Saturday, April 26, 2025

The Danger of Making Revival an Idol


Across a broad swath of evangelical and Pentecostal churches, there is a fixation on the idea of revival. The term itself can be used in several different ways, some of which are useful or even laudable, but one sense in which--I've now come to believe--it tends to be more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to the church's experience of life in Christ. The hope and expectation of a future revival, perhaps just around the corner--when this is meant to refer to a period of breathless fervor, high emotion, and mystical experiences--has the danger of becoming an idolatrous affectation for both churches and individual Christians. 

Picture in your mind the stories you may have heard of previous revivals: massive public crowds gathered to hear the gospel preached during the Great Awakening; attenders falling down weeping under their conviction of sin during the Second Great Awakening; prolonged sequences of worship in the presence of God that might stretch on for days. For many Christians today, these extraordinary scenes have consolidated into a desire that such times would come again, and in doing so, this sensibility has taken a new form: the idea that these things ought not to be extraordinary, but ordinary; that "revival" should be the normative state of the Christian life, and if it isn't, then one's church is doing something wrong.

But is that sensibility actually true? I'm not so sure. Before I go into why that is, it's worth noting that there are certainly cases in which the hope and expectation for revival can represent something healthy in a church's life. Revival need not mean a full-on outpouring of dynamic spiritual experiences in corporate worship as the normative Christian experience; some people use the term simply to mean a large-scale societal return to Christian faith, or a state in which a church's members regain a sense of abiding earnestness and zeal in their everyday practices of faith and devotion. I have folks in my church who pray and yearn for revival in these terms, which I find not only appropriate but commendable. Both of these senses of "revival" are, I think, something that we should hope for and pray that God brings about. In most of my usages in writing and sermons, I think I tend to lean toward the idea of revival as society-wide swing of the pendulum away from secular atheism and back toward the historic Christian faith. That's something that might include vast outpourings of spiritual fervor, but not necessarily so: such a revival might also happen very quietly, under the radar (as I would argue is even now happening across much of the West). But in many evangelical and Pentecostal circles, a broad social return to faith is only one small aspect of what is meant by "revival," and what many (perhaps most) people have in their heads is a scene of impassioned spiritual excitement that sweeps up enormous numbers of people in its fervor. 

This disjunction in meaning is one that has come up in my own church life. Some years ago, I felt a prompting in my spirit to devote a year to daily prayer for revival, and I shared that prompting with my church. Some of our folks excitedly grasped onto it, and I got the sense that, for at least a few of them, the expectation was that a promised revival would come upon the fulfillment of our year of prayer. That year--from early fall of 2019 to early fall of 2020--came and went, and the results were...well, let's just say that it was definitely not a massive outpouring of spiritual excitement through our town. Instead, what followed (in the very week we finished our year of prayer) was the first major outbreak of the Covid pandemic in our area, after having already had to re-imagine our practices of doing church thanks to society's efforts to "flatten the curve." This was swiftly followed by an outbreak in our own church, which (since it was still early in Maine's story of experiencing the pandemic) made headlines across the state, cast our church unfairly in a poor light to many of our neighbors, and resulted in several months of our church trying to connect online rather than in person. Instead of a revival, our year of prayer resulted in our church standing empty, week after week after week.

