Home: A Different Kind of Revival

Growing up the word revival was always understood or interpreted through the lens of congregational church gatherings.  Revival usually meant that I had to attend church not only on Sunday or Wednesday in a given week, but typically nearly every other night as well.  Growing up in a Pentecostal fellowship added its own number of connotations as well.  Revival was characterized by high energy, loud preachers, louder services, crying, dancing, and more music than usual before and after (and sometimes during) the preaching.

It wasn’t until my twenties that I began to revisit the word revival, and exactly what I thought it meant to me.  I began to ask, and attempt to answer, “What is revival?” for my own life.  Not that I no longer believed in all the things I experienced in revivals as a kid, I just felt like I wasn’t quite getting the whole picture.  Like most of what I had considered revival was really just the combined outward display of some of the things that happen to people experiencing earnest revival in their lives.

The answer to me, like so many things it seems, is found in the word itself.  Revival means reviving.  It means to revive—to take something that is dead, or dying; and to regenerate, recuperate, revitalize it.  Like Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones regaining life, it means taking a dry and dusty shell of something and allowing God to breathe back into it His awesome breath.

Revival to me means to find, have, understand, live, and dwell in divine inspiration again.  Like when God inspired scripture to be written, or dust to become man, I believe He inspires His people—the Church—to wake up, to no longer be inanimate objects filling space and occupying time, and to reconnect with Him in a deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably authentic way.

Understanding your deep need for God is often an early step toward salvation.  And many times the first stirrings of revival begin with the authentic whispering of spiritual unrest found within the Church.  Not unrest in the “let’s call a board meeting and rant about inconsequential matters of bureaucratic-nonsensicalness” kind of way—constructive unrest.  Unrest birthed out of the sense that God does indeed wish us to connect with Him in a more meaningful way than we are at present.  This is the kind of unrest that seeks to topple the status quo.

For a generation of people that have witnessed firsthand the pitifully inadequate attempt on the part of most youth ministries to compete with whatever is trendy and popular, we’re looking for something different.  We don’t need, and don’t want, to connect with God through; fog machines, gluttonously-loud music, light shows, or productions.  That stuff isn’t inspired.  Maybe it was, once upon a time.  But that ship has sailed.

Do you know what inspires me?  Finding myself in right relationship through redemption; knowing that I have forgiveness and freedom from sin in God.  Discovering authentic community; belonging to a body of fellow believers that actually care about each other and the community around them.

That’s what I am seeing lately.  It’s a different kind of revival than what I remember as a kid.  It’s a lot quieter (so far), it doesn’t come across like a preplanned production, it is unexpected—though very much welcomed, it is beyond the control and comfort of leadership and layperson, it is without walls or boundaries though it fits, and flourishes, in the hearts of those who deeply seek after earnest connection with God.  

Revival is what happens when the Church rejects, or at least diminishes, everything that distracts from seeking Him.  It is what happens when we find the purity of purpose in pursuit of the Almighty.  Revival is taking in His breathe, filling our lungs with it, and finding His waiting embrace.  It is being revived, being inspired, and being returned—to where we belong in Him.  If salvation is about returning a sinner to the family of God, revival is about returning the Church to the will of God.  Revival is about coming home.