Apostle Atria Stephen: Praying The Dead Back to Life

Stories have been told of the dead being brought back to life; of humans shapeshifting into animals and back to humans again; of witches casting deadly spells that hit their intended targets; and of how God takes one from being ordinary to extraordinary to the point where they can see into someone’s past, present, and future. Stories that some choose to believe, while others think are nothing but fables or only seen in the movies.

But for Ugandan apostle and prophet, Atria Stephen, these are but a few of the many first-hand experiences he has had in his own life. In fact, these have become ordinary occurrences to him.

When Apostle Atria got saved at the age of  24, like so many born again today, he could only pray for approximately five minutes, having grown up in the Catholic church and following certain written ritualistic prayers. At this level, he thought he was doing well. But one day he went to church with his sister and saw a man in the service praying throughout the entire three-hour-long service nonstop, and even when the service was over he had not risen from prayer, he was still lost in his communication with God. Young Atria was awed by this and was desirous to be able to pray this way. He then asked his sister what they did to get to that level in prayer.

“That type of prayer you are lost in it, you are passionate about it and it’s not burdensome. You don’t easily get tired,” the apostle explained.

His sister encouraged him to meet with the pastor to get the answer to his question. The pastor told the wide-eyed young man standing in front of him that in order to pray like that one needed an encounter with the Lord, because the Lord promised that He would fill us with the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of prayer. His pastor then gave him an example from Romans 8:26:

“ In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”

Therefore, an encounter with the Holy Spirit empowers you to pray.

Apostle Atria, who is the author of “Prophetic Timeline for Nations Revival: Unveiling Divine Oracles and Strategy for Effective Intercession”, (available on Amazon), says in order to have an encounter with the Holy Spirit, prayer must be involved.  In fact, this encounter happens when YOU pray, not when others pray for you. Therefore, each person has to get their own encounter during their personal time of prayer. This in turn will stretch your momentum in praying.

His pastor then said if he told him verbally how to pray it would not be as effective as taking him to a place of prayer and praying along with him. This way young Atria could get his own encounter in the time of prayer. Thus he started going with his pastor to a prayer place.

During his first lessons, the now apostle stretched for up to one hour with his pastor beside him encouraging him on. Every week they would meet every day for an hour with one agenda — to encounter Jesus/ the Holy Spirit.

“When I stretched to one hour I was happy but exhausted,” Apostle Atria recalled. “But my hunger developed. The church had a program every day from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm called ‘Pray Until Something Happens (PUSH), so we would also go there every day, but that was different from my hour of prayer with the pastor. ”

During the second week after his hunger and yearning developed, he was baptized in the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues. After this, he felt as if the grace and the desire to pray increased even more.

 Atria Stephen, Author of  “Prophetic Timeline for Nations Revival: Unveiling Divine Oracles and Strategy for Effective Intercession”

However, after a few more weeks it began to fade, he was now getting tired while praying for an hour and tired of praying in general. He began to struggle. He could not understand, now that he had the Holy Spirit, why was he struggling and slowing down?

Upon realizing what was happening, his pastor told him that prayer without having a fill of the Word was the cause of this exhaustion, as prayer and the Word go together. Therefore, the more you saturate yourself in the word, the more you are propelled to pray because the spirit man feeds on the word. When He doesn’t feed on the word for a long time He begins to starve. And when the inner man is starving, regardless of how much you want to pray — you cannot pray effectively because He is hungry and weak.

This is indeed the issue with many Christians today. They do not read the Bible and so the Spirit has been starving within them.  The spirit feeds on the word. What happens if YOU do not eat any food for a day, two days, three days, or a week — can you even walk or function effectively? No. Well imagine not feeding the Spirit yet you expect Him to rise to action every time you call… impossible! So when the inner man is starving, regardless of how much you want to pray, you cannot.

