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.
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