Making Champions

In sports, there are winners and losers—but in life, we can all be champions.
At The Bend Church, we’re equipping men and women, boys and girls, to overcome every challenge and every adversary. When we align ourselves with God’s purposes, we become unstoppable.

Our battle cry comes from the prayer of a young man named Evan Roberts. In the early 1900s, his home in Wales was a dark and broken place. Immorality, violence, and deceit were everywhere. Evan, then a coal miner in his early 20s, realized that nothing was going to change unless someone changed first. So he started with the only thing he could control: himself.

For more than a decade, he prayed a simple but dangerous prayer: “Lord, bend me.”

And God did. He bent Evan’s heart to match His own—and then bent the nation. The Welsh Revival that followed shook an entire culture. Bars and brothels emptied. Prayer gatherings overflowed. God’s healing power was so evident that hospitals began to sit empty. Even the coal mines changed—because the miners, once hardened and foul-mouthed, had become so kind and clean-spirited that the pit ponies no longer understood their commands.

That move of God sparked a fire that helped ignite the first Great Awakening around the world.

So we still pray:
“Lord, bend me. Bend the Church. And bend the Nations.”

Ephesians 5:27 gives us the end goal—“a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle... holy and without fault.”

Revelation 12:11 tells us how we’ll get there: “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.”

Followers of Jesus are already on the winning team.
And at The Bend, we’re learning, training, and growing together—so every one of us becomes that kind of champion.