Where was the promised revival? Well, for anyone who might have been expecting crowds of people shrieking with excitement in a new Great Awakening (and I'm not actually sure we had too many of those), it hadn't happened. No doubt the Lord had used our prayers to prepare us for what was probably the hardest year in the history of our congregation, but no "revival" of that kind. Except...something peculiar is starting to be noticeable now, five years later. That time of transition in 2020 led into a new season in our church life marked by the vibrancy and joy of a growing faith-community that spans all the age groups in our town, who delight in spending time in fellowship and devoting their hearts to the worship of God. Even more strikingly, some experts in the wider world are now pointing to 2020 (the year we completed our season of prayer for revival) as the point at which a new and surprising upswelling of faith started to become visible, and which is now making headlines across the West: public intellectuals coming out as new Christian converts, high-church communions seeing crowds of new catechumens, and Gen Z swinging the pendulum away from agnosticism and back toward faith. And it's not just the West, either--these early decades of the twenty-first century have seen an acceleration of movements to Christ among people of other faiths around the globe (and especially among Muslims and Jews), and that acceleration shows no signs of slowing down. But apart from a few little hotspots that pop up here and there for a time, this hasn't been a "revival" of the emotional-outpouring variety; it has been a broad, quiet, grassroots work of God taking shape in the background of our daily lives. This quiet revival has the potential to be one of the biggest things to happen in the entire history of Christianity if it continues along its present course, and lots of people are still unaware that they are living in the midst of it.

What has this experience taught me? Well, it's taught me to keep praying for revival!--so long as we're aware of what we're really praying for. But it has also made me a little wary of the fixation on a Great-Awakening-style revival that persists in the hopes and expectations of our churches. There are two main downfalls to that fixation that I can see. First, it can leave Christians in a place of perpetual sadness and disillusionment. While there is certainly a sense of hope in some future great work of God that might raise one's spirits, the continued absence of a visible, emotional outpouring of the Spirit on a broad scale is something that gnaws away at a person's faith, raising questions about God's willingness to act. It also builds up a sense that our normal Christian life is somehow insufficient, and that we (or our church's leadership) are doing something wrong. Is it any wonder that pastors and leaders in these traditions seem so often to fall from grace, often into sexual sin or abusive leadership practices? They have been conditioned to provide a sense of visionary excitement that God is at work, in answer to the hopes and expectations of their congregants, but in the end that excitement very often turns out to be little more than a cult of their personal charisma, and the perpetuation of that cult bears the fruit of its own consequences.

Second, this fixation on "revival" can lead to a kind of idolatry, which replaces the very real work of God that is going on in our lives right now with a wished-for substitute. Much of what we're called to as Christians is faithfulness and obedience amid the normalcy of everyday life. The mountaintop experience of the post-Pentecost church in Acts quickly makes way for the patient rhythms of simply figuring out how to live life together as faithful followers of Jesus, marked less by ecstatic wonder and more by "making it [their] ambition to live a quiet life" (1 Thess. 4:11). The whole Christian tradition, from the monastic fathers of the early church to the mystics of the Middle Ages to the leading pastors of twentieth-century evangelicalism, have tried to remind us that real Christianity is less flash and more substance, less of ecstasy and more of humble simplicity. As Oswald Chambers put it, "The snare in the Christian life is in looking for gilt-edged moments, the thrilling times; there are times when there is no thrill, when God's [blessing] is in the routine of drudgery on the level of towels and washing feet." The great Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross (who knew something about amazing experiences of closeness to God), advised other Christians not to seek out visions or ecstatic manifestations or special words from the Lord as the normal course of one's Christian life. Such things were always meant to be extraordinary, not normative. If one got caught up in pursuing them, one would lose sight of the greater part of the work of God in one's life. 

And that, I fear, is exactly what has happened with those Christians who are fixated on the idea of a future revival--they are missing out on what God is actually doing right under their noses. That's not to say that revivals of that sort can never come, of course. They do--we know they do, and they are great gifts of God when they do come. But we should treat them as St John of the Cross treated personal visions--accept them as a special gift of God, a blessing of precious value, and then move on. They are a gift to be appreciated, not an idol to be mounted on the altar of one's heart. We must always ask what comes next after the vision, after the revival, after the outpouring. And in most cases, like with the post-Pentecost church, it's things like patiently suffering persecution (Acts 4), dealing with matters of sin and holiness in our lives (Acts 5), congregational administration and dealing with church conflict (Acts 6), and other non-glamorous practices of ordinary Christian discipleship. These are things that God wants us to attend to, just as much as the mountaintop experiences of a Great-Awakening-style revival. God can work just as readily through slow, patient, quiet means as he can through big, showy, flashy means. It is perhaps no accident that Jesus describes the growth of the church in analogies of things that grow so slowly that one would almost die of boredom of one watched them from beginning to end: yeast spreading through dough, crops growing in a field, and so on. And yet, in the end, those slow, patient, quiet things are what make all the difference. So don't get lost in waiting and wishing for the next great revival. Pray for God's work in the world and then get to work yourself. Be faithful, proclaim the gospel, and give thanks for all things. Our Master is doing far more right now than we can even imagine, and perhaps what we are most in need of is simply to have eyes to see it.

