A Call for Revival

In ten days,  my Presbytery will meet in Columbia, SC.   As we come up on our meeting, the need for special prayer seems more and more imperative. Do we really believe prayer can make a difference, or don't we? 

 What else can we do?  Programs haven't helped.  I get the impression that we are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the society we inhabit. 

I have never  seen a great awakening of the Spirit myself, though I have often prayed for the privilege.  But it did come close once, though.  In 1971 I attended Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. The year before, on  February 4, 1970,  the Spirit of God sent revival to that institution. 

It began at a chapel service at nine in the morning. The Dean felt led to open the pulpit for testimony.  The service ended 184 hours later.  For eight days, twenty-four hours a day,  student after student testified, wept, and rededicated their lives to Christ.  By the end of the week, revival spread from the college to churches and colleges across the country  The revival at Asbury has been credited as a major spiritual influence in the Jesus Movement of the 1970's.

I wasn't there, but I came the next year.  It was real--in fact, it had not really stopped when I arrived on campus a little over a year later.   Here are some of the comments made by people who were there.

“The emphasis was never upon the gifts of the spirit. The emphasis was upon..sin. The need for repentance, need for restitution, the need for repairing relationships, human being to human being and the need for bringing alive into obedience the need for the highest and the best.”

“The amazing thing was a person would tell what had happened, it would be recapitulated, as a person would go somewhere and tell what God had done in his auditorium … it would

take place in the church where the person was telling it!”

“The less impressive the student was the more effective an instrument he was”

Sounds  exciting--yes?

This revival--like all revivals--came as a sovereign move of God.  No one can make revival come.  Only God can bring it. However, this doesn't mean he brings it without us playing a part. Revivals usually comes because Christians seek it--not just casually, but desperately and  deeply. In other words, revivals come in response to our passionate seeking after God. 

This was true of the Asbury Revival.  Robert Coleman in his account of it in One Divine Moment referred to the prayer that was going up before the revival broke.

Before the revival there had been a sense of general spiritual laxity at the college.  Professors had been accused of teaching false doctrine.  Financial scandals had rocked the administration.  More than that,  some among the faculty and student body had felt the only solution to their problems was to get serious with God.

So they reached back into their historical roots , all the way back to the early Methodist tradition.  The Methodists began with  prayer meetings on Oxford campus, where people came together for regular prayer, confession, and the practice of spiritual disciplines.  A small group of people influenced the world  through seeking the Spirit.

A few on the Asbury campus sought to emulate that early Methodist example.  Here are the words from someone who was there:

“How did it come? What called it?…Our need.”

“We had some students interested in prayer. In October before the Spirit came in February six students came together, banded together in what they called ‘the great experiment.’”

“They covenanted for 30 days to take 30 minutes every morning and spend in prayer with the Word, writing down what truth they got from the Word. They were to obey that day, sharing their faith somewhere in the course of the day, and meeting once a week for those 30 days and checking up on each other to see that each one had done his disciplines that week. So for 30 days they met that way and they worked that way.”*

As these students met, a sense of anticipation filled them.  And in time,  God answered them with revival. 

I am not sure that a sudden revival in itself is the best answer to our problems==but then I am not the Holy Spirit. It may be that such an outpouring of the Spirit is exactly what we need.   I am sure, however that the flame of the Spirit must be sought, nurtured, and fanned by the practice of spiritual disciplines and mutual support.  I truly believe that the shallow,  passionless,  listless,  cheap grace which marks most of our attempts at revival will make little difference in the end.  If we do not sense our need, we will not welcome the cure when offered.

It seems to me that the only way we will transform the world is through a faith that has more resolution and passion than the world has for sin.  If the world around us stubbornly persists in godlessness, then we must persevere even more in godliness.  It the world has passion for violence,  sex, and power,  then we must have even more passion for devotion, obedience, and prayer.  That requires the Holy Spirit, and a genuine effort to be seek His face. 

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*Pasted from <http://kimolsen.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/the-asbury-revival-the-great-experiment/>

Faith and Passion

One of the surprising things I've found in our recent sojourn among the Lutherans is that we Presbyterians are not the only "frozen chosen."  Lutherans call themselves that, too.  All this time, I always thought "frozen chosen" was a distinctly Presbyterian epithet.    It's nice to know we are not alone in the freezer.

Now, some Presbyterians may take umbrage with this,  that Lutherans would call themselves the
"frozen chosen."   We seem to take a certain pride in being the frozen chosen--in living  out our faith without messy emotionalism. We even have an answer to that gentle insult--we may have a frozen faith,  but at least it does not spoil so quickly as some other Christians.   We have kept the faith for a long, long time.

