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Gospel renewal is a life-changing recovery of the gospel. Personal gospel renewal means the gospel doctrines of sin and grace are actually experienced, not just known intellectually. This personal renewal includes an awareness and conviction of one’s own sin and alienation from God and comes from seeing in ourselves deeper layers of self-justification, unbelief, and self-righteousness than we have ever seen before. There is a new, commensurate grasp of the wonder of forgiveness and grace as we shed these attitudes and practices and rest in Christ alone for salvation. Perhaps we have previously said that we were “resting in Christ’s work, not our own work” for salvation, but when we experience gospel renewal, we have a new clarity about what this means in our mind and a new experience of actually doing it with our heart.
Corporate gospel renewal — what has sometimes been called “revival” — is a season in which a whole body of believers experience personal gospel renewal together.1 Over time, all churches, no matter how sound their theology, tend to lose sight of the uniqueness of the gospel and fall into practices that conform more to other religions or to irreligion. Their doctrinal instruction loses sight of how each doctrine plays a role in the gospel message, and their moral instruction is not grounded in and motivated by the finished work and grace of Christ. The leaders of the church must always be bringing the gospel to bear on people’s minds and hearts so that they see it as not just a set of beliefs but as a power that changes us profoundly and continually. Without this kind of application of the gospel, mere teaching, preaching, baptizing, and catechizing are not sufficient.
Richard Lovelace was a student of the history of revivals. He sought to discover what, for all their apparent differences, they had in common. He concluded that while Christians know intellectually that their justification (acceptance by God) is the basis for their sanctification (their actual moral behavior), in their actual “day-today existence . . . they rely on their sanctification for their justification . . . drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience.”2
In other words, revivals and renewals are necessary because the default mode of the human heart is works-righteousness — we do not ordinarily live as if the gospel is true. Christians often believe in their heads that “Jesus accepts me; therefore I will live a good life,” but their hearts and actions are functioning practically on the principle “I live a good life; therefore Jesus accepts me.” The results of this inversion are smug self-satisfaction (if we feel we are living up to standards) or insecurity, anxiety, and self-hatred (if we feel we are failing to live up). In either case, the results are defensiveness, a critical spirit, racial or cultural ethnocentricity to bolster a sense of righteousness, an allergy to change, and other forms of spiritual deadness, both individual and corporate. In sharp contrast, the gospel of sheer grace offered to hopeless sinners will humble and comfort all at once. The results are joy, a willingness to admit faults, graciousness with all, and a lack of self-absorption.3
Because we don’t really believe the gospel deep down — because we are living as if we save ourselves — our hearts find ways of either rejecting or reengineering the doctrine (as in liberal theology) or of mentally subscribing to the doctrine while functionally trusting and resting in our own moral and doctrinal goodness (as in “dead orthodoxy”). As a result, individuals and churches experience a slow spiritual deadening over the years, unless some sort of renewal/revival dynamic arrests it.
Revival can be widespread, affecting a whole region or country, or more narrow in scope, influencing just one congregation or even just a part of one. It can be fairly gentle and quiet or rather sensational. But all revivals are seasons in which the ordinary operations of the Holy Spirit are intensified manyfold. In revival, the ordinary means of grace produce a great wave of newly awakened inquirers, soundly converted sinners, and spiritually renewed believers. The church growth that inevitably results cannot be accounted for by demographical-sociological shifts or efficient outreach programs.
So revival is not a historical curiosity; it is a consistent pattern of how the Holy Spirit works in a community to arrest and counteract the default mode of the human heart. It is surely relevant to ministry in twenty-first-century global cultures, as it is relevant in every culture.
Critiquing Revivals
We cannot sufficiently cover a full history of revivals here. We know that revivals have often had powerful, society-changing effects.4 The most famous revival in American history, the Great Awakening of the early and mid-eighteenth century, had a major impact on the culture and history of both Britain and the United States. And of course there have been other well-known revivals in many other parts of the world.5 Throughout history, revivals have also drawn sharp criticism and suspicion. When William B. Sprague, a Presbyterian minister in Albany, New York, published his lectures on revival in 1832, he devoted his longest lecture to a “Defence of Revivals,” fielding several objections and addressing many of the most common criticisms of revival. He addressed concerns that revivals were unbiblical and “modern,” that they led to emotional excesses and fanaticism, that they split families, and that they undermined established churches.6
This last charge — that revivals undermine the role and importance of the church — is the most persistent today. I want to examine this charge by looking back at the conditions that led to revivalism in the first place. Before the eighteenth century, a person became a Christian through a process that was corporate, gradual, formal, and completely church-centric. First came the presentation of an infant for baptism by the whole family. After that came a long period of catechetical instruction in the church’s historical creeds and traditions. Finally, it was expected that the child would be admitted to the Lord’s Supper as a full communicant. Weddings and funerals in the church were also significant milestones, all observed with one’s family in the presence of the congregation and through forms and traditions that tied all participants in the present to the lives of believers in the past. One’s faith was first inherited and then personally confirmed by the individual through a highly communal process that entailed the support and approval of his or her family, church, and religious authorities.
