The present Christian generation knows little or nothing about a story, a story that is as fresh and beautiful today as when it first happened. And equally sad, if not sadder, it knows little about the man who was ordained by Providence to be at the center of that story.

It is the story of the Great July 1930 Oke–Ooye Revival, Ilesha, the beginning of modern-day Pentecostalism in Nigeria – and of Joseph Ayo Babalola, the human agent of that Revival. It is the story of how a young man of barely 24, without guns or bayonets but armed with faith in God who commissioned him, shook an entire nation including the Colonial authority of that time.

It is about a young man who stunned and roused a people from the stupor of idol worship, fetish practices and superstition into the amazing realities and possibilities of divine power. Although most of today’s Christians may have heard little or nothing about that name, yet Joseph Ayo Babalola was a house hold name throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria in the decades preceding Independence and even shortly after it.

Joseph Ayo Babalola was born on April 26th 1904 at Odo-Owa in Kwara State to God-honouring parents, the first and only son of his mother, Madam Martha Talabi. The father, Pa David Rotimi was a devout and God–fearing man who brought Christianity to the town and sixteen other surrounding villages.

According to the mother, something unusual happened the day this remarkable man of God was born: a sound was heard from above like a mighty thunder from the East to the West and the stars in their constellation shook. The signs of God’s call were already on him from childhood and the parents observed these.

He was unusual. .