Last year I recall the almost pressured feeling of posting something about the Asbury revival.  It had swept the campus there, and everyone in the Christian world seemed to be talking about it.  Except me.  My Youtube feed was jammed with clips from it, which I admit, I hardly had the inclination to watch.  

I’m writing this post even as the Ohio State University is said to be experiencing a revival event led by, of all things, players from the Ohio State football team.   Is this all real, or an artificial product of Christian culture? 

A revival is notoriously difficult to evaluate.  If you enthusiastically embrace it, the whole thing may prove to be so much religious hoop-la, Christian marketing at its worst.  Criticize it, and it may well turn out to be a move of God and, as a man named Gamaliel once warned, “You might even be found opposing God.”    

Remarking upon the “Asbury Revival,” in Wilmore, Kentucky, an article says, “It may ultimately fall to historians to catalog the long-term consequences of the events of last February and to determine whether they were a revival or something else. For now, looking back after only a year, I believe outpouring is capacious enough to hold a variety of understandings and avoid prematurely defining what unfolded before us.” 1   

That’s right.  We’ll have to wait and see what comes out of the Asbury event before we can say what it was.  When it proves to make significant contributions to redemptive history, then missiologists, church historians, and theologians, can study each of its features, assess the importance of each, and thank God for it.  We’ll also know more of how to cooperate with the work of God in the future.  

At least, ideally.

As I’m preparing chapter three of my book, and interacting with verses in the first chapter of Ezra, I’m forced to think once again about the nature of revivals.  Israel certainly experienced one there, enabling their return to Jerusalem, though it occurred mostly through a remnant.  

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know the value of that revival and return.  In fact, two of the three times the word “revive” or “reviving,” is even used in the Bible, occurs in Ezra.  There, the people of God escaped the most oppressive stranglehold of any that we could ever wander into–Babylon.  

1  Kevin Brown, “What the Asbury Revival Taught Me About Gen Z,” Christianity Today, March, 2024, Online.