Revival
Around the mid 1990s, a spiritual phenomenon broke out in a church in Canada. Before too long it had spread to churches around the world, including my church. It involved people laughing, and at times moving their arms and legs uncontrollably and involuntarily and even making animal-like noises. Before long our church was promoting it wholeheartedly as a move of God. We had a prophesy related to us that what we were experiencing was ‘just the beginning’ and it began to be preached that the movement was the start of revival, perhaps on a scale never seen before. After a while, we began holding mid-week services advertised as "revival meetings". A top leader mentioned the possibility of having to extend the size of our church building, or even of having to hold services outside in the future due to the huge number of people who could soon become Christians. We started leadership training because we thought that we would all need to be leaders of the new Christians. Revival seemed to become a major focus at my church, with a constant expectation and regular preaching that it could happen very soon and in a massive way.
After a while, I began to question whether the revival was really going to come. I was aware that other Christians, both in my country and overseas, had been praying for revival and it had not come. A christian newspaper (Challenge Weekly 27/4/99) reported that in America: "In spite of intense efforts by Christian ministries in the last five years to facilitate national revival, 1998 brought about no change in the percentage of adults who are born again Christians." I noticed that we were putting a lot of trust in a few scraps of Scripture that didnt seem to me to be "black and white" in their meaning. I started to feel that we were too focused on it, perhaps at the expense of other things we should be doing as a church. The fact that many other Christians were saying the second coming would occur around the year 2000, led me to keep an open mind about whether my church had a monopoly on knowing what was about to happen.
In my church, the new spiritual phenomena faded, but the expectation of immanent revival stayed ... and stayed. In 1998, a key leader said that God told him that revival will break out across my city by the end of 1999. When four people got saved at a service in April ‘99, it was suggested that revival could be starting at that service. From what Ive heard, some are now expecting something revival-related to happen in the year 2007. My research of other religions led me to find that the of postponement of expected big events when they dont occur, is common1 to many small Christian groups. I finally concluded that although a revival involving my church was possible, I didnt think it was likely. In the end I took the attitude of a character in a song I heard, who says "Im no quitter, but I finally quit living on dreams."2
Clarification: by “revival”, I mean an increase in the size of a congregation of at least 100%, where the increase happens quickly. The new members would be new Christians, and the increase would be due to a work of God himself, rather than new evangelistic strategies or increased evangelistic efforts.
Footnotes:
1. In the song Lucille. Hal Bynum/Roger Bowling. ATV Music/Andite Invasion Music adm. by Music Corporation of America, Inc. BMI.
2. This has happened throughout history, EG the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore, predicted the end would come in 1260, and then revised the date to 1290 when it didnt occur (src: Messianic Revolution, by D. S. Katz & R. H. Popkin, Pub. Hill and Wang 1999).