The apostle said he began reading the Bible, and the more he read, the more he would pray. And the more he prayed the more he hungered for the Word. As a result, he read through the entire New Testament in two weeks because of his hunger to get the Word in. Then it took him three more weeks to read the Old Testament. So within five weeks, he had completed the entire Bible.

“So I would read the word of God, meditate on it, then get into prayer,” he explained. “And the more I prayed the more I hungered for His word.”

Then he began to pray scriptures — praying through the promises of God, which built his vocabulary and consistency in such a way that the Holy Spirit would highlight a certain scripture then he would pray through that for a particular day. His prayer life began to grow. Now, he began to do three hours of prayer every day. He said in the beginning it was heavy work and his jaws and throat would pain because he would be praying nonstop for that duration. But he was told to just go home and drink warm water and he would be fine. After six months it became easier and more natural.

Before he got to three hours, however, he was taught the principle of consolidated prayer. Meaning if he broke through the one-hour prayer mark, he needed to consolidate it until it was no longer a struggle. Therefore, at least once per week, he would need to pray for one hour so that it would become a natural part of him. He did this by sometimes fasting and praying until he broke through the one-hour timeline, then he moved to two hours. When two became natural he then moved to three.

Shortly after starting the three-hour-long prayer, there was a problem in the mission field that needed tarrying in prayer. There was a father whose daughter came to them and told them that his daughter had been sick from birth. She was seven years old at that time. The father told them that he was giving the child to them. That they should take her because he did not want her anymore. When questioned if he was certain he wanted to give up the girl the father said yes. The girl suffered from a constant itching in the body and had a problem with her digestive system so she would sometimes take up to three weeks without easing herself. This caused her severe pain while her body would itch and things would move within her. This resulted in her yelling and crying and sometimes seem to lose her mind when the pain got extreme. The parents had tried witch doctors and hospitals but nothing worked.

Apostle Atria Stephen (L), Conversing with a Believer on the Mission Field

“So they brought the child to the crusade that we were hosting,” he recalled. “My pastor said ‘Stephen, you have been praying for three hours. I think you should fix this’. I said ‘no pastor this is my first mission’. He said ‘you can fix this, so pray’. So I began to pray. Thirty minutes passed and I asked the girl how are you? she said the movement have stopped but the itching and everything else was still there. She said her stomach was still paining because she had been eating and not going to the restroom. So I then prayed more. It took like two hours to get the girl to go to the toilet. She went and the parents saw. So what was left was the itching. But before three hours the itching stopped. So she was delivered before three hours.”

He then called the father and told him to talk to his girl. She told him she was not feeling any pain.

“I told him to go home with the girl. That we would be there at the crusade for one week, so if there was anything and he still wanted to give her away then by the time we were ready to leave on Friday we would take her. The next day the father returned and said he was not giving her up because she was healed.” he recalled. “So you see there are some circumstances which require perseverance in the place of prayer. So that was my encouragement now to pray more.”

After six months his pastor pushed him to move to six hours of prayers — bypassing four and five — advising him that there will be times when he will come upon circumstances that could require perseverance in prayer. He soon discovered firsthand what his pastor meant.

They were going on another mission. He was advised that this mission field was difficult. His pastor then put him in charge of a group of eight to go into that community to hold a crusade. That was a community highly ruled by witchcraft, as many areas in Africa are. Churches there were diminishing while others had closed their doors. They later found out that there was a woman living in this community who was a witch that could turn into a physical crocodile and devour things and people. They were taking a crusade there and she knew it would be dangerous for her.

“Our coordinator was a primary school teacher and she sent demons and got him into trouble,” he explained. “He ended up getting arrested for the defilement of a grade six student. And in Uganda at that time you would be in jail for one year before they hear any case. We called the pastor of that teacher and he said we should not come because things were really bad. But we said no, we are coming. We prayed, we fasted, and God did not tell us not to come. This could be interference from the enemy. He said there will be no crusade. Don’t come. But we moved out on our own.”