Wednesday, April 09, 2025

Bible Study Series on the Book of Revelation

This page offers a new Bible study resource, with links to videos of studies in the Book of Revelation, as originally offered to my local church. These videos are not polished or high-level productions; they are simply the recorded livestreams of my in-person midweek Bible studies. With Facebook no longer hosting archived recordings of livestreams for more than a month, I needed a new place to offer these files, and demand was high for this particular series. (The first three chapters of Revelation are unrepresented in the videos below because those Facebook files had already been removed by the time I realized I needed to download them, but I've uploaded a few old audio sermons on those passages to represent that material.) This page will continue populating with new links to Bible study videos on a weekly or biweekly basis, until the series is complete.

Monday, March 17, 2025

Update

Just a quick update on a few things going on here, written partly in apology for not yet resuming my often-promised return to regular posting on the blog:

- My current book project is progressing, but it calls for more work in the editing/revision stage than I had foreseen, so at my publisher's bidding I'm focusing most of my writing attention on that at the moment. The hope is still to be able to release it sometime this year, so I will keep you all apprised.

- I have a few academic presentations upcoming as well, with a bit of in-country travel, and since travel always sparks my itch to write, I hope it will result in a few good essays here. This coming weekend I'll be traveling with my family to my old alma mater, Houghton University, to present lectures based on my previous book (regarding the historical missiology of the early church). And later this spring, I'm off to Chicago to present a paper at the North American Patristics conference. I hadn't planned on attending this conference at all, but when the call to papers came out and I saw that they were specifically looking for papers on early church fathers and birds (yes, really)...well, you'll agree that I didn't have a choice in the matter; I had to pitch a paper proposal. 

- In the absence of daily (or even weekly) offerings on the blog, please feel free to check out my sermon podcasts on my church's website (calaisbaptist.org). I'm doing a series based on the "Glimpses of Grace" studies I began writing here a few years ago, and the response has been tremendous.

- Once this year's book project is off my plate, one of my great hopes is to return to my Evangeliad and perhaps even pick up the pace (it's still possible for me to complete it in less than a decade from its launch in 2017, so that seems a worthy goal). Blessings to you all, longsuffering friends, and many thanks for your kind support of my wildly-ranging writing projects over the years. 

Wednesday, March 05, 2025

A Change in the Wind


"And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

- T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets

Most of my adult life, I've been praying for a transformation that I sincerely doubted I would ever see. Call it what you will: revival, a Great Awakening, a return of the West to its Christian foundations. I came of age in a highly secular corner of the US at the turn of the millennium, and there was a palpable sense of anxiety in the air among Christians. It was becoming clear that our society, like Christian Europe before us, was entering a long, downward spiral into the abandonment of faith. The first two decades of this century were rife with bleak news for anyone who cares about Christianity in the West: it was attacked on all sides by both "the New Atheists" and a resurgent global wave of Islam's rising tide, it was swamped out of the cultural consciousness of the young by the advent of addictive, all-consuming technologies, and it was marked by growing movements of "nones" and "exvangelicals" and former Christians intent on "deconstructing" their faith. Much of this was the cultural harvest of decades upon decades of institutional atheism in academic circles, which exercised a serious trickle-down effect on society at large. It was common knowledge in Christian circles that to go to a secular university (unless you lived in a Bible belt) was an act of entering territory that was uniquely hostile to one's faith. Those trends had played out in public life to devastating effect, and with the loss of faith, the fundamental stability of many parts of society began to crumble. In short, it looked like all the momentum was going in one direction, and there was no way out. The West had become "post-Christian." And although I prayed and hoped and longed for a swing of the pendulum back the other way, the signs were all so evident that I dared not really believe it to be possible--I found that my heart couldn't bear the anguish of disappointed expectations.

