A Drug Called Revival

Revivalism is firmly back on the map as the great hope of many churches. One commentator reckons that at the height of the Toronto Blessing, some 30,000 British Christians flew to the Canadian epicentre in search of blessing, spending an estimated £24.6 million in airline tickets alone. So what does it all mean? Is revival a desperate attempt to capture the media spotlight, or a drug to dull the pain of church decline – or what? Paul Roberts thinks it over.

Excuse me, but am I missing something? Apparently, rumours have started flying around the charismatic wing of America that revival has broken out in Britain, so it looks like we're set for summer of fun with revival-junkies from around the world descending on the tarmac of Heathrow looking for the next thing after Pensacola. I feel a bit like re-writing Mark Twain's aphorism to read: 'Sir, news of my re-birth has been grossly over-exaggerated.'

RELIGIOUS HANGOVER

As a Welshman, I'm very ambivalent about revivals. Apparently, Wales had one in the first decade of this century which led to a wave of conversions, expansion of chapel building and enough 'hwyl' to keep the Morriston Orpheus Choir and the terraces of the (late-lamented) Cardiff Arms Park ringing for decades. Yet it appears that its effect on churches in Wales was rather akin to a hard drinking session after a victorious rugby international, only more protracted – two years of exuberance followed by eight decades of religious hangover.

In the latter part of this century, the religious decline in Wales has been more precipitous than that of England, with one principal factor being the inability of those churches most influenced by the 'revival' to cope with the realities of a changing world. My teenage memories of Welsh church life are of the constant, and constantly postponed expectation of 'revival' which peppered many evangelical sermons. If God had done it once, surely he was going to do it again.

Over time, the psychological aspect of revivalism has come to interest me. It appears, firstly from my experiences in Wales, but more recently from contact with the charismatic network of England and the United States, that revivalism could actually be a form of corporate neurosis that besets a church once is gets into a pathological loss of self-confidence.

The Bible directs the church to Christ as the grounds for its confidence, but when declining church statistics and an increasingly disinterested populace crowd in on our perspective, churches reach for some kind of ejector-seat, an instant 'put it all right' button. What else could be expected from people formed by a technological culture?

COPING MECHANISM

Yet there seems to be considerable vagueness over exactly what a revival is. What are the statistical boundaries which define when a period of rapid church growth is or is not a revival? Given this vagueness, the word 'revival' becomes a kind of totem which bears all our feelings of ecclesiastical inadequacy and the struggle of maintaining faith in the midst of declining observance. What much talk of revival has failed to come to terms with is that those events in church history which are commonly described as 'revivals' were almost impossible to predict.

Sociological analyses of sudden spurts of Church growth point to various factors which contributed to it, but these seem to be so unique in each circumstance, that no clear patterns emerge. Even those features which are common in many (but not all) 'revivals' seem to offer little hope for Britain or other churches of the West: cultural isolation, poor communications, political or economic disenfranchisement, linguistic oppression, strong residual Christian faith not adequately expressed by established church forms, strong (non-Christian) religious background… not exactly yer HTB.

By contrast, 'revivalism' provides a well-tried coping mechanism which is endemic throughout the West. As someone who grew up in Wales, a land where hundreds of churches have lived and died in a state of permanent intoxication to the drug of revivalism, the growth of a similar revivalism in English charismatic circles concerns me.

Like its twin-sister, millennialism, revivalism stands wanting when contrasted with the picture of the faith of the church in the New Testament. Ultimately, to commit all your energies (not to mention your airmiles) to the hope that God will or will not do something in the here and now, seems to fall far short of the Christian life of hope and faith.

EASTER FAITH

The Easter faith, though it is rooted in the historic resurrection of Jesus, looks to an unknown future for its fulfilment. In the meantime, Christians are called to live in a hope which is expressed through a very ordinary holiness of unspectacular day to day living. The search for a spectacular, media-attention-grabbing revival or second-coming-in-our-lifetime arises from our desire to have our personal religion justified in the public realm. But why do we need this sort of justification, when a far greater one has been won for us already by the raising of Jesus?

I suspect that this is not what the world is really hungry for, either. Increasingly, this spiritually-aware generation seems to be hunting for the one thing that doesn't come cheaply or quickly. It's looking for personal integrity, for wisdom, for a solid foundation – beyond immediate satisfaction or instant justification – in the very being of eternity. It's not looking for synthetic hope, gained at the price of an airline ticket. It's looking for the real thing, and I suspect that as time goes on, more people will be prepared to pay a far greater price to get it.

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