Presbyterians are not really cold, nor are we unemotional.  People  often forget that most of the great revivals of American history, including those accompanied by  wild exuberance, by shouting, barking,  dancing and so forth,  broke out first among Presbyterians and were largely led in their early stages by Presbyterians.  Jonathan Edwards'  famous hellfire-and-brimstone sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", was originally preached in a Presbyterian church to Presbyterians, and if the folk tales are true that while he had to ask the congregation to quit crying so loudly so he could finish it,  those were Presbyterians he had to tell to be quiet.

Nevertheless,  we must painfully admit that there are good reasons for calling us the "frozen chosen."  Presbyterians are in general a reticent and reserved bunch. Our dispassionate approach to preaching and worship is shocking to the unaccustomed.  Baptists, Pentecostals, and  African Americans with whom I currently work cannot fathom why Presbyterian do not shout with joy before such a wonderful God as ours.  Frankly, I wonder why we don't sometimes myself. 

In the face of the omnipotent,  majestic, and overwhelming  Lord of the Universe, why are we so unemotional?   Where is our joy in His presence? Where are our tears of fear and awe? Where is our zeal in praising Him?  Aren't our detractors right to wonder why we don't shout for joy?

Emotional reticence was not the way of our Presbyterian ancestors.  One cannot read Calvin, Luther, Knox, or the Puritans without being struck by the passion in their prose.  We cannot listen to "A Mighty Fortress" or read Knox's "Last Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of Women" and think of them as the products of talking heads in an effete university.  These were men of flesh and bone and fire. 

Our emotional reticence does not come from the Bible, which tells us to shout with joy , to weep before the porch and the altar, and encourages us to bring even our worst fears and anger before Him by the example of the Psalms, but is a product of the Enlightenment reason-worship, Platonic dualism, and Victorian prudery.  It is a denial of both the full image of God, which includes His passion, wrath, and delight, as well as of total depravity, which  posits that our heads are as fallen as our hearts.  Furthermore,  our tendency to look upon the emotional excesses of other churches with distain is simply the instinct found in every sinner to spot the mote in another person's eye while missing the log in our own.

The truth is that it does not matter how right our doctrine may be if we do not marry it with spiritual passion.  Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence argues successfully that our ability to understand emotions is a better predictor of success than our ability to reason.  Gestalt psychology, for all its faults,  demonstrates successfully that showing emotion intensifies emotion, that laughing makes us happy, crying makes us sad, and arguing feeds our anger.  The  Old Testament writers in expressing praise used words denoting outward actions not inward feelings--brightening the face, shouting,  even leaping for joy. They understood that we cannot separate having feelings from displaying our feelings.   If we know it, we should show it.

As I said before, Presbyterians are not unemotional people--we are very emotional at times.   But we are sometimes reticent to show them,  so we lack their power.  We'd love to be swept away in praise to the Lord, as were Paul and the Puritans--we really would. But we fear  embarrassment and so we do or say nothing.  We wait for God to excite us,  overwhelm us, empower us,  but when the chance arises, we don't want to show it until we are sure. Uncertain of its propriety, we wait for an awakening of soul that never comes.

C S Lewis wrote of the lion Aslan  (who represents Christ) in The Chronicles of Narnia that he is not a safe lion, not a tame lion, but one that is good.  We among the "frozen chosen" are looking for Christ to be both tame and good.  We want God to bless us, but we do not want to risk becoming foolish while He  does. Our shyness keeps us from embracing His lovely wildness; our fear of uncertainty keeps us from leaping out in faith; our aversion to embarrassment keeps us from  childlike glee.  We will not ride the winds of the Spirit until they are safely in a bottle.  Bottled wind, in the end is nothing but stale air. 

This is not intended to take anything away from Presbyterians (or the Lutherans either).  The historic Protestant traditions have made vast contributions to Christian life and thought. We make the best teachers, the best administrators, the best scholars.  But is it so hard to imagine that we can be more than just scholars, or that the Spirit of God is more than just an intellectual ideal?  Is it possible that we can not only reason like Paul but dance like David, as well?  We have our theology down cold, but  we need more than a cold theology. Revival is more than this. It is being swept away in the wonderful God, in the passion of Christ,  and in the power of the unpredictable winds of the Spirit. 

