According to church expert C. Peter Wagner, except for Jesus Christ, South American pastor Carlos Annacondia is the greatest evangelist of all time, converting at least five thousand souls at every meeting (He wrote this in 1988). Annacondia reports that before he goes into an area to conduct crusade meetings, he sends in teams to fast and pray in order to bind up the strongmen over that area. Only when God shows him that the strongmen are bound does Annacondia set up his crusade tents. Only then are the fields ripe for harvest!
Other prophets and evangelists, such as Ed Silvoso and Cindy Jacobs, advocate a similar process. They will send teams of intercessors who spend weeks fasting and praying against and binding up the strongmen over a city. Once the strongmen are bound, the teams then go in and evangelize the area with great success and with virtually no spiritual interference.
People often ask South Korean pastor David Yonggi Cho how his humble house church movement exploded into the largest church in the world. His answer has always been the same: “We bound up all of the strongmen over South Korea.”
In the mid-1990s, I had the pleasure of teaching spiritual warfare in Fiji for six consecutive years. The church and Bible college where I taught arose early each morning to pray together and bind up the strongmen over Fiji. Today, there is a revival in Fiji and the church I ministered in is one of the mainstays of that revival.
I had the honour to teach on binding up the strongmen in Sibu, a town in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, at the Sarawak Full Gospel Church’s Bible College. The pastor there had spent twenty-six years building his church, which had three thousand members. When I returned the following year, the members gleefully told me that nine months earlier, they began binding up the strongmen over Sibu.
When God told them that they had bound the strongmen, they went from house to house and converted two thousand more in just two weeks. They had to stop because they had no more room. When I returned around 1997, they had purchased a large parcel of land to build a church that would hold five thousand people in each service. Revival had sparked in Sibu.
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Before you can bind up ruler spirits, you must first break the curses that give evil spirits the right to rule. If curses are not broken, evil spirits have the right to oppress and you will not be able to bind them.
Some curses are brought about by our own sin and unrighteousness. When the sins of the people bring curses upon a land or nation, only confession and heartfelt repentance will break them. Therefore, the first step is to intercede, confess and repent for the sins of the people.
(From the book Waging Spiritual Warfare by Richard Ing, pg 141-142,146)