Revival Centre PNG Marks 40 Years With 374 Baptisms

More than 10,800 people packed into Wewak for four days of celebration as the Revival Centre of Papua New Guinea marked 40 years of ministry in East Sepik Province. The anniversary ended on Sunday, 1 November 2026, with 374 new members baptised and welcomed into the church, a number the organisers called another milestone in its growth.

The celebration ran from Thursday, 29 October, to Sunday, 1 November, bringing together thousands of church members, pastors, leaders and invited guests. According to the anniversary programme organising committee, a total of 10,891 people attended, including more than 200 pastors and church leaders from across the province and beyond.

374 new believers in one weekend

The baptisim services were the heart of the weekend. Over the four days, 374 people were baptised and officially joined the Revival Centre of Papua New Guinea. For a church that began with nine converts, the number tells its own story: four decades on, the movement is still growing, and it is still growing through baptism.

The programme began on Thursday with a float procession through Wewak town, ending at King Charles Oval at Kaltex, where the church's founder and principal pastor, Godfrey Wippon, officially opened the four-day event. The days that followed mixed preaching, singing, testimonies and prayer, closing on Sunday with the cutting of an anniversary cake to mark 40 years since the church was established in the province on 1 November 1986.

The Momase regional pastor acknowledged the pioneers of the Revival Centre's Wewak Assembly and everyone who helped make the celebration a success. The pioneers were the men and women who carried the message into villages where there was no church at all, and who stayed when the work was hard and lonely.

From nine converts to a movement across 22 provinces

The East Sepik story began on 1 November 1986, but the movement itself is older. Godfrey Wippon founded the Revival Centres of Papua New Guinea on 1 September 1982, in his home village of Karaite in West Sepik, after returning from thirteen years away. The fellowship began with nine people being baptised, eight men and one woman, in a village that was then strongly Catholic territory.

Wippon had been a broadcaster before he was a pastor. He began his career behind a microphone at Radio East Sepik in Wewak in 1969, and later worked as a correspondent for the National Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Australia. After a serious illness with lobar pneumonia, he encountered the Christian message of being born again of water and the Holy Spirit through full immersion, was baptised, recieved the Holy Spirit, and says he was healed by God.

The church he built is founded on Acts 2:38: repentance, water baptism by full immersion, and receiving the Holy Spirit. From those nine converts in Karaite, it spread from village to village, reaching Wewak in 1986 and then Lae, Mount Hagen, Vanimo and the Highlands. Today the church says it is present in all 22 provinces of Papua New Guinea, with 900 assemblies, and its members report an average of about 220 people being converted every week.

The movement keeps finding new ways to carry the message. On 1 September this year, it launched an online radio station, The Voice of Revival, to mark 44 years of gospel ministry in the country. Weeks later, from 23 to 25 September, it held its 25th National Rally at Momei Oval in Mendi, in the Southern Highlands, with baptisms and healing prayers through the gathering.

"Keep the Gospel moving"

Pastor Wippon's message to the anniversary crowd was short and direct. "Keep the Gospel moving, keep going, continue on with the work the Lord has placed in your heart and in your mind," he told members and leaders, urging them to stay committed to their Christian calling and to keep spreading the Gospel.

It is the same message he has preached for 44 years, and the crowd in Wewak heard it from a man who has lived it. He walked away from a broadcasting career to preach in remote villages. He watched a fellowship of nine become a movement of thousands. And on Sunday, he cut a cake with the people who came after him, including the 374 who had just been baptised.

The celebration in Wewak belongs to a wider season of Christian gathering around the world. In Seoul, 26,000 people joined a prayer rally for a major missions anniversary, as 26,000 join Seoul prayer rally for CGI 50th, and in Leicester, a whole diocese marked 100 years of faith, as Leicester Diocese marks 100 years of faith this week. Papua New Guinea's story is the same pattern in a different place: ordinary believers, gathering in large numbers, and a church that keeps growing.

The 40th anniversary is over, but the question it leaves behind is about the next 40 years. The nine converts of Karaite are now thousands of assemblies across 22 provinces. The 374 baptised in Wewak are the newest members of that story. What happens next depends on whether they, like the pioneers before them, keep the Gospel moving.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.