However, the Industrial Revolution brought profound social changes. Many people were displaced to the big cities to work in factories, which took them away from their parish churches and small towns where everyone knew everyone else and where norms of behavior and participation in institutions could be enforced through social pressure. Second, market capitalism gave individuals (who could now act more autonomously) more goods and services to choose from.
The revivalist ministries of the Wesleys in England and of George Whitefield in America were responses to these cultural realities. They took preaching directly to the masses in outdoor meetings that called people to conversion, not waiting for them to be processed by their local parish churches in the traditional way, because (revivalists felt) this was less and less likely to happen. Revivalists emphasized the decisions of individuals rather than the incorporation of families into a community and called on a dramatic turning experience, rather than a process of liturgy and catechism, for spiritual formation.7
Now we see why Sprague in the 1830s had to respond to the charges that revivalists were undermining the authority of the ordained ministry and the local church. Detractors of revivals said that, in the long run, stressing conversion and revival undermines churches’ ability to instruct and discipline their members. Participation in church comes to be viewed as optional, since salvation comes directly through personal faith and experience — it is not mediated through the church. Emotional experience is placed above doctrinal soundness and holiness of life. Christianity becomes a way to meet felt needs instead of a means of re-forming a person into the image of Christ. The individual is privileged at the expense of the community, so every Christian becomes his or her own spiritual authority, and there is no true accountability.8
They were partly right, of course. These criticisms of revivalism hit home in the eighteenth century (and are equally valid today). In fact, Sprague’s second-longest lecture was on “Evils to Be Avoided in Connection to Revivals,” and here he leveled his own criticisms of the excesses of revivalism, excesses that eventually came to full flower in Charles Finney’s ministry.9 Sprague was part of an influential stream of nineteenth-century Reformed theology that was able to find a middle ground in the debate. Archibald Alexander, the founding faculty member of Princeton Seminary, remained a strong promoter of revivals, despite his recognition of all their possible negative effects. He believed those effects were not inherent to revival and could be avoided or minimized.
Alexander and his successors at Princeton continued to support the basic insights of revival while insisting on the critical importance of both evangelism and spiritual formation. As believers in infant baptism, they understood that baptized children were part of the church and recipients of God’s grace in the life of the family through the sacrament. But they continued to exhort children to put their faith in Christ and counseled them about what conversion looked like.10 When it came time to admit children to the Lord’s Supper, they looked for a “credible profession of faith” rather than simply admitting any child who completed church instruction. While continuing to affirm the importance of the church in the process of spiritual formation, they emphasized the ongoing need to preach and teach the gospel message — even to their own children and congregations.
Revivalism Today
The same debate continues today, as the perils of unbalanced revivalism are still apparent in the church. Extreme revivalism is certainly too individualistic. Our truth-allergic, experience-addicted populace wants transformation but doesn’t want the loss of freedom and control associated with submitting to authority within a committed community. Many “converts” seem to make decisions for Christ but soon lose their enthusiasm because they are offered quick programs for follow-up and small group fellowship rather than a lifelong, embodied experience of community. Many churches do not even have a process for becoming a member. As a result, converts’ lives are often not visibly different from those in the culture around them. The older, more communal processes of traditional churches are better at bringing about a more thorough transformation of life.
However, many of today’s critics do more than lament these effects; they deny the basic premises of revival. They reject the idea that we should call people to conversion if they are in the church. Many aim to recapture something similar to the traditional church life of pre-eighteenth-century Europe, where no one could “become a Christian” except through incorporation into a local congregation. And once baptized and incorporated, this person was a Christian by definition, regardless of personal experience.
I believe this is a mistake for two fundamental reasons. To use biblical terms, this position does not know the times and seasons, and it does not sufficiently account for the heart. Or, to put it more positively, the basic insights and practices of gospel renewal ministry are right for two reasons: they fit our times, and they center on the heart in a biblical way.
Gospel renewal fits our times. What do I mean when I say that revival “fits our times”? The traditional, highly church-centered approach worked well when there was one dominant church and religious tradition in a culture and when the private and public sectors put far fuller weight behind the church. The institutions of society and the shared symbols and practices of common life expressed, confirmed, and reinforced religious beliefs. In such an environment, the culture’s God seemed inevitable and the worldview of our society’s religion seemed plausible to everyone. The traditional model also depended on not having many kinds of churches to choose from. Alternative denominations or religions were absent or were heavily stigmatized. Citizens could choose to be active in their society’s inherited faith (and the local parish) or to just be fairly inactive, but those were the only two realistic options. The social realities were such that virtually no one chose their own faith, let alone their own congregation.
This church-centric model broke down as people became increasingly mobile and society slowly but surely became more pluralistic. North America was the first place where churches had to appeal for members and converts. Americans only came to church if they chose to do so.11 Now wind the clock forward a couple of centuries to today’s pluralistic societies, where the important institutions of our public life do not all point to a unified set of beliefs about life and reality. No one really inherits their belief systems as they once did. People actively choose among competing sets of beliefs and worldviews and must be persuaded through personal appeals to do so.12 I believe this state of affairs demands the revivalist emphasis on persuasion, conversion, and individual self-examination.
