The Fields Are White

For Pastor Jacky Connell, 2026 Is Not a Anniversary. It's an Invitation.

Jacky Connell has been the pastor of Eden Westside Baptist Church in Pell City, Alabama, for thirty-nine years this July. Before that, six years at another church. He has buried people and baptized their grandchildren. He has prayed over the same families through seasons they did not think they would survive. He has stood at enough bedsides and enough altars to know exactly what matters and exactly what doesn't.

So when he talks about the moment the church is in right now, you listen differently than you might listen to someone who came to these conclusions more recently.

“I believe that 2026 is the year of decision," he says. “I believe that people in Alabama and the nation are going to either choose Christ or chaos. And I believe that we've got to make that clear."

He says it the way a man says something he has already settled in his own heart. Not to alarm you. Just to tell you the truth.

What God Said in 2023

The story of Celebration 250 Alabama begins a few years back, in a quieter season that set everything else in motion.

Around 2023, Connell felt a specific pull toward prayer — not as a topic to preach about, but as a discipline to actually build. He sensed God calling him to stir intercession in a serious way, and not just within his own congregation. Across the state. He obeyed, and he says the fruit of that season was real and significant.

Out of it came relationships. Out of those relationships came a conversation with leaders from the Alabama Baptist State Convention about evangelism — what it would take, what it would look like, whether anyone was willing to actually organize around it. They asked Connell if he would help lead something.

He asked for a few weeks to pray about it.

Two weeks of fasting later, he sat in Dallas, Texas, with six or seven other men, and together they confirmed what each of them had already been sensing: it was time. They spent the fall of last year meeting, praying, and distributing assignments. Now they are in the final stages of putting it all together.

Celebration 250 Alabama is the result. The name borrows from the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, which falls in 2026. But Connell is transparent about the fact that the anniversary is more of a backdrop than a reason. “There is a greater celebration than the birthday of the nation," he says. “The greater celebration is a reaping of the harvest of the souls of men."

The Picture He Keeps Coming Back To

Connell is a man who thinks in images, and one in particular keeps surfacing when he talks about this work.

Jesus is walking with His disciples. The disciples are looking down, talking among themselves, caught up in whatever is right in front of them. And Jesus reaches over, finds one of them, lifts his chin with a hand, and says: Look. The fields are white, ready to harvest.

That gesture is what Connell is asking of the church right now. Just that. Lift your eyes. Look at who is standing around you who has not yet been invited.

He makes a distinction that clearly matters to him — between studying revival and pursuing it. He is not dismissive of history or of the theological work that has been done around understanding how God moves. But he is direct about what he sees.

“We've done more study on revival than we have pursued it," he says. “We pride ourselves in how much we know about the first great awakening or the second great awakening, and all that's good. But the posture of the heart is to pursue it for the moment we're in today. And I believe that moment is right now."

“There is one sure way to fail in evangelism: just not do it."

October 1, 2026

The target date for Celebration 250 is October 1, 2026 — a Thursday. The vision is not one massive event in one city. It is something more distributed, and in that sense more powerful: churches across the state of Alabama, in every city and district, each planning their own gathering where lost people are invited to come and where the gospel is given to them plainly.

Connell envisions the night before, September 30, as a night of unified prayer. Every church. At once. On their knees. And then October 1 as the day the doors open and the invitation goes out.

“A lot of people have never received Christ," he says, “because nobody's ever invited them."

He holds that sentence out there without embellishment. It has a way of landing on its own.

The initiative is genuinely cross-denominational, which matters to Connell on a level that runs deeper than strategy. He is not interested in a coalition that holds hands while quietly ranking each other. He is interested in the body of Christ finding its way back to the thing that actually holds it together: the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, and the gospel that flows from it.

“Irregardless of what you call yourself, whether it's a Baptist or a Methodist or whatever label is on the door — that's not going to matter in eternity. What's going to matter is, did we preach the gospel and did people receive the gospel?"

