Revival

Kingdom Grace has a serious
post on false prophecies of revival. There was also a humorous (but so
close to the truth) piece on Lark News last month, entitled Holy Ghost
neglects to turn up at revival. Both have prompted lingering thoughts about
my past involvement in revival and prayer movements to come more to the surface.
I have also been recounting how my thinking has developed on beyond those
movements.

In the mid-1990s, the ‘Toronto Blessing’ profoundly affected
me for the better. God did something through that to put me back together after
a broken engagement and prolonged spiritual abuse. I’m not saying he couldn’t
have chosen other vehicles, but what he used was the TB.

That movement got connected in with revivalist tendencies.
Before the Vineyard movement disfellowshipped the Toronto
Airport church around late 1995, John Wimber had apparently (and wrongly)
prophesied imminent revival at some meetings in London. To go to Toronto was to
encounter all sorts of people, and a church hooked on Zionist eschatology (not
central to Vineyard theology, in my understanding). I preached about revival,
expecting it, although I hope not falsely prophesying it. Nicky Gumbel of the
pro-Toronto Holy Trinity Brompton had a
book out around this time on the subject that influenced me.

In 1997 came Princess Diana’s death and the ‘Diana
prophecy’, where God was said to be moving in the UK faster than the
flowers were being cleared from the streets (a prophecy that was partly given
before Diana died, you may recall). Excitement increased. Surely, we were on
the brink of something big spiritually in the UK. But we didn’t see anything
that looked like revival, not even something that was a new manifestation or
interpretation. We saw further decline.

Around this time, Medway Celebrate was launched in
the Medway Towns, where I was now serving as a minister. I was invited to join
the team. I hadn’t appreciated when joining just how committed it was to the
spiritual warfare approach of Ed Silvoso
and concomitant controversial beliefs in ‘territorial spirits’.
There was much talk of unity in prayer to bring revival, reading of Elijah List
prophecies and networking with other prayer networks in the Thames Gateway and M25 areas. I’d
hate to suggest it was all bad: far from it. Christians came together across
boundaries. There was some fine worship. Silvoso was strong on encouraging
Christians to bless non-Christians, rather than curse them. I made many fine
and caring friends in the Celebrate team. However, the governing theology was
one where everything had to be prayed in, there was little about concrete
action.

One day, a then-local Baptist pastor called Darren Blaney did the
ten-minute preach at Celebrate (it was a midweek lunchtime meeting). Darren
spoke from Acts chapter 1, if I remember. His question was what do we do while
revival isn’t here. I don’t recall specifics, only that it was brave and
honest.

In 2002, I went back to my first church in Hertford to take
Church Anniversary. I was led to Jeremiah 29 as my text, the prophet’s letter
to the exiles. It has become one of my fundamental texts since then. Since
then, my preaching seems to have been preparing people for exile rather than
revival. Surely, Christians in the West are in some kind of exile. For all the
talk of revival, it isn’t here (yet?). We currently have to live as exiles, and
yet the prayer and revival movements rarely help people with that. And what if
God opted for exile, rather than revival? Or what if the revival were to come in
many decades’ time, as it did for Judah? What if, when it happened, the return
was patchy, and in dribs and drabs, sometimes half-hearted, like the return
from Babylonian exile? What do we do for people with shattered dreams? These
are not questions from a lack of faith: they stem from pastoral necessity and
honesty.

So do I want to ditch all the prayer and revival talk? Not
entirely, actually. A friend of mine called Linda Ashford introduced me to
a prayer movement she was involved in. She called it ‘Picking up the baton’. It
started with a year of prayer for the counties of East and West Sussex, with a
view to it spreading, county by county, and right up to the Orkneys. She quoted
a maxim of Steve Chalke’s, that
Christians should be about ‘intimacy and involvement’ – intimacy meaning prayer
and worship, involvement meaning getting our hands dirty in the community. I’m
interested in a prayer and action movement. I’m interested in one that won’t go
‘pop’ like a balloon if revival isn’t around the corner. We’re here for the
long haul, not the quick fix.

Actually, it’s not just about the quick fix, malevolent as
that is in an instant society. I also believe the yearning for revival is about
us wanting to feel significant, not just going through a ‘day of small things.’
We’d like to feel that we are part of a defining epoch in history, where God
does amazing things, that people will write about us, or at least our generation,
in years to come. We know we don’t belong on the pages of the closed canon of
Scripture, but we’d like to be the cause of much ink in future church
histories. It’s closely allied to the interest in the prophetic – not just
because there are prophecies of revival (it’s been around the corner since the
mid-1990s, but still hasn’t come) – but because a certain understanding of
prophecy would make it feel like Big Things are happening before our eyes. Some
of that most unhealthy trend, Christian Zionism, is undoubtedly infected in
that way.

At the same time, I want to keep the prayer element central.
I’ve had enough of prayerless action movements in the church, too, or social
action Christianity whose contribution to prayer and worship is liturgies of
the hectoring and lecturing variety.

And I’m not ditching the ‘gifts of the Spirit’, either.
Along with some of the post-charismatic bloggers such as Kingdom Grace, RobbyMac, Jamie Arpin-Ricci and Brother Maynard, I still
see a strong and important place for them. However, as Kingdom Grace says in
her post Temple
Tantrum, there is a place for them being exercised quietly and humbly,
without people having to build up a platform ministry and a following to
generate income for themselves. (Whether I count as post-charismatic, I don’t
know; I await the publication of RobbyMac’s
book in April, but maybe labels aren’t the biggest thing to worry about.)

Somewhere in all this, charismatic and Pentecostal
Christianity needs a radical reimagining. The hype and lust for sensationalism
have been the toxins infecting the living water. Movements that have recovered
something authentically biblical in the area of spiritual gifts (but which have
sometimes arrogantly called themselves ‘Full Gospel’, as if they had a complete
handle on the truth) have not always matched these with other critical biblical
values, such as humility, servanthood and sacrifice. The failure to marry gifts
of power with godly hearts has been catastrophic.

Prophecies have been given during this period of heightened
expectation for revival that anonymous people would lead a new move of God.
These are the prophecies that have the most authentic ring of truth to me. They
have not been taken seriously, in my estimation. People have latched onto the
‘new move of God’ bit, but neglected the ‘anonymous people’ component. Too much
is at stake. We ape the world in the creation of our superstars – who, although
they resemble large fish in a small pond, nevertheless do quite nicely out of
it. Some of the superstars would lose their meal tickets.

Like congregations who don’t show up on Good Friday but cram
the building on Easter Day, Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity needs to dwell
at the Cross. Not only so that we can repeat evangelical mantras about Jesus
dying for the sins of the world (much as I emphatically believe that), but so
that our lifestyles may be reshaped, in order that we might truly live, and
bear the life of Christ to a needy world. Then – with a combination of
‘intimacy and involvement’ – we might see more remaking of a broken society,
just as the revivalist tendencies long for.

All this is basic Christianity. It’s Luther’s theologia crucis writ large. I find it
frightening that we so need to come back to basics (if I dare use that
tarnished expression). However, it is a recovery of Cross-centred basics that
will enable us to live in exile and work for any revival God might be pleased
to grant.

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