Nov. 11-13, the dates of the Festival de Esperanza con Franklin Graham (Festival of Hope with Franklin Graham), were historic days in Temuco, Chile. A local newspaper reported, “[The Festival] in Temuco will be a blessing difficult to quantify in the short or midterm, but it is clear it made history and marked the lives of all Temuquenses.”

Temuco, with a population of about 300,000 people, is the capital and largest city of the rural Araucunia region, a beautiful tourist area but also the poorest region in Chile. Normally, big events take place more than 400 miles away in Santiago, the nation’s capital. But crowds totaling nearly 106,000 people–more than one-third of Temuco’s population–came to hear the Gospel proclaimed at the Festival.

The opening day was cold, wet and miserable. The Festival was to begin at 7 p.m., but intermittent rain threatened to ruin the opening service. It was hardly the sort of weather that draws people to an outdoor event. The soccer field at the Festival venue, Germán Becker Stadium, was sodden and the chalk lines were running off into the mud. Was it possible that more than just a few people would sit in the stadium meant to seat 20,000?

By 6 p.m. the stadium was nearly full; by 7 p.m., it was hard to find a seat on the bright turquoise benches circling the field. A steady rain fell through most of the service, but few people left. Instead they listened as Franklin told how Zacchaeus struggled to reach Jesus.

“There was … a big crowd, and Zacchaeus was a little man,” Franklin said. “Maybe you feel like you’re little in the eyes of God. Maybe you feel that you’re not important to God. I’m here to tell you that God loves you. And God wants you to come to Him tonight.”

Franklin encouraged people to come forward to receive Christ in spite of the rain. “If you want to be forgiven, if you want to be set free, you come right now,” he said. “I know it’s raining. You might say, ‘Franklin, I’ll get wet.’ … But look at what will happen. You’ll be washed in the blood of the Lamb. You’ll be forgiven and set free!”

Thousands of people filtered out of the stands and onto the field. Some counselors held umbrellas aloft as they led inquirers through the counseling materials. Others wore ponchos or simply got wet while they explained the plan of salvation. And as the rain soaked the field, more than 1,400 people came to the Living Water to have their sins washed away.

The attendance and the response to the invitation increased with each service, until 34,000 people crowded into the bleachers, the walkways, the stairs and the field on Saturday evening. People arrived hours before the service, and they cheered, sang and even started a wave around the stadium as they waited for the Festival to begin. And when Franklin called on them to receive Christ, more than 3,000 people found their way through the crowd to the field. In just three days, 11,448 people made decisions for Christ.

The response didn’t surprise Christians in Temuco. They expected to see God do great things, because they had been praying for the city. Some 500 churches in the Temuco area were involved in the event. In Temuco alone about 95 percent of all evangelical churches were involved with the Festival. These churches understood that prayer was the key to seeing God move in Temuco–even before the Festival.

Prayer played a role in the planning for every committee involved with the Festival. According to Elias Zapata, executive chair of the Festival of Hope, the prayer committee was the first committee formed after the Festival’s executive committee members were chosen–and it will be the last to finish its work.

“Prayer is the key to every evangelistic project,” Zapata said. “[The Festival] has given Christians in Temuco a renewed and strengthened spiritual life.”

Mario Lincoleo, prayer committee co-chair, remembered the mission that the executive committee gave the prayer committee: To enlist 1,000 people to pray. It felt like an impossible task after the first meeting when only three people showed up–Lincoleo, another pastor and a church leader. But they began calling churches, and their numbers grew slowly but steadily until several hundred people were meeting weekly in one of Temuco’s largest churches. By November 800 people were signed up for monthly prayer meetings after the Festival, and the numbers continue to grow.

“The power of prayer was so great that people started bringing requests from their churches,” Lincoleo said. “The intercessors are seeing a new dimension. Their eyes are opened to the power of prayer.”

Leading up to the Festival, the main prayer emphasis was that people would come to know Jesus Christ, join churches and spark a revival that would span many years.

Intercessors wanted to see Christians leave the four walls of the church and go into the streets with the Gospel. As the Festival drew closer, Christians watched as God answered this prayer.

Maria Teresa Rivera, chair of the Love-In-Action committee, is a veteran social worker. She knows that the needs of Temuco are great. But she knows that God is greater than those needs.

“This is the region where you can find most of the poor people in Chile,” Rivera said. “I think that’s why God has chosen Temuco for this [Festival]. All that the world has done hasn’t helped. On the contrary, we are even poorer.”

The main goal of the Love-In-Action committee was to motivate churches to be concerned for people in need. The committee conducted a survey of the social work being done by all churches and social-work agencies in the area, so that after the Festival they could form a network of churches to work with other organizations to help the needy in Temuco and the surrounding region.