When they got to the location the church was empty. Fortunately, the building had no doors and windows so they entered and tried to figure out what to do next. They stayed in the empty church and prayed for an hour. Their pastor told them the solution to this was prayer and revelation. The group prayed for another hour. One brother saw an ant ill. Atria saw a crocodile on an ant hill, and then another person saw a woman, a crocodile, and an ant hill. So now they consulted God on what all these three signs meant.

Some Mission Fields Require Tarrying in Prayer

It was revealed to them that the woman they saw could turn into a crocodile and would sit on the ant hill. They then realized they had to deal with this issue with prayer and take authority over it. While they prayed they saw in their spirits that the woman disappeared. As soon as they ended their prayer a pastor from the community came into the church and told them that he heard they were stranded. He told them to follow him to the community center and he would run around and call a few people. When they got there, the generator refused to work. So the pastor had to run to another place to get a generator. By the time he returned it was 6:00 pm — too late for them to have the crusade for that day.

However, his pastor called upon three of them in the group and said since they had the prophetic gift they should tell him what to do next because they could not end the day without winning a soul. The Holy Spirit told them that in the process of testing the equipment they should get into worship. They began to worship. As they worshipped people began to come to look at what they were doing. There were about 30 people who had turned up just to see. Almost immediately eight people fell to the ground. Demons began to manifest in them and they were rolling over on the ground.

The team of eight began praying for them and all who had fallen got delivered and were led to Christ. They gave thanks for the eight souls saved. The pastor then told them that for that night they could not sleep because they were in a territory that was resistant. As a result, they stayed up and prayed through the night until about 1:00 am. By 3:00 am they were up again praying until 7:00 am. Then they went out and prepared the ground for the crusade. That day no one responded. So that night they prayed for about six hours as they were all burdened. They had never seen such a difficult place. At night they would hear all sorts of strange animals crying in the village. On the third day, the pastor again told them to pray through the night. That day they had a conference and people began to be delivered. But when the altar call was made no one came forward.

Apostle Atria told the pastor to invite people who were sick and had problems to come up for prayer. About 20 people answered this call for healing. While the pastor was praying and the group of eight surrounded them in agreement with the prayer, persons began to fall to the ground. Suddenly something unexpected happened.

“The ground was shaken, women ran from their gardens, men ran from their homes, others from the bars, others from the market,” Apostle Atria recalled. “It was as if the land was affected 2 km in all four directions. People were running, crying, and screaming. Some of them that were cooking you could see flour on their hands and so on. They piled up the whole area and we were only eight. We prayed for these people. Everyone who got delivered got saved.”

Their joy at seeing the number of surrendered souls suddenly turned into something else.

“When we were finished we realized two people had died,” The apostle said. “They suffocated because they fell during the time when the crowd was running and were trampled upon. Then the pastor said ‘now this is the reason why we have been building capacity prayer and building prayer of encounter. This is the day! We must pray these people back to life!”

In Order to Have an Encounter with the Holy Spirit, Prayer Must be Involved

Someone ran and informed the police. So now three policemen came and just stood there watching to see whether they were going to take responsibility for the deaths.

“They were standing there waiting to arrest us because remember already our coordinator had been arrested for defilement,” the apostle said. “So now the teacher was in jail and we were having this crusade. We divided ourselves into two groups of fours and began to pray. One of the dead was a 13-year-old girl and the other was a 26-year-old lady. We prayed for one hour…two hours…three hours… four hours… five hours. The police didn’t interrupt. We started that prayer at 5:00 pm. By now we were sweating, then it dried, then we sweat some more — we were praying all kinds of prayers that we have ever known. So my friend turned to me and said ‘Stephen what do we do next?’ As I was thinking about what to do the Lord just said ‘find out the name of this girl’. I asked and someone told me. So I said let’s call her name and give her this command — ‘come out from among the dead and live again’. So we shouted her name and said ‘come out from among the dead and live again!’. She coughed and came out! When she rose up, if our faith was measured with a measurement it had gone so high!” he recalled with a smile. “And then we joined the other team and did the same thing. In about five minutes the other one got up. When this one got up a demon spoke and said ‘I entered this lady when she was young and she had become mine. Why are you people chasing me out of her? I’d rather kill her’. So it was the demons who had killed her. We chased out the demons. When they got free we interviewed them. We asked did you come here to the crusade?’ they said ‘no, I don’t even know who brought me here’. I was at home doing something but now I found myself here’. This was the response from both.”

