C. S. Lewis noted that the one prayer that God almost never grants is “encore.” Lewis wrote that our nostalgia for the “golden moments in the past” can be nourishing and sustaining, as long as we see them for what they are—memories, not blueprints. “Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths,” Lewis argued. “Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing.”
Russell Moore
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I am hard-pressed to think of one congregation that is not divided—or in an adrenal stance of tension about the imminence of division—over the turmoil of the political moment. This should be a time for revival in our churches. Revival is a concept with a long history in American evangelicalism, rooted in the Bible, that says a people who have grown cold and lifeless can be renewed in their faith. It is a kind of resurrection from the dead.
Yet the language of revival is now riddled with cynicism, and is associated with some of the worst aspects of American evangelicalism. Entrepreneurial American evangelicalism built a programmatic structure for “revival”—whether in the spring- and fall-meeting schedules of little Bible Belt churches like the one in which I grew up or in massive stadium events traveling across the country like rock concerts. As The Guardian noted in an editorial after the 2016 presidential election, “In the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth, and this development ultimately eviscerated conservative Christianity in the US and left it the possession of hypocrites and hucksters.”
Some evangelical Christians have confused “revival” with a return to a mythical golden age.