Are We Truly Ready for Revival?

It can be a fine line between a miracle and a misfire.

Personal Photo. Glacier National Park, 2015

The feeling may seem unfamiliar, but Christians are indulging in a bit of optimism. Bible sales unexpectedly surged in 2024. From intellectuals like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson, to entertainers like Russell Brand, more high-profile figures seem to be taking Christianity seriously. And believers were buzzing about all of that before Wesley Huff made the historical case for Jesus’ resurrection to Joe Rogan’s twenty million listeners.

After two decades of declining church attendance, the tide may finally be turning.

But we’ve also seen our hopes dashed before.

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“This is revival!”

I had just stepped into the aging warehouse where my church gathered. The claim was directed at someone else, but I clearly remember who said it.

Around fifty years old, Steve was the greeter every church dreams of having. “Aggressively friendly” is how a pastor once wryly described him. It was 2011, and I don’t know if Steve was aware of the energy that surrounded New Calvinism. He might have just been excited to see an uptick in young people, men in particular, coming to church.

But was he right?

Had I, a wide-eyed new Christian, unwittingly stumbled upon a revival?

The movement’s leaders didn’t seem to think so. Published in 2010, A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories that Stretch and Stir is by Collin Hansen and John Woodbridge. I first encountered the book in my church men’s group back in those days, and I recently picked it up again. Hansen was an influential figure in New Calvinism, having coined the phrase, “Young, Restless, and Reformed.” But in the book, he didn’t suggest that revival was underway. Instead, he and his co-author expressed hope it might yet emerge. They included chapters dedicated to great historical moves of God’s Spirit, urging believers to reflect on them. And they encouraged people to pray for revival, like Habakkuk did during a desperate chapter in Israel’s history:

Lord, I have heard of your fame;

I stand in awe of your awesome deeds, O Lord.

Renew them in our day,

in our time make them known;

in wrath remember mercy

Habakkuk 3:2

A God-Sized Vision points out that the word translated here as “renew” is the Hebrew chaya, which means “to bring back to life.” It can also be rendered, “revive.”

A prayer for revival is asking God to raise the dead.

Revival brings resurrection. Without seeing new people raised from spiritual death to new life in Jesus Christ, we would never claim to be in the midst of revival.

And such times also bring deep refinement to those who already believe. A God-Sized Vision recounts events that took place in Wales, India, Korea, China, and several countries in East Africa. The denominations, theological particulars, and ministry styles involved varied widely. But this theme was common: revival often begins with a deep spirit of repentance taking hold inside the church.

But are we ready to pray for that?

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In wrath remember mercy.

Few Christians today would call the New Calvinism of the early 2010s a revival. By the middle of the decade, just as the movement had attained significant influence, it began to splinter. This fracturing was often fueled by politics, especially matters surrounding race and Trump. And overlapping with that turmoil, a troubling number of pastors in the Reformed camp were dismissed for moral misconduct. You likely know some of the famous names. And as author Paul David Tripp observes, those were only the tip of the iceberg:

We have all been witnesses to the fall of well-known pastors with a huge amount of influence and notoriety, but for every public falling, there are hundreds of unknown pastors who have lapsed, have left both their leadership and their church in crisis, or are spiritual shells of the pastors they once were.¹

Revival doesn’t have a single, clear-cut definition. Nor is it immune to division. But Christians will always be reluctant to apply the term to an era from which many believers still carry spiritual scars.

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I have no idea whether the micro-trends captivating Christians right now will turn into a spiritual awakening. Our country is in desperate need of one, and I’m praying that something extraordinary is, in fact, building.

But to do so, I have to actively fight against my cynicism. One reason is that technology seems to only accelerate the hype cycle. Ascendant in the early days of social media, New Calvinism was a coherent movement, if not a revival, by the time its stock became overpriced. Now we have an army of online pundits trying to anticipate the trajectory of spiritual trends.

Maybe I’m preaching to myself here. I get it. It’s exciting. But we have to keep our perspective. Regardless of what emerges spiritually in the near term, the next couple of decades will likely be a slog for Christians. To even return to church attendance levels from twenty-five years ago, we’d probably need a revival larger than any America has yet seen. Such a statement misses something crucial, though. That’s because revival is never a return to what existed before. It’s a step into what God is doing next.

Such strides can be powerful, yet also short-lived. The first revival that the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards experienced began in Massachusetts in June 1734. Within a year, the momentum had already faded. Edwards went on to witness a series of spiritual outpourings that came to be collectively known as the First Great Awakening. Yet even as momentous as that time was, the holy fervor still waxed and waned unpredictably. Revival alone, it turns out, can’t fuel a lifetime of discipleship.

Then what can?

That’s the question driving this blog, The Long Renewal. In an age of fleeting trends, my hope is to remind Christians that profound works of God-given renewal usually span decades. Such works may occasionally surge with the electricity of revival. But, more often, they involve whispered prayers and patient toil.

The handful of subjects I’ve written on so far (prayer, psalm singing, working with your hands) leaves a lot of gaps. A complete guide to Christian living, this isn’t. But, in a way, that’s the point. I feel like popular books on spiritual formation, past and present, tend to offer so many practices that most believers quickly get overwhelmed. Or such books may produce a brief burst of enthusiasm that soon fades.

I think you’ll be better off if you take the perspective that you’re pursuing long-term renewal, say over the next ten or twenty years. One way this helps is by allowing you to start small. Over a long time frame, we can more easily imagine how even minute changes could prove transformative. If you haven’t tried praying the Bible yet, begin there. You’ll be amazed at how simple, yet powerful, this habit is.

Or you can rest today and ponder habits again tomorrow. Salvation, like revival, can’t be earned or produced by performance. It’s a gift of God’s grace, received through faith in his Son, Jesus Christ. To know God is to have a treasure you can simply pause and enjoy. It’s an inheritance than only grows as we share it with those unaware of the Lord’s goodness. It’s a blessing we can celebrate with our brothers and sisters who we worship alongside.

And as we praise God together, we’ll keep praying for his Spirit to move.

1. Paul David Tripp, Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church, 2020.