They were then asked if they would like to give their lives to Christ and both said yes. The team lead them to Christ and asked if they were able to go home by themselves. Both also said yes, they were fine. So they went home delivered, born again, and alive!

“Then the policemen came to us and said ‘now we know that you are the servants of God. We are going to consider this defilement case and re-investigate it. When they investigated they found that the teacher was innocent. So they got the teacher out that week and found the right person who had defiled the young girl.”

He explained that that night after praying for six hours to bring both persons back to life, they were tired. But when they went back to where they were staying, showered, and were ready to rest, the pastor told them no. Their next assignment was the witch doctors living in that village. They, therefore, had to pray for another two hours before going to bed.

“Dogs were barking the whole night and human voices were screaming because people were still getting delivered in their own homes. For those who came to the crusade, the presence went with them. And as they reached home the members of their families also got encountered from what they carried and so people came to the conference that day with testimonies of how their lives were impacted,” he said.

“Early in the morning at 6:00, a messenger came. He said, ‘there are about five to six witch doctors in this place. They have asked me to come and tell you people, why have you disturbed them so much? They have no issue with you so why are you disturbing them? You leave them alone. They have no problem with you people’. We said, ‘if the God you serve is not the one we serve, that’s the reason why we are here — to align the people to serve the living God because you have misled the people’,” he said.

Their pastor told them this was why he trained them to go through the prayer of encounter. Because someday they would go through a situation that would need capacity, that would need endurance, that would need perseverance before they see the breakthrough. He asked them what would they have done in the scenario of the dead ladies if they had not gone through such prayer. This now gave them the desire to pray even more!

An Encounter With the Holy Spirit Empowers You to Pray.

When they returned to their hometown from the mission the pastor told them that they would be practicing and praying for 12 hours nonstop. During these 12 hour, they would be having encounters. But this time it would be two ways, the Lord was breaking the limitations of their lives and empowering them to break limitations in the lives of others.

” And so we began to pray for 12 hours. When I began to pray for 12 hours my part of the encounter was that God dealt with something in my mind,” The apostle explained. “When I was young I watched a lot of blue movies and pornography and so on. So these things stuck in my mind. I came from a family that was deeply rooted in witchcraft. My grandmother was a witch. She was the 6^th generation serving in witchcraft. So every child born in the family she was the midwife. None of the children were allowed to be born in the hospital. She would cut the umbilical cord and take it to the river to dedicate you to the water spirits — the marine spirits. That’s how our family was dedicated.”

However, God had a plan for his life. Two weeks before he was born his mother fell sick and was hospitalized. She was not released until two weeks after he was born.

“When they brought me home she said the spirits have lost interest in ‘that one’, because dirty hands have touched him. Because when I was in the hospital some missionaries had prayed for me. So the demons said some dirty hands have touched that one.”

The apostle recounted the story of how he attacked his grandmother’s demons and nearly died. He was about 12 years old and in grade five. She had died a few years before at the age of 120. These demons were kept in pots in a shrine in her house. This was where his family had gone to sacrifice to spirits while she was alive.