He brings up the Billy Graham crusades, anticipates the objection before it comes, and answers it simply. They worked. The model is not broken. What has been missing is the willingness to actually do it.

Why Alabama

There is a thread woven through conversations in the intercessory and prophetic communities of the American church — something that has been spoken over this state more than once by people who pray over maps and take these things seriously. As Alabama goes, so goes the nation.

Connell has heard it. He does not wave it off, and he does not inflate it either. He just places it in a larger pattern he recognizes from scripture.

God tends to choose the place no one would have chosen. The family no one was watching. The son who smelled like sheep. The carpenter's town that produced no one worth mentioning. And then, from that ordinary and overlooked starting point, something moves that changes everything.

“God uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise," Connell says. “He knows how to find leaders in His season and call them in their weakness to make Himself strong. And He knows how to do that."

He is not saying Alabama is special because Alabama is impressive. He is saying God has a habit of working through places that have the good sense to get out of their own way.

On What Comes After

When asked what he hopes happens after October 1, Connell pauses. It is a genuine pause, not a rhetorical one.

“We have programmed ourselves to death," he says finally, “trying to program what's next. And we can never forget that it is the Holy Spirit's job to disciple the believer. We can come alongside and give them tools, but we can never take the place of the Holy Spirit."

He does not have a Phase Two mapped out, and he makes no apology for that. What he has is a deep and practiced conviction that God reveals the next step in the moment of obedience, and not before.

You move. He shows you what's ahead. That is how it has worked in every season of Connell's ministry, and he has no reason to expect this one to be different.

What he does allow himself to hope for is this: a floodgate opened. Rivers running from every direction, gathering momentum, meeting somewhere at the throne of God and becoming something none of them could have been alone.

“If all the rivers are moving in the same direction," he says, “we can see revival blanket America."

He means it. You can hear that he means it.

How to Pray. How to Join.

If you want to pray for Celebration 250 Alabama right now, Connell has a specific ask: pray that more churches catch the vision. Pray for leaders who will step forward and carry it into their communities. Pray that the people of God in this state will lift their eyes to the harvest that is standing right in front of them.

If your church wants to be part of what is being built toward October 1, 2026, visit celebration250al.org or reach out directly to Eden Westside Baptist Church at (205) 338-7711.

“We want to see revival," Connell says. “I just want to reiterate that. We want to see revival. And I believe that Alabama and the nation work hand in hand. I really do."

Thirty-nine years of pastoral ministry gives a man a certain authority when he says something like that. Jacky Connell is not speculating. He is reporting what he sees — and then stepping toward it. 

 Pastor Jacky Connell has served as senior pastor of Eden Westside Baptist Church in Pell City, Alabama, for nearly thirty-nine years. He is the author of Painkillers, Prison Break, and Palm Tree Living. His fourth book is forthcoming.

What Is Celebration 250 Alabama?

Celebration 250 Alabama is a statewide evangelistic movement built around one conviction: that 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States — is a moment the church in Alabama should not let pass without pressing toward the harvest.

The initiative, supported by the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions and the Cooperative Program, calls churches of every denomination to unite around three commitments: pray, prepare, and proclaim. Not as a sequence, but as a posture held all at once — intercession and readiness and bold, plain gospel proclamation, carried into every corner of the state.

The effort builds toward two key dates:

September 30, 2026 is All-Church Alabama — a day of unified worship and prayer across the state, with congregations gathering in their own communities and lifting their voices together toward the same purpose.

October 1, 2026 is Celebration 250 Revivals — evangelistic gatherings in twelve locations across Alabama where the gospel will be preached and people will be invited to respond.

The vision does not end at the state line. The prayer behind it is that what God does in Alabama will move outward, that revival kindled here will travel.

If your church wants to get involved, find resources, or learn about events already planned in your area, visit celebration250al.org.

The fields are white. The invitation is open.

To learn more: celebration250al.org or call Eden Westside Baptist Church at (205) 338-7711.