Tony Cummings went to Kingston Upon Hull to talk to worship songwriter, pastor, author and broadcaster JARROD COOPER

Tony: Talking about Revive Church, it's a multi-site entity, isn't it. How does that work?

Jarrod: On a Sunday we meet in five different venues across the region, but we're all one church. Three of the services are 10.30 in the morning, and two are five in the afternoon. It's different teams: there's a whole team of preachers, of hosts, of campus leaders that are dedicated to particular areas. Various preachers move around. Our building here, which is where we started, can hold about 250 people. We use the building now mainly as an admin office and to house our school, New Life Christian Academy. We also use the building here for the Portuguese language church. We're actually moving the biggest campus up to the north of the city of Hull, and we are at the planning stages of a project to build a new church auditorium. When it's all done, it should be a thousand-seater. What we do at the moment is we hire the biggest cinema screen in Hull and meet in that; that's a 500-seater. We charge in there, set it all up then after the service we literally have to strip the room down in 25 minutes and get out, because the next movie's on half an hour after we've walked out.

Tony: I have to admit I'm rather sceptical of some mega-churches. It seems that particularly in America some have gone a bit off-kilter.

Jarrod: American culture is very different. I've got friends - very gifted, capable people - that have gone to the States and failed at church-planting. For an example, you can go into the Bible Belt of the US but as soon as you mention the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the place empties. It'll be unwise to tarnish everyone with the same brush, but there is no doubt that America's church culture is very different to ours. In the US 40 per cent of people go to church. In a city like Hull it would be nearer two or three per cent. Hull, in fact, has one of the lowest church attendances in the country; we compete with Telford over that. People say that Ephesus was a 50,000-member church. But I'm not sure what size in itself indicates. I've been in many small churches that stink a lot worse than any mega-church I've ever been in. The heart is always the heart of any issue.

Tony: It's easy to find criticism on the internet of megachurches teaching prosperity theology. Where do you stand on that?

Jarrod: We're involved in television a little bit at Revive Church. All we do is broadcast our preaching to make the most of a pulpit. Everything I preach ends up a podcast, a TV programme, a radio programme - just to get the message out there and bless people. But without a doubt, I take issue with blanket prophecies about finances and things like that. There always has been and always will be people who grasp a certain truth and push it too far - whether that's grace or prosperity or the severity of holiness. We can all fall prey to that. Prophetic teachers will probably lean the worst. Go right back to William Branham, who was an amazing miracle worker, but he fell out with team, stopped walking with the teachers around him. Leave a prophet alone with the Bible, and you come out with all kinds of things after a while - which is why we're meant to be in team.

The prophet will think of something, and the teacher will go, "What about this ancient boundary stone here that can't be moved?" Then the pastor goes, "And is that loving? Is that truly caring?" And the evangelist goes, "You're all getting wrapped in yourselves. What about the lost?" The apostle goes, "Let's all work together and get the job done." We're meant to be in team, and when we fall out of team we fall into error before we've said a wrong thing. Falling out of team is an error in and of itself, even if you're preaching the right thing; eventually you're going to get an error of theology if your behaviour's not right.

You can take that kind of reality through a megachurch, through a small church: we're all in the same boat. There's smaller churches that have a particular niche role in the community, a purpose; you've got some big ones that are fantastic. The biggest crowds in the world are not Christian; so gathering a crowd is not an endorsement of your message. Signs and wonders are not an endorsement: Jesus himself said, "People will cast our demons and do miracles, and say, 'Lord, Lord,' and I'll say, 'Away from me - I never knew you.'" It's much deeper than what we see on TV. I'm chilled out, I'm not a critic of other churches: that's not what I'm on God's earth for. In general, unless it really affects the people God has given me to care for, I keep out of it.

Tony: Has your understanding of the word revival changed over the years?