Despite what I'm about to tell you, all of those worrying signs are still all around us. In much of western Europe, secular people now far outnumber religious believers. The "nones" still hold a significant share of our population here in the US. On my pilgrimage in England last year, the effects of the loss of faith on British society were poignant and painful. While I walked around the unimaginably beautiful heritage of the faith of ages past, there was a touch of sorrow to it. These beautiful churches were mostly empty. Those that still held services were either evangelical (where some life remains) or tiny groups that were simply holding on while deaths of old age gradually reduced their numbers. Many expressed surprise that someone as young as I was (and I'm not young anymore) had such an interest in the faith. Those churches that were full were full of tourists, not worshipers, and several cathedrals had gone a good way toward turning their naves into exhibit halls for community events or the celebration of woke-ist values. There was a painful disenchantment to it all.

But there is a change in the wind. It's discernible now; something is happening. It's still small, still just "the size of a man's hand" (see 1 Kings 18:44), but it's coming. This week, I read the testimony of another major public intellectual who has just announced his conversion to faith in Christ (Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia). Over the past five years, this has been happening with increasing frequency. Public intellectuals like historian Tom Holland and psychologist/influencer Jordan Peterson sparked open dialogues about their growing appreciation for the Christian faith. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim-turned-atheist (author of the book Infidel, published during the days of the New Atheists), has become a Christian. Paul Kingsnorth, a major literary figure, found the end of his religious journey through atheism and Wicca by becoming an Eastern Orthodox Christian. Even the agnostic Elon Musk and the world's leading atheist voice, Richard Dawkins, have recently gone on record that they are essentially "cultural Christians." It's not just intellectuals, either: leading figures in media and the arts are coming to faith, from movie stars like Russell Brand and Shia LaBeouf to Youtubers like Ryan Trahan. The uber-popular podcast host Joe Rogan has begun sprinkling an openness to faith into his shows, catching attention especially for one simple line: "We need Jesus."

And it's not just happening at the upper levels of society; there's also a growing groundswell rising up under the radar of public perception. Some events--like the revival at Asbury University last year--broke out onto the public consciousness. But it wasn't a one-off event; college students are showing a marked new openness to the gospel. In the US, there's a particularly noticeable shift of young people moving toward the traditionally orthodox denominations of ancient-rooted Christianity: Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, high-church Anglicanism. Some Eastern Orthodox churches in the US are seeing new catechumenate classes that are, at times, as large as the rest of the congregation put together. In Catholicism, the young people coming to faith are leaving behind the diluted expressions of worship that came into vogue among the previous generation, and are expressing a longing to go back to the rich heritage of older practices. Whereas my generation--the so-called "Millennials"--is probably the most faithless generation America has ever seen, the generations rising behind us, as they come of age, are starting to look like they're not on the same track. My children's generation is much more open to the Christian faith and much more skeptical of the self-centered secularism that dictated public consciousness in earlier decades. 

Every time I come across the evidence of this shift, I still find it surprising. I know I shouldn't; after all, I was writing articles years ago on this blog about how we were already seeing a slow shift back toward theism in academic philosophy. But I am always surprised. I find myself shocked, with wonder and delight, that it might really be happening. 

