we glibly go, "Let's have revival," I say, "You're calling on the Holy Spirit, who is fire as well as water and oil. Number one: if God moves in your church, everything's going to come to the surface, so you want to repent of it quickly, get it sorted it." Revival is not just God moving, and everything's suddenly fine: "we've got miracles, we don't need to wear deodorant, everybody now loves each other." That's not revival.

Revival is all the stuff coming to the surface. Yes, it's miracles and presence; yes, it's remarkable that some people will just walk in a building - as we've had - fall to their knees and say, "What on earth is going on in here?" But it's also the fact that you can't lie about your tithes: you may just die. My life's journey is this: "God, I want to be close to you, so I need to be internally equipped to truly cope with that." So now we're talking about humility, steadfastness. This is where revival gets it wrong a lot of the time - or the revival culture we try to create. "God's arrived! Let's put on meetings every night." Number one - most churches that do that end up smaller at the end of it, because you just exhaust everyone. It's Peter's response up the mountain: "It's good to be here. Let's put up tabernacles." Jesus said, "No! Get down the mountain: there's a job to do." You can't live in the rarefied atmosphere at the top of a mountain. People live in valleys, not mountaintops. So revival is not nightly meetings - even though there may be short seasons where you've just got to pause for a minute and be in God's presence. The danger is to make a pursuit out of such a thing: "Come to us! We're the latest, greatest thing." It's idolatry, it's ego.

Every minister - myself included - wants to be successful: I don't know many people setting out to be a failure. So when God moves in a minister's life, he is doing something that makes your work look successful. There's the danger. Handling failure is easy; I'm an expert at handling failure. But success touches us deeply, so God's glory touches us deeply, because we're handling something that our hearts desire, yet pride won't sit in the same room as God's glory. I think sometimes, when God really does move, it affects us deeply in our psyche and in our emotions. So my pursuit is, "How do we create healthy, paced, humble revival?" What we want is lasting revival. We've had lots of two, three year revivals that usually end in fights over the CD sales.

Tony: Has all that Revive Church experienced resulted in an increased number of people becoming Christians?

Jarrod: In periods it has, in peaks and troughs. I wouldn't call what's happened with us revival: I would call it preparation. Our focus has been the presence of God among us, and the by-product of that can be signs and wonders. The other side of what God's done has been a real cleansing work; we've deeply changed as a church. Some big changes - holiness, coming together, like a coming of age as a church. I don't think the numbers are any higher than they were before. From 2011 to 2013, we were having waves of God moving, and that's where some of the headlines might come; people might think, "God's doing this, that and the other." But it was actually a big change for us, and we had to dig right into the foundations of who we are, what we are, our leaders. There's a holiness move that comes, because you can't just slap God on top of anything: when he comes, he comes to change it, conform it and mould it. "I'm not going to let you get away with that. I'm going to bring hidden agendas to the surface, and that won't look pretty."

We're growing nicely as a church but I wouldn't call it revival growth. A big part of it's been cleansing. Like a lot of churches, we'd hit a threshold where we needed to change in order to grow: we'd reached a peak of what our structure could cope with. That's another side we need to catch up. I've got a book coming out in the summer called When Spirit And Word Collide, and it's based on the prophetic word from Smith Wigglesworth in 1947. He lists several stages in the British church life which have come to pass. I'll jump to the last one - the future one - the emphasis of the Spirit and the emphasis of the Word would come together. That would mark the greatest revival the world has seen, eclipsing, in Wigglesworth's words, the Wesleyan, the Welsh revival - all this kind of stuff.

I've written about how people of the Spirit and people of the Word can come together, to operate together. What we often find is churches that emphasize the Spirit are often small; they don't have the organisational capability to grow. That might be a huge stereotype, a brushstroke of reality, but churches that really linger - not bothering about meeting times, just letting God move - often they are smaller in size. Then your biggest churches are often very organised; but they can also be very locked down. I would equate "Word" with good discipleship and quality presentation; I would equate "Spirit" with great atmosphere, prophecy, healing, miracles. I believe what Smith is talking about is a coming together of the two, so we can begin to have large, Spirit-filled, great atmosphere but well organised churches. I believe we're going to see large, dynamically Spirit-filled churches. That's what we're learning to model and understand here as Revive Church. How can we absolutely retain this sense of God's presence? We want people to walk into our rooms and shake under the sense of God's power, have a sense that God's in this place - prophetic word, for a deaf ear to open, people getting out of a wheelchair. We want to retain that, because that tells me God's walking through this place. But also we need to cope with the organisational developments.

Go through the Book of Acts, there came a point where the size of the church was really growing, so that means the complaining was growing too. You end up with this little discussion about delegation and structure, social care, who's going to feed these. The Apostles turned round and said, "We're not waiting on tables." These days we would've gone, "Pastor, that was a really good moment to show us that you're servant-hearted," but that would've been wrong. If we're going to retain this sense of God's presence as Apostles, we've got to pray, we've got to minister and delegate: they're the three jobs of someone trying to lead a large group of Christians.