Review
Igniting a Spiritual Revolution: The Field Manual

Eric Watt
Chesapeake, Virginia: Eric Watt, 2001

Reviewed by Michael Jaffarian
Coordinator of Research for CBInternational, Richmond, Virginia

Published in Global Missiology, Review & Preview, January 2005, www.globalmissiology.net

Watt heads the Network for Strategic Missions, and the mission agency Reaching Unreached Nations (RUN). He has been teaching the content of this book among some powerful indigenous church-planting movements in Asia. This is a small book with a big vision. It is a manifesto, a fresh call to spiritual commitment and world missions, with an outline of practical steps to follow, seeking to incite a decentralized and unfettered global movement of millions. In a commitment form on the final page, readers are invited to live the Five Truths, walk out the Six Orders, and follow the Seven Principles of the book, and thus join this movement.

This is inspiring stuff, with a direct appeal to the Christian youth of the world, along these lines: it is now your time, to write your own chapter in the long story of spiritual revolution and world evangelization. Eric knows Frontier Missions well, speaks often of suffering, and gives much attention to the need for supernatural encounter with the Living God. He calls for deep devotion, deep fellowship, attention to key evangelistic contacts (“men of peace”), network/family evangelism, and multiplication of house churches, with on-site leadership development, in church planting movements. As it stands, this book is good – but could be even more powerful if the thinking and terms were more clear, if it made more and better use of the Bible, and if it were a bit better written.