Many readers of this blog will be observers of an episode in Kentucky which has been dubbed the Asbury Revival.  Asbury is the home of a small Christian university, and its chapel is the site of a continuous act of worship which has been going on for a fortnight.  People have been travelling from all over the States, and beyond, to attend this service where the claim is that God is working a revival which will spread soon to other places all over the world.  In some ways it resembles the Toronto Blessing.  There are significant differences, the main one being that Asbury has not thrown up yet any named leaders.  Toronto Airport Chapel where the earlier ‘revival’ took place in 1994, was ably led by professional clergy who coordinated the events for several months.

Revivals are complicated things to assess, and part of me was hoping that this Asbury event would quickly fizzle into obscurity before I had to say anything or even think about it.  Then one of the Surviving Church readers sent me an email asking me directly what I thought might be going on.  I answered him fairly quickly but, in the process of doing so, I found my mind generating ideas and thoughts which I find worth sharing with my wider readership.

As long-term readers of this blog will know, I have some personal history of exposure to charismatic events and teaching.  Back in the early 1980s I would say that I identified with aspects of charismatic spirituality.  This fed into several years of an active healing ministry with my wife.  Over a period, I was led to write two books on the topic of healing and address meetings around the country.  Something changed for me in the 1990s when many Christians who openly identified with charismatic styles of theology seemed to insist, increasingly, on a hard-edged style of theology.  I could not follow or identify with this.  I have, from my undergraduate days, found what I describe as the Bible proof text method of doing theology a dishonest and frankly incomprehensible way of discovering the mystery of God.  The opening up that the charismatic styles of prayer had taught me, and which allowed me to share deeper insights, could not be sustained in the presence of Christians whose main concern was to establish whether I was ‘sound’.  By the standards of a card-carrying conservative Christian, I did not pass this test of soundness.

Returning to the phenomenon of Ashbury and the revival that is believed to be taking place, I begin with a number of observations.  The first thing to note is that, in the chapel where the revival is supposed to be happening, there is a dominating preponderance of young people. Of course we would expect this in a university chapel but the bulk of the visitors, of which there are many, are also young. In common with the flag-ship revival churches up and down Britain, we find an apparent resonance between such churches and the emotional and spiritual needs of the young.  The second factual observation I make is the style of music.   I am not sure how to describe the dominating style of music that inevitably appears at a revival event.   Much of what I have listened to on YouTube seems to belong to a slow repetitive style, where there is a strong preference for a minor key.  The distinct reflective mode of this music style helps to further a distinctive mood which seems to enthral the audience.  The appeal does not seem to wane, even over long periods of time.  In my continuing attempt to be as objective as possible, I note that this style of music, culturally speaking, does not fit in with the taste of many older people – the over 35 cohort.  Whatever the spiritual significance of Asbury may prove to be, there is clearly also a strong cultural dimension at work.  If this is a real revival, the cynic might suggest that the Holy Spirit is only interested in working among middle-class Americans of student age.

I have on this blog, in the past, offered my observations on the way that conservative/revivalist Christianity seems normally to be far more accessible to the student-age population than to older Christians.  No doubt someone has done some research on why this should be from the cultural/psychological perspective.  I do not know where such research may be written up, so my remarks here have to be rooted in what I have observed over a lifetime of what goes on in churches of all kinds.  My summary claim, based on my observations of Christian life, is that there is something spiritually genuine at the heart of some so-called revivals, including this one.  Nevertheless, it is not the universal panacea for a declining Church in our culture.  It is unrealistic, indeed impertinent, to expect all Christians across the world to recognise in events like Asbury a full embrace of Christian truth as they have known it. The Christian phenomenon, as it manifests itself across the world, is too varied and too diverse to be wrapped up in one single cultural manifestation.  We would be guilty of cultural and spiritual imperialism to claim such a thing.

I have used the word ‘genuine’ to describe what is going on at Asbury University.  I want to explain how, from my point of view, it contains something to teach all of us.  I have expressed a certain number of qualifying caveats to my welcome of the idea of an Asbury revival, but I want now to consider the potential positives.  I begin with some words of Jesus when he said something to the effect of ‘unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven’.  I have, with countless other preachers, struggled with the meaning of these words.  There is probably no single meaning, but Jesus may be recognising something about the way children apprehend reality much more directly than those of mature age.  Christians of student age, the ones now experiencing revival in Kentucky, seem closer to this capacity to experience a primal spiritual awareness than the older among us. To use the analogy of the onion, older people have far more layers to strip away than the young.  I am wondering whether the ability of ‘gospel music’ to promote stillness and spiritual awareness among some of the young is something we need to understand far better.  Might it not be that this style of music is allowing many young people to regress to the ‘childlike’, even naïve, awareness of God by children that Jesus commended?   This is something that the older among us find increasingly difficult to do.

In my days of studying the phenomenon of Christian healing in the 80s and 90s, I was puzzled by the way that, while ‘miracles’ happened from time to time, there was no way that, from the outside, one could predict who was going to receive healing and who not.  What I observed was that prayer for healing was a worthwhile activity which was sometimes answered by transforming events.  Without going into detail, there was one ingredient that could always be found in every healing episode.  Christians call this ingredient faith.  I use this word rather tentatively as it has gathered to itself a number of connotations which I believe are unhelpful.  I, for one, want to link it back to the childlike primal reaching out to the other, in an attitude of hope and expectation.  This is what Jesus seems to have commended.  It is the sentiment that one hopes to be at the heart of the Asbury revival.  Those who experience this link, this momentary reconnection with God, will find something that lasts, maybe even for a lifetime. 

Will the revival last?  My answer is affected by what I see of the history of revivals.  The power of revival events seems to be hard to maintain.   The energy in them seems to dissipate.  Worse still, the spontaneity of revival is so often destroyed because the unholy juggernauts of institutions appear.  These are the ones that try to attach every new spiritual movement to a money-making machine.  Also, the new experience of ‘faith’ discovered by many individuals, is forcibly diverted into another sort of faith.  This is the one that requires those affected to assent to doctrinal formulae which may have little connection to what they have experienced. This unholy process is vividly described in the book by Reuben Alves, Protestantism and Repression. Asbury may well leave something behind, even if not what Christian leaders want to see – full churches and financial strength for the church institutions.  There may be clusters of new spiritual power inside the hearts of men and women around the world.  This comes as the result of having been for a short time in a new active communication with the transcendent power we call God.

  My hopes for Asbury are tempered with a realistic understanding of the human capacity to destroy spiritual energy because of power games, control and money.  Many of my readers will have shared my dismay at the way institutions so often corrupt those who are part of them.  If there is something alive and spiritually genuine about what is being experienced at this small Christian university in Kentucky, we pray that it may survive these dangers of being controlled by people who are concerned only for their own purposes.  We will see over a period of time whether the parts of it that seem to be genuine, are indeed of God.  If they are, we trust that they will be allowed to remain of God.