Something Was Ignited in Colorado Springs, The service had been scheduled for 6:30, but as we often see in the tent, the sanctuary and overflow were packed full of ready people. So the call was made to start early.

By the end of the evening Mario Murillo had said three different times: “I believe a revival is starting tonight. I believe that the awakening you’ve been praying for in Colorado is going to start tonight.”

The night led off with Catherine Mullins and it was clear from the first song this was no warm up act. She opened by calling the room into surrender: “Before He moves, before we feel His presence, we’re going to give Jesus the praise and the adoration that He’s worthy of.”

The set moved from testimony (“He picked me up, He turned me around, He placed my feet on solid ground”) into an all-out declaration of freedom. No more shackles, no more chains, no more bondage. The room sang it until it stopped being a lyric and started being a verdict.

In the middle of worship, Catherine stopped and singled out a woman in a blue flowered shirt with a word from the Lord: “I’m meeting you right where you’re at tonight. Hold on, I see you. This dream is not over. It is just getting started.” Then she turned and sang it over the whole room.

Later she called out one of her own singers, Bailey, who was delivered from a spirit of suicide, and had her sing her testimony over the region: “The enemy thought he had me, but Jesus said, you are mine.” Catherine turned it outward. Cancer thought it had you. Disease said it had you. But Jesus said, you are His. The set closed with “Is He Worthy?” and the answer thundering back: He is.

When Mario took the platform, he didn’t pretend to be unmoved. “The presence that’s in here feels exactly like we’re in our tent right now. And that is bad news for the devil.”

Where the Tent Has Been, and Where It’s Going

Before the sermon, Mario gave the room a report from the front lines: San Bernardino and Stockton, the two hardest-hit cities in California, and the two greatest crusades the ministry has ever conducted. He recounted the mass baptisms that followed San Bernardino, when Pastor Marco Garcia of Way World Outreach called for the largest baptismal service in the history of the Inland Empire, and churches across the region baptized new converts from the tent. He recounted Stockton, where the tent stood for 52 days, where the crusade had to be extended because the city begged for it, and where a youth revival broke out in the murder capital of America. Gang members saved. The homeless saved. First-time salvations, night after night.

Then he laid out what’s next. God has told him to triple the size of the outreach: expanding the tent to 60,000 square feet, seating 7,000, and targeting at least 10 of the darkest cities in America. Not the safe zones. Seattle. Portland. Chicago. New York City. “I don’t have anything against the Bible Belt,” he said, “but when you’re in a war, you’re not going to win it by staying in the safe zones.”

How Much More

The sermon was three words: How Much More. Mario promised the room they would never read those words the same way again, and he kept the promise.

He started with a story. Years ago, before preaching at Towson State University near Baltimore, the devil attacked Mechelle’s body in their hotel room. Mario took it personally. He went out into a forest near the hotel and prayed until something broke, until his prayer life crossed a line it has never crossed back over. When he returned to the room, Mechelle’s hip had been instantaneously healed.

That night, walking in a vision he’d received in that forest, he called out a man in the crowd: a delivery driver who had been robbed, beaten within an inch of his life, and stabbed. Warren Rogers, sitting in the back in a full body brace, facing surgery to fuse his knees after more than two dozen operations, turned to his wife and said, “He is talking about me.” He unlatched the brace, stood, and walked on his own power. The healing became part of the medical record legend at Johns Hopkins. Warren carried a cassette recording of that night into his surgeon’s office, then his court-appointed psychiatrist’s office, then his Jewish attorney’s office. All three wept. All three got saved. And Warren walked back into a Maryland courtroom and returned the settlement money he had won, because he was no longer disabled.

Then Mario opened the text. Luke 18: “Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1 NKJV). The persistent widow and the unjust judge. And the punchline Jesus builds to: “And shall God not avenge His own elect who cry out day and night to Him, though He bears long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily” (Luke 18:7-8 NKJV).

“He is comparing someone who doesn’t care at all with someone who cares more than anyone else. If perseverance in the natural will work, how much more will perseverance work in prayer? We are making it illegal for you to quit praying.”

Then he resolved the apparent contradiction in the text, the God who bears long and answers speedily, with a line the room will be repeating for a while: “The unjust judge denied her because he didn’t care. God denies you because he cares.” If success would destroy you, God withholds it while He works on you. And then Mario acted out how the answer actually comes: “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Everything.”

When You Get Jesus, You Get It All

From there he went to Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” (NKJV)

He told the story of a wealthy widower in the 1950s who lost his only son in the Korean War, and of the painting of that son, sent by a North Korean citizen who had known him, that became the man’s only treasure. At the estate auction after his death, nobody bid on the painting except the gardener, who had watched the boy grow up. The moment the gavel fell, the auction ended. The will stipulated that whoever took the son got everything.

“When you get Jesus, you get it all. If Jesus was given up for me, how much more will God pay my bills? How much more will God save my family? How much more will God heal my body?”

More of What Got Us in Trouble

The last movement of the sermon was Peter. The healing of the man at the Gate Beautiful caused as many salvations as the day of Pentecost, and it got Peter arrested and threatened with death if he prayed for the sick again. His first act after the threat: gathering the church to pray for more healings.

“I want God to give me more of what got me in trouble in the first place,” Mario said. “You are out of your mind if you’re trying to find safety in Christianity. God didn’t say he would give you a safe zone. He said he would protect you in the battle.”