“I was in charge of looking after goats and sheep while my elders were looking after cows,” he explained. “That evening I was going for football because at school I was the goalkeeper. So I was rushing for football. So I had to come and bring the goats early at 3:00. Then at 4:00 pm go to the football match. But I found one goat missing. So I brought all the others home. But the law at home was that you brought all the animals in, none could be missing. So I went around looking and I found it stuck in between the pots. The goat was arrested by demons. They wanted it as a sacrifice. So I tried to get the goat to move away but it could not move. I tried to pull it and it could not be pulled. By now the house where my grandmother lived had collapsed but the shrine just remained there because people feared touching that area,” he said. ” I started stoning the goat and in the process of stoning the goat I stoned the pot and it broke and the goat was released. When I went home my uncle was so angry with me. ‘Why did you break the pot? You are dead! No one has touched those things and lived. And people started to cry. I was the eldest son of my dad, I am the heir and I was going to die. My father had married five women looking for a baby boy and I was the boy. So it was a serious problem. They wanted to save me but they were helpless. According to them, there was no atonement for what I did.”

He said four days later he was attacked by the demons. They burnt him all over his chest and neck and there were blisters as if he was burnt by hot water. His family saw it and said ‘yes, it has started. you will go [die]’.

“Good enough the mother of my mom, so my grandmother on my mother’s side was born again. So I left the village and went to her,” he explained. “When I was born she had said she had only one son and I was not going to be her grandson, I was going to be her second son. So she always called me her son — not grandson. When I got there I showed her the blisters and told her what happened. She said ‘don’t worry, you are not going to die. Tonight you will be set free. Let me finish what I am doing in the garden, I am coming’. So when she was finished she came and said ‘just lay on my bed as I’m cooking’. I laid on her bed and you could feel the presence of God on that bed.”

When she was finished cooking she gave him something to eat, by then it was night. She laid him on her bed and placed her hand on his body and began to pray.

“She prayed the whole night,” he recalled. “But what amazed me was that she prayed only one prayer — ‘God deliver my son… God deliver my son… God deliver my son. I cannot lose this son you gave me… God deliver my son’. And then she mentioned something. She said ‘when I will be gone to glory this is the young man who will take the mantle. Why would he die now? God heal my son. deliver my son’. That was the prayer the whole night. when it reached about 4:00 am she slept. She had started praying at about 10:00 pm. Then she woke up early in the morning and started praying and calling the names of all her children and then every grandchild and calling their destinies one by one and finished with me. Then she got up and asked how are you feeling? I said ‘ok, the pain is gone’.”

When he went to shower in the afternoon and checked his body, he realized that all the blisters had gone. They didn’t leave any scars — with the exception of a small area on his neck that remains even today as if to remind him of the healing power of God.

Atria Stephen has Prayed the Dead Back to Life

The boy ran to his grandmother and said, “Mama the scars are gone!”

She replied, “Yeah. My God is greater than those gods there.”

She then told him that because his school was back in the village she would not keep him so he would need to go back home and go to school. When he arrived home they were shocked to see him alive, and even more so to see that the blisters were gone. They asked him what happened and he told them,

“I found a God that is better than your god here.”

From then he realized that there was going to be a permanent war between himself and the demons and whoever won would stay in his home. He said he was no longer afraid, now that he had realized that his God was better. He then told everyone nothing was going to happen to him anymore.

But his life was not easy from then. When he got older and went to secondary school he got involved with the wrong crowd.

He said at the age of seven his father died, and they were chased from the village and their home was taken away.  However, he had returned on his own to his grandmother’s village because he said he wanted to know about the history of his family and what belonged to his dad. Even as a child he wanted to know everything so that his family would not be taken advantage of. Thus he left and told his mom he could survive there. All this was before the incident with the blisters.

“But in secondary, I joined the wrong group. I got myself into drugs and smoking and I joined martial arts. I was preparing for revenge. So when I went on drugs a demonic attack came again on me. For nine years I was tormented by demons. I dropped out of school. I was losing my mind. I was running mad. I went to my sister in another village and she took me to my mother. My mother took me to church and that was when I was born again. That was in 1999.  My mama [grandmother who prayed for him] was living somewhere else where her husband had built. She passed away in 1985 after suffering a stroke. But before she died she told them that she should not be buried before ‘this son of mine is brought from his father’s house to my burial’. I didn’t know why. But she said ‘even though that young man has not yet embraced Christ he is the one to take the mantle from me. I have prayed for him and I know he will be born again’.”