Back in 2019, I felt led of the Lord to commit to a year of praying every day for revival in our society. I initially took it as a personal call, but during an unplanned moment in the middle of a sermon, I let it slip to my congregation, and some of them took up the call with gusto. (At first I regretted that slip, because then all the pressure of public expectations came to bear upon it, as if people were expecting the call to be a prophecy of what would certainly happen if they prayed.) Rather ironically, the end of that year of praying coincided exactly with a major Covid outbreak in our congregation, one of the first in our state. It resulted in us closing down for several months and ending up in the hostile spotlight of regional news media--not exactly a revival. One could say, however, that it was perhaps not a coincidence that God had led us through a year of concerted prayer immediately before what was probably the most difficult period in the long history of our congregation. But on a larger scale, it's now possible to trace out the lines of another connection. That period, beginning around 2019-20, was the beginning of the recent surge of public conversions. Justin Brierly, host of the podcast "The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God," marks the turnaround to right around that time. That's not to say, of course, that it was our prayers that made it happen. But it's heartening to see the connection nonetheless. So, people of God: keep praying. We may find that rather than staring into the darkness of a falling twilight, we are in fact on the threshold of an entirely new dawn, and even now the brilliant colors of a fresh awakening are dancing on the horizon. 



Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Cathedral Photos from England

February has been a month of tending to all the tasks I had pushed off while working on my book project, so it's been busier than expected. I'm aiming to get back into a rhythm of regular posting for essays and poetry next week. In the meantime, here are a few more pictures from my pilgrimage in England last year, many of which I haven't yet shared. For those who are lovers of church interiors, like I am, this is a wonderful feast of beauty. (If you want to enlarge a picture to see it closer up, just click on it. Feel free to also download any of these for your own use if you like.)

Rochester Cathedral

Magdalen College Chapel

Lichfield Cathedral

Lichfield Cathedral

Lichfield Cathedral

Lichfield Cathedral

Christ Church Cathedral

Keble College Chapel

Keble College Chapel

The Oratory (Catholic Church in Oxford)

Westminster Cathedral (Roman Catholic)

Norwich Cathedral

Norwich Cathedral

St Edmundsbury Cathedral

St Edmundsbury Cathedral

Ely Cathedral

Ely Cathedral

Ely Cathedral

St Albans Cathedral

Dormition Cathedral (Russian Orthodox)

Southwark Cathedral

Southwark Cathedral

St Paul's Cathedral

St Paul's Cathedral

St Paul's Cathedral


Friday, February 14, 2025

The Wellspring Service


A few years ago on this blog, I designed a liturgical service drawn from traditional sources, which an evangelical church could hypothetically use to dip its toes into the great stream of the timeless traditions of high-church Christian worship. At the time, we weren't actually implementing such a service in my church; I knew that I would love it, but I wasn't sure anyone else would. Well, that has changed. There has been a growing groundswell of interest in connecting to the classical forms of Christian worship from the days of the early church, and so we've started offering a monthly service of high-church liturgy. I offer here, for anyone who might be interested in using it, the newly revised version of my Wellspring service (based mostly off the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, but with some additional prayers from ancient sources). I've also included a document I wrote for my church to answer their questions and explain the meanings behind the service. Click the links below to access the documents.


Wellspring: A Classic Liturgical Service of Christian Worship


Wellspring FAQs


Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Update

After a few weeks of pounding away at another book project, I'll be coming back to a more regular schedule of posting on the blog. I'm happy to report that my next book is well on its way to publication, with a release date hopefully later this year. It's based on the research that went into my PhD dissertation, and it traces the story of how a new form of worship in the English churches of the 1700s (congregational hymns) ended up striking a spark that lit the global Protestant mission movement. The provisional title is Earth Repeats the Loud Amen: How a Revolution in Worship Launched a Global Mission Movement (title is subject to change at this point, though). It'll be released by William Carey Publishing, as was my last book (Missionary Motivations: Challenges from the Early Church), and I'm really looking forward to working with them again on the editing and processing steps to come. To any students of worship or mission, this book should be an interesting read. 

In any case, with the initial manuscript-production stage off of my plate, I'll be a little freer in my schedule, and will be returning to regular posts of The Evangeliad and a few occasional essays. Thanks to all my readers!