Bishop Michael Pitts has a feeling about California: It’s where movements are formed, where influence originates.

It’s where he hopes to contribute to an awakening of Christianity.

Bishop Pitts, 50, who is the pastor of Cornerstone Church in Maumee, has had a longtime presence in California, mostly at the Jubileee Christian Center in San Jose, where Pastor Dick Bernal, 71, is the senior minister. “Michael first came and preached at Jubilee’s Thunder in the Bay conference in 1998,” Pastor Bernal said in an email.

Now Bishop Pitts will be at Jubilee “once a month for a weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and lend my push to try to bring revival into the Bay Area,” he said. He’ll usually leave after Cornerstone’s Thursday evening service.

Pastor Bernal invited him to help usher in religious awakening. “People are looking for fulfillment, for connection, for meaning and their role or purpose in the world at large,” Pastor Bernal said. “And that can make them very open to the gospel message, which is what a number of us pastors, especially in the South Bay area, are sensing — there is a stirring or revival of sorts happening.”

“What’s exciting to me is the potential,” Bishop Pitts said, “in part because it would be somewhat different than what most churches are doing, and because that area is also somewhat unchurched,” so he can cultivate a congregation that will be new to religion. “You don’t have maybe the aciduous religious thing that you have to deal with from people who have been acculturized in fundamentalism or something, you don’t have all that, so it’s almost like a clean slate in that respect.”

For those already religious, he said, “What I started feeling just under the surface in [California] churches is that there are people that are very passionate about their faith and that they’re ready to do something, and I think maybe a little wearied with some of the dumbing down of the spirituality [in many churches] to the point of capitulating to the culture. And I think that they want someone that is clear, someone to speak to them to make an argument so that they’re not placated or pandered to.”

Pastor Bernal recently had a dream, Bishop Pitts said, “that he was standing outside of his church and the church was filled, and people were trying to get in. ‘And the funny thing was,’ [Pastor Bernal] said, ‘I’m looking at it and there’s this revival, but I wasn’t leading it.’

“He started talking to me about [it],” Bishop Pitts said. “I said, ‘Well, let me do this. Let me get my church praying about it,’ which I started on New Year’s Eve. And when I was just out there [at Jubilee] on Super Bowl Sunday, I said, ‘Let me say something to the [Jubilee] church about it’ because, to me, there’s a witness, there’s an amen, there’s something. And so when I said something to the church out there, they just went huge.”

Pastor Bernal and Bishop Pitts both envision this as a California religious revival time. “In the new year,” Bishop Pitts said, “I was hearing in my own heart this word, cycles. My impresson is that we are revisiting the cycles of the ’60s.”

He spoke about current cultural similarities to 1960s events. “It looks a little different” this time; for example, with drug use: today there are “suits and pharmaceuticals — but it’s still a drug culture.

“It’s also a time of real spiritual searching,” Bishop Pitts said. “I started thinking about how the Jesus movement came out of that same area and that same time frame [in the ‘60s]. It's time for revival, a new movement of Jesus people."

The bishop said that Pastor Bernal "has in his lifetime experienced two waves of revival in that territory. He was feeling like they're ready for the third wave."

Bishop Pitts hopes to ride that wave.

"Sometimes I call this the head, heart, and hand message — that I'm always trying to get feeling people to think something; I'm always trying to get thinking people to feel something; and everybody to do something. I think that you have some people that are really good at preaching a message that hits the heart, but it kind of leaves the head disengaged.

"Maybe my niche might be that if you come to hear me, I think you're going to learn something; I think you're going to think something; but you're going to feel something. 

“I know the difference between how to use my mind but not to become a victim to it, because there are some things that faith takes me where my mind can't go, so I think most of my life has been characterized by bringing people together."

The togetherness of Jubilee and Cornerstone is not being approached as a type of merger. Bishop Pitts said there are 110 Cornerstone churches in Mexico, as well as Cornerstones in South Africa. For Jubilee, Bishop Pitts said, "When I talked to Pastor [Bernal] about this I said, ‘I just want you to know, from my end, I want to do this with no strings attached.'"

Pastor Bernal indicated by email that he anticipates some synergy from the organizational separation. "Any time good people work together, organizations/​people come closer; each does what they do in their particular region and work together to fulfill a common goal."

Contact TK Barger at: tkbarger@theblade.com, 419-724-6278 or on Twitter @TK_Barger.

First Published February 14, 2015, 5:00 a.m.