In Uganda, the dead is usually buried the following day. When she passed away everyone was standing in the church waiting to see who this boy was that she had told them must be there before she was buried. When he arrived they ushered him in to see the body and seated him. Then they enquired of him ‘what did she tell you and why did she want us to wait for you before burial?’ I told them she wanted to pass on something to me but I was not present when she passed so I don’t know what she meant. Then someone said she said when she died this young man takes over her faith. He was then prayed for and blessed before she was buried.

After becoming saved at the age of 24, he had numerous encounters with Christ in the first four years of his salvation. It was during one of these encounters that God revealed to him how she had prayed for him night after night that he would be born again and take up the mantle. He began to understand how God had raised him up from a family consumed by witchcraft to plant the seed of salvation. It was when he became born again that he began to fight those demons until they were cast out of the family and destroyed.

Sometimes Demons Have to be Cast out of Entire Families to Set them Free from Witchcraft in Africa

The now 45-year-old apostle explained that the capacity prayer was just what he needed. Because when the Lord encountered him, He dealt with so many things — anger, bitterness, revenge, and the pornographic pictures that were still stuck in his mind.

He explained that the first time he prayed for 12 hours non-stop he lost his memory.

He could not remember anything. It was like he prayed off everything that was stored in his memory that was not good. He could not think much. So that evening he just went to bed. This was when he had an encounter. He said this encounter was so strong that he felt that someone had opened his scalp and poured in gallons of information and then closed it back. He jumped up touching his head because it was as if it was physical. After feeling his head he realized it was normal. But when he came out of his house in the morning everybody he saw, he knew everything about them. That’s when he raised that the prophetic ministry was ushered in with a strong gift of discernment. His spiritual ears and eyes were opened and he began to experience the supernatural. In this particular experience, he thought he was losing his mind again. This made him very scared (remember he was insane for seven years). He prayed and asked God to help him out of this. He thought that praying more would subdue it. So he went into prayer for hours. This only made it more defined. But God told him ‘no, do not get scared. I will teach you how to manage a switch’.  God told him He would teach him how to switch on and switch off whenever there was a need or when he wanted to flow in that grace. But not only did he have the prophetic gift, but he found that all the nine gifts of the Holy Spirit were operating in him. Even today he says all gifts are operational in him. He prophesies, he interprets, he heals, he teaches, he pastors … all of them. Thus his function was difficult to define.

“I was there in the prophetic, I was in the apostolic, in teaching, in the evangelistic ministry. I went into crusade sometimes and when I teach somebody feels I’m a teacher, then I’m pastoring a church, and they would call me pastor, when I prophesy they called me prophet and so on. Then one day my pastor asks, ‘who are you?’ I said ‘pastor I don’t know. I’m supposed to ask you. You are my father.’ He said well, I know the prophetic dimension is high, but all these others are functioning. So what do we call you? I said ‘call me brother Stephen, that fits in all situations. So people began to call me brother Stephen instead of using titles.” he smiled.

He said this 12 hours of prayer soon became a habit, if he did not do it he would feel like something was not right, as if something was missing. So then his capacity to preach, teach, discern, pray — everything increased.

The More You Pray, The More You Build Your Capacity to Pray

“Then God said to me now, I have taught you how to pray until you encountered me. Then my pastor said we are not going to do it for 12 hours or six hours. We are going to pray until the Lord has encountered you. Whenever you have an encounter you can stop. So if you get encountered at one hour you end it. If you get encountered at 30 minutes you end there. That is where you will find satisfaction in prayer. But you must pray until you encountered the Lord.”

Now that his capacity had been built in prayer, The Lord began to teach him how to pray from the heavenly realm.