But the committee wanted to do something tangible, something that would open opportunities to meet both physical and spiritual needs before the Festival. Rivera knew that while human tools were limited, God could make a difference–something she learned when she first accepted Christ. “He’s the only One who can change a heart, a life, the poor and violence,” she said.

“The objectives we’d talked about were long-term, but we needed to do something now,” Rivera said. “There were many opinions on what to do, but we had to stop at some point to pray that the Lord would give us direction. Facing so much need, the Lord had to do something–only He could tell us when and where. He took us to a very poor rural school three kilometers outside Temuco.”

The Catrimalal school’s students are from the poorest outskirts of Temuco and have severe behavioral problems. Their families struggle against poverty and violence.

A teacher met the Love-In-Action volunteers at the school on their first visit in September. She said that she knew that God had sent them. The school’s director had given up. He wanted to resign and sell the school. The teachers were ready to quit. The school building itself needed a lot of work. But the teacher felt that the school’s greatest need was spiritual–only God could help the children.

The volunteers used materials supplied by churches in Temuco to repair the school’s facilities. But more important, they organized prayer groups within the Love-In-Action committee and visited the school to work with the children. They held an assembly where the children sang Christian songs and heard a presentation of the Gospel. Everyone, both teachers and students, participated. The school asked the volunteers to teach a religion class at the school. The Festival sent buses to bring all of the children to Festiniños, the Festival’s Saturday morning children’s service, and many of the students made commitments to Christ at the event.

“The Lord is doing great things in the students’ and teachers’ lives,” Rivera noted. “We understand that the job has just started, but the important part is that God has led us all along. He told us how to do it.”

Committee after committee had similar stories of answered prayers.

Marco Paillamilla, Operation Andrew committee chair, said that the Christians of Temuco have a new spiritual sensitivity after praying for the lost. The committee collected the names of 70,000 unsaved friends, family members, neighbors and co-workers. For months 11,000 Christians prayed for the lists and hundreds of people made commitments in the months leading up to the Festival.

Marco Nissi, an engineering student, put his mother and two of his classmates, Pablo and Ruiz, on his Operation Andrew list. Within weeks, all three had accepted Christ. Nissi led Pablo and Ruiz in a prayer to accept Christ in the middle of a park at their college, Universidad de la Fronterra. Pablo and Ruiz then began to pray for others and have led other classmates to Christ.

It’s been a blessing to be involved, Paillamilla said. “[Operation Andrew] has opened the eyes of many who have never experienced the joy of leading someone to Christ,” he said. “They have been encouraged through prayer.”

The women’s committee saw similar results. In June the women of the Festival, lead by women’s committee Chair Maria Cristina Osorio, split Temuco into seven sections. They worked with the churches in each section to assign Christian women to blocks for door-to-door visitation. Each woman visited the homes on her own block, then visited homes in the surrounding blocks. They visited each home four times, bringing invitations to the Festival.

At first the task seemed overwhelming, but they began praying and felt assured that God was with them. By November they had visited almost 6,000 blocks, with approximately 30 houses on each block. The women put signs on their homes that read, “We’re praying for the city and for you.” When people asked about the signs, the women used the opportunity to lead several people to Christ.

The work is just beginning, Osorio said, because the women will visit each home again after the Festival to follow up. And what will they do if a neighbor has accepted Christ?

“We’ll rejoice with them first!” Osorio said. “Then we’ll pray with them and make sure they get to church.”

The youth also went out of their way to tell Temuco about Christ. Calling themselves “Agents of Change,” more than 300 youth worked together to get the word out about the Festival. Beginning in May, between school and work commitments, they went to shopping malls, parks and public plazas to hand out fliers and to talk to people about salvation. More than 150 people accepted Christ.

Temuquenses continued to turn to Christ after the Festival began. A policeman guarding the stadium during the services had never considered accepting Christ. But on the Festival’s opening night, the message of salvation pierced his heart. He came forward to receive Jesus Christ.

A Christian’s co-worker didn’t want to surrender her life to Jesus Christ because she thought it would be too hard. She was afraid that she would let God down. But as the two women entered the stadium on Friday evening, the co-worker said, “I feel something so strong inside.” When Franklin extended the invitation to receive Christ, she committed her life to Him.

As thousands made their way into the stadium for the final service on Saturday evening, it was clear that God was working in an historic way through the prayer and hard work of the Church in Temuco.

“Tonight could be the most important night of your life,” Franklin told the crowd. “It’s not about religion. It’s not about anything you’ve done. It’s about a new beginning, and you can have that here tonight.”

Some 3,000 people crowded around the stage and started over by making a commitment to Jesus Christ.

“I feel a profound joy to see the way that God works,” Zapata said as he stood on the platform watching thousands come forward. “I also feel a great concern because we need to teach and disciple these new believers. I hope that years from now we’ll see churches that had to expand because their walls could not hold all the people.”