Jarrod: To take it literally it's "coming back alive", so to me it's a church coming back to fullness. That can happen through amazing divine encounters where God seems to fall out of the sky. In the Welsh Revival just over a hundred years ago, one of the headlines in the Times was, "Something From Another World Is At Work In Wales". As reporters' feet hit Welsh soil they'd fall to their knees, overcome. That wasn't a preaching revival, it was a singing and a prayer and a presence revival - it was all in Welsh as well. So you have these encounter-type revivals, then there's a coming to fullness. I think we've had revivals of faith. There's been surges where the concept of faith being important has returned to the table, and we grasp faith now compared to a hundred years ago in a very different way.

The concept of healing through the '50s, '60s, '70s - there was a surge of healing. I think the only one left from that move would be Oral Roberts. You get revival in different kinds of teaching and thought - a revival of worship in the last four decades. For me, I've seen prophetically a sense that there will be revivals of the moving of God's Spirit, the miraculous, the amount of people getting saved in our nation. In 1996 I had a sense of city centres being filled with crowds of people touched by the Spirit of God and the miraculous. God said to me over and over again the phrase, "The greatest auditoriums in the land will be filled." In 2011, I remember picking up some of our young people from a conference and they were so overwhelmed by the Spirit of God. I said, "What's happened in the conference?" It was nothing to do with the conference. "They threw us out of the meeting because we were so overwhelmed with the Spirit." I had to take one of them home. I'd peeled him off the floor, dumped him in my car and took him home thinking, "What's this?"

We were just beginning a period of prayer and fasting in the church and there was a conference a couple of weeks later. We called it - I think it was Hosea - He Will Come Like The Rain. God came like the rain; it was just incredible. God swept through. We were in a big Methodist hall in the town. For several weeks the churches couldn't stop praying; people begged me to open up the church building. They'd come in, lay their kids along the sides of the walls and they'd just pray. I heard staff members and leaders saying, "I feel like I've been born again again!" That was a thick sense of God's presence engulfing us. We would have a staff meeting next door in the offices; it started with a couple of us praying, and as each staff member arrived - slowly, about 10 different people - as they walked into the room they fell on the floor. We were useless for about three weeks: we didn't get a thing done. It's like the church fell in love with God again. Then about six months later we booked our own city hall and held a big series of meetings. I remember the security guard saying, "It's never this full. How have you filled it three days in a row?" We saw remarkable miracles - people getting out of wheelchairs.

Over that period from 2011 to 2013, at its most intense, we were seeing 20-30 deaf ears open every fortnight. This wasn't happening through the pastors at the front or visiting preachers: we're talking about 15 year olds, 16 year olds, people with council jobs, teachers. It was incredibly intense - talk about the great auditoriums in the land. For me, a local church pastor, to see my own city hall - only a 12-1400-seat hall - filled, not just with prayer or great music, it was this incredible sense of God's presence. I remember the day, outside the city hall, I said to our youth pastor, "Take a band, go out on the bandstand outside; sing some songs, tell the Gospel and see what happens." I was walking past the city centre at the lunchtime while they did it. There were about 700 or 800 people gathered in the city centre; half of them were conference delegates, so they were just on fire for God anyway - of course, a crowd draws a crowd. It was growing. Our youth pastor - and our young 15/16 year olds - he'd sing a song, then he'd stop and start bringing these words of knowledge, things he felt God had said. "There's somebody here who's deaf," "There's some people here with a pain in their left knee" or "a kidney problem," "a blood problem"; "while we sing this next song, come forward and we'll pray for you."

Our 15 year olds had these high-vis jackets and were pulling hearing aids out of people's ears; ears were opening up in the city centre, people were leaving their zimmer frames behind. Dozens and dozens of healings. I'm stood in the back going, "This is a move of God when 15 year olds start doing these things!" It's not booking the evangelist that does it all the time. I've got some great friends - you book them, you get miracles. But we're talking about a youth group performing signs and wonders in the middle of the city centre in Hull; and we've seen that many times.