September 11, 2007
Revival
I think it’s safe to say that revivals have gone out of favor in today’s church. It’s probably been over 25 years since our church has held one, but I can remember week long events where contests were used to encourage members to ‘fill a pew’ on a specific night. The focus seemed to be on getting friends, family and the un-churched into a service where the Spirit had a chance to work on their hearts. Looking back I think our efforts may have been somewhat misguided. Webster defines revival as ‘an act or instance of reviving; a new presentation of something old’. The heathens we invited had nothing to revive - it’s we believers who need spiritual CPR.
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Gail;
-----I remember when your church used to have revivals. I went forward at one of those and was baptized. Mom had taken me to church regularly for a year or so when I was about four or five. Dad took me to church a few times when I was older. And, of course, there was the series of annual vacation Bible schools before my teen years. So I always knew I had to face this Jesus thing, and I never considered it anything but real. When I went to that revival 38 years ago, I experienced it as my reawakening to an issue I had dealt with more responsibly in my childhood. From this first impression of revival, I have always understood that, although the lost are invited to it, its purpose is to raise the spirit of the church.
-----But, so much for impressions. I experienced several other revivals since then. I began to wonder why there was so much preaching about the basics of salvation. I couldn’t miss all of the encouragement to bring the lost, bring the neighbors, and the guys from the other church, “They need saved too!” Like you, I continued to get hung-up on the word ”revival” and on my first impression.
-----I lost interest in revivals because I found no meat and potatoes at them, just a lot of emotion. I began to notice there was quite often no meat and potatoes on Sunday mornings either. Before I was twenty it bothered me that so much of the Christian life was about bringing everyone else into the church and dealing with their sins, rather than bringing ourselves there for dealing with our own spiritual growth and sincerity.
-----It is funny, sometimes, how tiny coincidences serve interesting tidbits to the soul. On the way to work yesterday morning I noticed a large “REVIVAL” banner stretched between two posts in front of a Pentecostal church. I felt the nostalgia as I drove by. And my thoughts went to the way we adopt different practices to reach the same goals. Whether we invite the community into our “revival” to preach milk and Gerber’s, or whether we abandon the revivals, the hymns, the communion tables, pulpits, and altar calls on Sunday mornings to preach milk and Gerber’s, the goal is still to fool the congregation into thinking they are being fed while attending the front door with a giant shoe horn.
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