What is the Long Renewal?

First, it's a return to the headwaters.

Personal photo, 2015.

“Why do we see so little change in Christians?”

The compassion in the pastor’s voice underscored his concern. I was seated at a table, along with him and four or five classmates. We quietly let the weight of the question sink in.

“In our day,” he continued, “We have every kind of resource you can imagine for studying the Bible. What’s available to us far surpasses what any past generation had.”

He paused, possibly for effect, although it felt as if he was pondering the question right along with us.

“Yet why so little change?”

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I heard that question around 2014.

I recalled it later that decade when I saw the confidence of the New Calvinist movement shattered by pastoral scandal. And as I saw friends drift away to unbelief.

I recalled it again when a small town church asked me to step in and preach for them during a transition. Here, the pastor had served faithfully for thirty years, and a head injury had forced a sudden retirement. The hearts of the people in that church were warm and welcoming, but the congregation had dwindled to around fifteen souls. In a town of five hundred, it was the last remaining church that upheld the Bible as fully God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16).

Some ask, “Why so little change?”

In this town, many were asking, “Why so much?”

After the birth of our first child, my wife and I came to the difficult decision that bi-vocational ministry wasn’t our future. We shared an emotional goodbye with our church. We moved and I found work as a delivery driver. Able to listen to books and podcasts on the job, I took in a wide range of Christian perspectives. I was struck by how fractured the church had become. Although the fault lines had surely been forming for some time, it was still shocking to see the fissures out in the open. The atmosphere was starkly different from what I had discovered a decade earlier as a wide-eyed new believer.

Why so little change?

Why so much?

Both were fair questions. And I was becoming convinced they were related.

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By the early 2010s, Christians in the United States were swimming upstream. And we knew it, even if just on a gut level. Eager for a positive spin, we tried this narrative: although our numbers were dropping, those who remained were becoming more committed and pursuing a deeper understanding of God’s Word. To put it the clunkiest way possible, our quantity was decreasing, but surely our quality was improving.

Unfortunately, this silver lining was likely wishful thinking. A 2022 study by Ligonier Ministries found that almost half of evangelicals¹ agreed with the statement that “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” The same poll discovered that a majority—58 percent—believed that God accepts the worship of all religions.

Around that same time, researchers put numbers to the feeling in the pits of our stomachs. Over the previous 25 years, a staggering 40 million people had stopped attending church. That’s almost 12 percent of America’s entire population. We had been living through the biggest religious shift in our nation’s history. In terms of the headcount, it was larger than all of historic revivals in the United States combined.

Pause and consider the collective weight of our challenges. First, leadership scandals, both high-profile and local, had become an expected part of Christian life². Meanwhile, roughly half of supposed believers lacked a basic understanding of the faith. Further, a colossal number of Americans had stopped bothering with church entirely. For those who remained, the landscape was full of tripwires ready to fuel mistrust and spark further division.

Fortunately, the tide may be turning. Bible sales jumped unexpectedly in 2024. Church attendance has ticked up slightly among younger Americans, men in particular. Even some atheists are realizing that Christianity’s decline has cost our country something priceless.

It’s a shift I’m still adjusting to personally. It can feel like I’ve lived my whole believing life in a fog of Christian disappointment. This new flicker of optimism is compelling, but unfamiliar to me. And even if we do see a genuine Christian awakening in our country, it will come with extraordinary challenges.

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“Why so little change?”

After a pause, the pastor offered these two words: “No application.”

In his view, Christians knew all about the Bible, but few were living like it. In case you’re wondering, this sixty-something pastor was, in his own words, “a once-saved-always-saved guy.” He would have completely rejected any notion that we could earn God’s love or mercy. Rather, he longed to see believers respond to that divine gift with vigor and persistence.

Maybe he was right. And maybe this is where the dots connect. Could decades of too many Christians settling for too little change in their own lives have triggered the landslide of unwanted change we’re now reeling from? Had so little change, in fact, become the cause of so much?

Other factors have surely contributed. We’ve seen extraordinary shifts in technology, politics, and sexual morality in recent decades. And while these have undoubtedly taken a toll, we need to be cautious how much power we attribute to them. That’s because while it’s comfortable to point the finger at changes largely outside the church, it also disempowers us.

The alternative, while it stings, actually offers more hope for the long haul. What we can take responsibility for, by God’s grace, we can change.

“No application.”

He didn’t choose the most inspiring way of putting it. But I believe this seasoned pastor was urging believers to take responsibility for our actions. And that much, I certainly still agree with.

Even so, these days, I’d choose a somewhat different emphasis. I’d say we need to get upstream of our own application, actions, and efforts.

If we’re going to see renewal in our day, the kind that lasts, I think we need to go to the headwaters.

I took this picture from Triple Divide Peak in Northwest Montana. It’s the only point on earth from which water flows into three different oceans, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Arctic.

We need to spend time in God’s presence.

Everything else that is holy and redeeming, everything truly desirable, originates there.

Because in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

How will you seek God’s presence this week? If you’ve been a reader here for a while, you know some of my favorite ways. But if you haven’t, you might actually be at an advantage.

See, this is the heart of the conundrum: the moment I say, to discover God’s presence, try . . .

Then I’ve slipped back into application. Into to-do’s. Which I’m actually fine with. I’ve spent time in Christian circles where to-do’s have gotten a needlessly bad rap. Jesus, you may have noticed, gave a lot of commands.

But He also sought His Father’s presence. And He didn’t always do it in exactly the same way.

So that’s what I want to leave you with this week. It’s not how I intended to end this post when I began. But it feels right to me.

I don’t know exactly how you should seek God’s presence today. Or tomorrow.

But He does.

Ask Him.

1. The survey considered a person an evangelical if he or she strongly affirmed the following four beliefs: 1. The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe. 2. It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior. 3. Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin. 4. Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.

2. Author Paul David Tripp put it this way in his 2020 book Lead: “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.”