Then he turned it on Colorado. “If the state of Colorado doesn’t want soul winning, how much more should we do soul winning? If the state of Colorado does not want us to oppose abortion, how much more should we oppose abortion?”

The Shift

Anyone who has been in the tent knows what happens when the sermon ends. The atmosphere shifts. It shifted at Radiant.

Before he had even finished closing the message, Mario stopped and announced that someone with a heart condition was already being healed. Then he went to the fourth row, to a man in a red shirt and the woman beside him. He told the audience plainly that he had never met either of them. Then he told the woman the source of her illness: a broken heart that had shattered her immune system and brought down the hedge of her physical health. He named the conditions in order: her jaw, where the grinding and the pain started, then her neck, her back, her hip, her knees, her feet. Deterioration so severe that she dreaded trying to sleep at night. He named the medications that had stopped working because her pain had exceeded their reach. Then he sent her on what he called a victory march, and she walked the front of that church faster and freer with every lap. He wasn’t done. He called out the blockage and abnormal heartbeat first discovered in her chest three years ago, and the damage COVID had left in her lungs. All of it, gone.

Then she returned the favor. At Mario’s direction, she laid hands on the man beside her, and Mario called out his hearing, the ringing in his ears, his memory, his balance, his knees, his stomach, and the fear that had been living in his spirit. “You’re going to be as bold as a lion.”

What followed was something Mario said he had never experienced in his entire ministry. Words of knowledge began coming in mass, in layers. Everyone battling arthritis stood. Then out of those standing, he called out the ones also battling diabetes, section by section, by exact count. Then a third condition: neuropathy in the feet. Then a fourth: heart disease, arrhythmia and blockage. Then a fifth: ulcers and acid reflux. Layer after layer, verified in real time by raised hands across the building. “We are watching a mass miracle right now.”

A woman with 10 separate conditions, from diabetes to improperly healed fractures, was sent walking the aisle, then walking faster, while Mario declared the day she had prophesied over herself had arrived. Migraines were called out and healed in one section, including a man whose lingering damage from a collision was removed. A mother laid hands on her child as Mario called out a neurological healing that went far deeper than the headaches. And from the crowd, a testimony rang out mid-service: scoliosis, healed just like that, like lightning.

Mario refused to let the moment stay in the room. He called for prayer meetings to be formed because of it, for regular healing services to come out of it, and declared that the reports would keep coming in for days.

He also drew a line. “There is an anti-gifts-of-the-Spirit movement in Colorado, and God is going to kill it. If you teach that the gifts of the Spirit stopped, you’re no better than a crooked televangelist, because you’re preaching a doctrine of devils.”

Living Proof, and the Next Movie

Then came a face the tent family knows well. Bree, one of the five greatest healings Mario says he has ever witnessed and the subject of the award-winning film I Am Living Proof, was in the room. Four years after her healing, she stood on the platform and gave the update: she knows the Lord now, her entire family is turning to Him, brothers, sisters-in-law, nephews, a new niece. The film, now on Amazon Prime, was named most inspirational film of the year by the company that produced it.

And then the announcement: Mario Murillo Ministries is making a second movie. It’s called If You Knew the Gift, from the words of Jesus to the woman at the well. The cast will be almost entirely Gen Z, and it will do two things: expose the doctrine of cessationism, and present the need for the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. Mario didn’t mince his assessment of cessationism: “It’s too thin to stand on and too thick to swim through,” a theology hanging on the abuse of a single verse while ignoring that there is no scripture anywhere declaring the gifts have ceased. The baptism of the Holy Spirit, he reminded the room, was the engine that drove the Jesus movement, and the ministry is bringing a major re-emphasis on it into every tent crusade. Everyone who gets saved should walk out praying in the Spirit.

The Altar

Mario quoted Aimee Semple McPherson: any preacher that ends a service without an appeal for souls is a failure. He was not going to be one.

He spoke directly to the lonely, the anxious, the emotionally wrecked. “When Jesus steps into your life and assumes control of your problems, suddenly those toxic, destructive emotions are wiped out.” Then he asked for hands, and hands went up in every part of the building. He called them forward, and they came: down the aisles, across the front, and streaming in from the overflow room, which is why some of them took a while to arrive. They had sat through a much longer than normal service, and at the end of it they wanted Jesus more than anything.

“These are going to be some scary Christians,” Mario said. Then he refused the credit. “Don’t give Mario Murillo any credit. These people were attracted by Jesus. This church was packed because of Jesus. Not me.”

He led them in the sinner’s prayer, then handed them to Pastor Hudnall and the Radiant team, who had gifts and next steps ready, though even they admitted more people came forward than they had planned for. Higher expectations, the pastor said. That’s the right lesson.

This One Is Going to Last

Mario told the room early in the night that he wouldn’t be here for the awakening that starts in Colorado, and that it doesn’t matter. “You don’t need me. You need Jesus. And he’s the one that’s starting this tonight.”

Radiant Church is collecting the healing testimonies and if Sunday night is any indication, that inbox is going to be busy. Prayer meetings are forming. Healing services are coming. The words of knowledge are still being verified in doctors’ offices across Colorado Springs.

Something was ignited in Colorado on Sunday night. And it’s going to last.