When the gospel connects with a person's deep need, conversion happens. Every evangelical knows this. When the gospel connects with society's deep need, revival happens. Sometimes we forget this.
But the Holy Spirit has a way of reminding us. Early in America's industrial era, when the transition from farm to factory led to a separation of spheres in which women cared for home life while men went out into the world to earn a living, a widespread need for 'family values' arose. Evangelists like Billy Sunday struck a chord preaching against drinking and gambling because they connected the good news of Jesus with this deep need. Likewise, in apartheid South Africa, when the injustice of a race-based social hierarchy threatened the viability of society, Desmond Tutu touched on a deep social need when he preached that the gospel to a hungry man is bread. The freedom movement in South Africa was inspired and sustained by a revival that connected the gospel with society's deep need.
In several segments of America's fragmented church, we hear the rumblings of revival today. Some of these movements only seem partly right to me, but I'm most interested in what they have in common. In most of our low income communities, like the one where I live in Durham, North Carolina, the 'health and wealth' gospel has been hugely popular over the past decade. From Joel Osteen to T.D. Jakes, preachers are connecting the promise of abundant life with people's real economic needs in the here and now. I'm committed to engaging the health and wealth gospel because Osteen and Jakes are partly right: the church has too often spiritualized the gospel to the point that it offers nothing in the here and now. The energy of the health and wealth movement comes from the fact that people are hungry for a gospel that speaks to their material conditions.
But this basic need is also fundamental to movements like Red Letter Christianity. Coming primarily from the position of middle class privilege, several contemporary movements converge here with the common conviction that the stuff Jesus said matters not just for the after-life, but for our lives here and now. Arising out of different church communities, these Red Letter Christians are variously labeled as 'progressives,' 'Emergents,' 'new evangelicals' and 'new monastics.' Though we don't agree on everything, we all have this in common: we feel deep in our bones the need for the hope of the gospel to connect with the material needs of our world today.
This will be the hallmark of America's next revival: an embodied faith that makes the connections between conviction and practice, between Spirit and flesh, between the world that is and the world that ought to be. Something is stirring in a dozen different movements today to teach God's people to pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This one thing is more important than any of the smaller movements we are part of.
If there is a single event driving these various movements, it is 9/11. Unanticipated in so many ways, that irruption of violence on U.S. soil was a wake-up call to a whole generation that something is deeply wrong with our world -- particularly, with its social systems. Of course, the tragic events of 9/11 were only symptoms of deeper problems. But those symptoms opened our eyes to systemic connections between religious extremism and extreme poverty, between unjust wars and unsustainable economics, between dependence on oil and global climate change. Eventually, an analysis of these social problems begins to connect the dots, bringing more and more of us to a frightening conclusion: we can't go on like this. Something has to change.
The temptation at a moment like this is twofold. Unable to see our way forward, we can give into despair. (This is one explanation of why, by some estimates, over half of Americans are now addicted to a substance or destructive behavior). But this is not the only temptation. In the face of uncertainty, we can also succumb to optimism -- to the false hope that, against the odds, we will triumph as a nation or as the human race. This optimism, however, is but the other side of despair. Both are a rejection of the new thing God wants to do.
When we come to the end of our strength, the Bible teaches us that we find true life -- the life we were made for -- in Christ. When an individual realizes this, we call it conversion and celebrate that the one who was lost has now been found. We throw a party and throw our arms around the prodigal son who has come home. When a society realizes this, we call it revival. There's nothing any of us can do to make it happen. But we don't have to. The Holy Spirit moves to connect the gospel with our deep need. And, in the words of the old song, 'when the Lord gets ready, you've got to move.'
Follow Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove on Twitter: www.twitter.com/wilsonhartgrove
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one of the greek word that makes a huge difference regarding the mystery of time is the word , aion or aionion. These words in the greek never meant forever and ever. in fact there was never a word in the language that meant eternity. The word means age. Age has a beginning and end. here is where the fabrication of hell is a place where people go for ever without end. Maybe i just care to much about these thing and dig deeper than most. I have not studied like you have so you probably know much more than i do. I jsut hope you use your studies to teach how to follow God and not how to me a good church goer.
How can we witness violence like 9/11, committed in the name of god, and not realize that it's the fantasy of a supernatural wizard that drives us to reprehensible action?
You don't need the fairy tale. America and the world needs it even less.
but look at their actions. they line up with the repubs that favor such things as pre existing medical conditions to enhance corp profits, the favor tax breaks for the rich, loopholes for corporations, and a society of haves.
if I could speak to one evangel that was not judgmental and did not think they and they alone are going to heaven which jesus stated the least in heaven is greater than john the baptist.
the baptists preach guilt and culpability much better than the catholics and that is saying a lot.
A man died and went to Heaven. At the Pearly Gates, he was met by an angel whose job it was to take him on a tour.
While they were walking through Heaven, the man was surprised to see Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and representatives from all of the world's religions.
He also noticed that there was a wall in a remote corner of Heaven. The wall was so high that he couldn't see its top.
When the tour was over, he asked the angel, "What's behind that wall in the corner?"
The angel replied, "That's where the Baptists are. They think they're the only people up here."
Jesus gave out free food, wine, health care and education, and told his followers to do the same.
The new revival would be the "christian" conservatives living up to that.
Monotheism has done what it was created to do, now the globe is going to Polytheism again, where we will be able to live with one another and not be able to enact laws or murder someone just because they feel offended that their particular blasphemy/sense of the sacred was triggered.
The True Human Revival.
Jonathan, when I am sitting with the young boys we mentor in Harris County Juvenile probation; boys with multiple felony charges against them at ages as young as 10, my bones ache. When I am sitting under a bridge on interstate 45 eating lunch with a person living there, my bones ache. When the teenage prostitutes outside my office, are plying their trade in 105 degree heat, my bones ache. When friends from my neighborhood OD on bars for the third time in a year, my bones ache.
Yes, we need revival, parts of the Vineyard are thriving, while parts remain parched. Jesus bring the rain, I am begging. The rain falls on all under it, under grace. It did rain on Airline Drive today, and as I watched one of the girls standing drenched in it, she looked thankful, thankful for a little relief before her next trick; in Houston, home of: Your Best Life Now.
Here's what COULD help solve at least SOME of them:
A revival of a national jobs program like the WPA and CCC which we had in the thirties.
If we concentrate on what we can do as U.S. citizens of the year 2011, instead of what people said and wrote two thousand years ago, we will have a chance of reducing those problems.
- And what is the "new thing God wants to do?"
I guess it's to "find true life -- the life we were made for -- in Christ."
So God wants us to find true life, but not to be optimistic? I don't get it.
Hopefully, there is something that some of us can do to prevent it.