Enriching Revival

I have a confession—I am not a revivalist. As an activist type whose spirituality is too often measured by the amount I can accomplish, I have always struggled with the concept that the greatest works of God happen as people gather in churches to wait on God. I am always looking for a message that mobilizes us to hit the streets. So all of the talk over the past few months about the move of God here in Hamilton 150 years ago has created tension for me. On the one hand I have tremendous respect for my many godly friends who are calling us to learn from what happened in the Methodist revival of 1857. On the other hand I long for more than joint worship gatherings where we feel a strong sense of God’s presence.

Don’t get me wrong, I realize my perspective has numerous pit falls of its own, and I am trying to learn from those whose background and calling are different than my own. I have been helped in this by a British prayer movement leader named Martin Scott. In his book Impacting the City he shares some very insightful observations about our longing for revival and how it relates to the ways he sees God at work. I think he gives us some good starting points for developing a more robust perspective on “revival” that our different traditions can work towards together.

He writes—
The word “revival” is a hard one to give definition to. At one level it is not a biblical concept, for if the word is to have any meaning at all it is only applicable to a church that has fallen asleep (or died). Only such a church needs reviving. Surely God never intended the church to sleep, and “revival” language can be dangerous for two reasons: it can suggest that a revival dynamic is abnormal and that such abnormality solves all ills.

Yet the word is applicable in the sense that the church, as we experience it, continually needs reviving. And provided we understand that God desires the church to rise again to the challenge of incarnating the life of Jesus within our culture, it is not an inappropriate term. So long as we do not fall into the “revival-cures-all-ills” trap, it seems appropriate to me to use the term ”revival” as a statement of hope.

I do believe revival is coming—and in measure is already here in many places—but I am agnostic as to how it will be expressed. I am sure there will be some great inbreakings of the Spirit, for that typifies the unpredictability of the wind of God (John 3:8), but in all honesty, my overall hope is that we see the church rise from her sleep and grow increasingly into the fulfillment of her call. Sudden increases might well be more exciting, but an experience of steady growth might well prove to be healthier than a sudden explosion of the life of God. Statistically it has been suggested that the early church grew at some 40 per cent per decade for some 300 years—definite steady growth and, dare I suggest it, truly revival growth. I also consider that steady growth will more likely deal with our wrongly placed desire for God to do for us what He has already challenged us to do. He asks that we work out what He has worked in us; that we grapple with the suffering of creation and so come through to a place of humble stewardship. Hence, steady and consistent growth should indeed prove to be healthier.

If God comes to accelerate things dramatically, and He most surely will, so well and good but, if not, then we need to know what it is we are to get on with, and to set in place. Perhaps there has never been a greater opportunity to demonstrate the manifold wisdom of God, not only to the heavenly powers, but also to those around us. God does have a “meta-narrative” that He is telling, for He is the beginning and the end, and that story must be told and re-told in every generation through a myriad of cameos.

For that story to be told we, as part of the Body of Christ, will need to connect with our community. As a connection is made with the community, the church becomes a redemptive body and enables the setting (people and geography) to begin to connect with the amazing redemptive story that runs from creation to consummation. If the church can embrace the truth that God has called her to be a body of destiny, then sees of destiny can be sowed into the wider community. The story to be told, then, is not our story but His. The challenge facing any church leadership is to flow in such a way that any sub-vision that they are proposing is not centralized in a controlling fashion, but is ready to give way to the wonderful transformation message of the gospel. Too often leaders have developed a vision that is centred in on the growth of the church numerically and its activities—the end result being one of stifling the bigger vision of the church being redemptive in and through all of creation. Any vision developed at a church level can only be temporary. It continually has to die in order that Jesus becomes center stage in God’s meta-narrative that is directed by the Spirit.

Revival the, for me, both speaks of the awakening of the church to fulfill her creation mandate and also of great inbreakings of the Spirit, so that through the church the presence of the future is manifest for any society to view.

Impacting the City pages 15-16

My prayer is that we would experience more and more of the type of revival that Martin Scott envisions. My conviction is that we already have begun to see this kind of move in Hamilton. I pray that we activist types can learn to wait on God to move in a way that allows Him to bring transformation on a level we have never experienced, and that this move results in a steady, continuous growth of God’s kingdom where we learn to work together as the Spirit leads.