 I believe that we will never be revived if we are not wiling to release the power of Spiritual passion--to cry over our sins,  to shout over our salvation, to dance with joy and prostrate ourselves in sorrow. As long as we play it safe and keep our feelings to ourselves, our energies  will forever be wasted in the senseless pursuit of composure.   Church will feel like a duty,  worship will feel like a funeral, praise will be joyless, love will be mirthless,  repentance will be tearless,  evangelism will be mere news without  goodness,  charity will be cheerless, and hope will be hopeless.  Our heads may be the rudder of our lives, but we will not get far without the winds of Holy Spirit passion.  Without the fire,  the truth we offer  the world will be as appealing as a frozen steak on a plate. 

Revive us, o Lord. Fill each heart with Your love  Let our soul be rekindled with fire from above.  Amen and amen.

Surfing the Wave of the Spirit

Joy and I were having a conversation the other day about churches and how they grow. This is a bad time for growing a church. For at least the past ten years, church attendance has been falling at a rate of about one percent per year. It is a time of great opposition and disinterest in religion, especially in Christianity. That, coupled with the recession has hurt all churches, especially ours.


What makes a church grow spiritually? I know those things which keep it healthy--love, the preaching of the Word, sound teaching, etc. These make a church more likely to grow. But there are plenty of loving churches where the Gospel is preached and growth is slow or nonexistent.

There are nonspiritual reasons for growth, too. Churches on main roads generally grow faster than churches on back roads. When a church reflects the needs and desires of a particular portion of the contemporary culture, it will grow, too. (There is really no one monolithic "culture" in our world, just wide collections of many cultures, leaving room for almost every kind of church to find a niche.) But this can happen whether or not God is in it, I'm afraid. Growth or lack of it is no sign of godliness.

There are other factors which are also cited for the growth of churches--relevance, purity, concern for the lost, faithfulness, and many others. All of these may have an impact on the growth of the church but none of them in themselves means that the church will grow.

Look at the Christian landscape today. How many churches are growing--I mean really growing? How many are reaching the lost in any large numbers? What we see are many congregations, offering many different techniques and styles, mostly without significant success.

Now think about the churches that are still growing today. They can be high or low church, contemporary or traditional--they can be very, very different both in practice and theology. But there is one thing they all have in common--a sense that the Holy Spirit is there.

The degree to which a church is likely to grow depends upon the expectation of the people that the Holy Spirit will move in their midst. There have to be signs and wonders, not necessarily in the Charismatic sense, but certainly in the spiritual sense. People have to see that something supernatural is going on.

People are drawn to Christ by the moving of the Holy Spirit, not by preaching or praying alone. We must ask of God, and we must see an answer. In growing churches, there is a full expectation that God will make Himself known. They come to church expectantly, not knowing what He will do next, but convinced that He will do something.

People often use sports illustrations to explain the church. Let me suggest a new one --surfing. Churches grow when they catch the wave of the Holy Spirit.

The church is not built on our own effort. It is not a race, where the strong and the fit succeed. It is not a game requiring strength and ingenuity. Church growth is an enterprise powered by the overwhelming power of God. Its force is irresistable, unstoppable, and inevitable. Our task, if we are serious about growing churches, is to look for that power and ride it. It involves less planning and less study of the world, and more planning and more study of God's intentions and actions today. We need to catch the waves. We cannot create them.

The first wave started at Pentecost. On that one day, three thousand people were added to the church. The disciples rode that wave for some time Another wave came when the church was under persecution, through the underground movement of evangelism. All through the history of the church - the Prostestant revolution, the missionary movements, the great awakenings, the holiness, pentecostal, and Charismatic movement, the Wesleyan revivals, the Moody revivals, the crusades of Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, and so forth, we see the Spirit moving in waves and eddies. None of these movements last forever, any more than waves on the sea last forever. Every movement of the Spirit in the church inevitably is brought down by pride, jealousy, and heresy. The waves may crash; the tide remains. God continues to move in the church, using different people and different names. Even so, the church goes on.

As far as we are concerned today we have two choices, we can catch the wave, or miss it. We can ride the Spirit, or be knocked down by it.

If we are to grow in this generation, we must not look to restore the waves that have gone on. Nor should we try to create a wave, molded to what we think it should be. We should look, neither to the present, past, or future, but to God. We should seek Him out, to try and discern where He is working His signs and wonders today. I don't mean finding the next trend or fad, but we should genuinely seek what the move of God is. We are like surfers in the water, looking for the next big swell. When we find it, then we ride it, allowing the power of the wave to carry us forward.

What will the next wave be and when will it come? I have no idea. It is not for us to know really. But we can seek God with all our hearts, and stand eagerly before Him. If we seek to be moved by God, God will move us, and the next wave of the Spirit will come here as well.