Gospel renewal focuses on the heart. I believe this second reason for retaining the basic insights and practices of revival is the more important one. Revivalism’s core insight — that salvation is a matter of the heart — has ample grounding in the Bible. In Romans 10:9, Paul writes, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Virtually all commentaries observe that this means it is not enough to agree with Christian truth intellectually (“declare with your mouth”). There must also be personal trust, a heart conviction.
When the Bible speaks of the heart, it means more than just our emotions. It is true that we feel our emotions in our hearts (Lev 19:17; Pss 4:7; 13:2), but we also think and reason in our hearts (Prov 23:7; Mark 2:8) and even act from our hearts (Eccl 10:2). Our heart is the center of our personality, the seat of our fundamental commitments, the control center of the whole person. What is in the heart determines what we think, do, and feel — since mind, will, and emotions are all rooted there. Paul states in Romans 10:9 – 10 that it is not enough to grasp and assent rationally to Christian truth, though that is absolutely necessary. Saving faith is never less than intellectual assent, but it is always more than that. It combines rational knowledge with the conviction and trust of the heart.
For an example of revival preaching in the Old Testament, consider Jeremiah’s call to the Israelites and his demand to “circumcise your hearts” (Jer 4:4; cf. 9:26; Acts 7:51). Jeremiah’s listeners had the outward sign of the covenant, yet Jeremiah informed them they did not have the inward reality of a new heart (Jer 31:33). The rite of circumcision was the sign of belonging to the covenant community. It functioned much like baptism in the Christian church (Col 2:11 – 12). Anyone who was circumcised had been visibly incorporated into the community of God’s people. And yet, according to Jeremiah, there was more required of them than just the outward signs. Salvation required the removal of a stony heart (Ezek 11:19). The heart had to be cleansed (Ps 51:10) and made steadfast (Ps 112:7).
The New Testament continues to make this distinction between the outward and the inward. In Romans, Paul makes the case that many who were members of God’s covenant people “outwardly” were not so “inwardly,” because “circumcision is . . . of the heart, by the Spirit” (Rom 2:28 – 29). In his letter to the Philippians, Paul declares that in Christ, Christians become the “[true] circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit” (Phil 3:3). Here he ties Christian conversion to the “heart circumcision” of the Old Testament.13 In this chapter, Paul describes his reliance on law keeping and moral attainments (“put no confidence in the flesh” — v. 3) and how he once lacked this inward spiritual reality. The renewal and heart change in Paul’s life came only when he transferred his trust from law keeping to Christ’s imputed righteousness for his confidence before God (vv. 4b, 7 – 9). When Jesus called a religious leader to be “born again” by the Holy Spirit (John 3:7), he was making essentially the same exhortation that Jeremiah had made in calling the people to circumcise their hearts.
Another warrant for emphasizing the heart is the biblical teaching on the relationship between repentance and faith. The summary of Jesus’ gospel given in Mark 1:15 highlights this relationship: “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” In Luke 24:47, Jesus states that “repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in [my] name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.” And when people ask Peter how to be saved, he tells them to repent (Acts 2:38; see 3:19; 5:31). Repeatedly throughout the New Testament, we see that saving faith and repentance are inseparable and that true repentance includes grief and sorrow over our sin (2 Cor 7:10). Second Corinthians 7:11 tells us that repentance includes zeal, indignation, and longing, using a variety of terms to show that repentance is a deep experience that profoundly affects the mind, will, and emotions. Repentance changes the heart. It will never be enough to ask if a person has learned the faith, has been baptized, or has joined the church. If he or she has not repented, it is all to no avail.
Gospel renewal does not simply seek to convert nominal church members; it also insists that all Christians — even committed ones — need the Spirit to bring the gospel home to their hearts for deepened experiences of Christ’s love and power. In Paul’s great prayer for the Ephesians in chapter 3, he prays for his readers that Christ will dwell in their hearts and they may be filled with all the fullness of God. This is noteworthy, since he is writing to Christians, not nonbelievers. By definition, all Christians already have Christ dwelling in them (1 Cor 6:19; Col 1:27) and have the fullness of God (Col 2:9 – 10) by virtue of their union with Christ through faith. What does Paul mean, then, by his prayer? He must be saying that he hopes the Ephesians will experience what they already believe in and possess — the presence and love of Christ (Eph 3:16 – 19). But how does this experience happen? It comes through the work of the Spirit, strengthening our “inner being” and our “hearts” so that as believers we can know Christ’s love (see v. 16). It happens, in other words, through gospel renewal.
This fits perfectly with what Jesus declares about the work of the Holy Spirit in John’s gospel: “[The Holy Spirit] will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you” (John 16:14). The phrase “make known” indicates a momentous announcement, a declaration that grabs attention. The Holy Spirit’s job is to unfold the meaning of Jesus’ person and work in such a way that its infinite importance and beauty are brought home to the mind and heart. This is why in the letter to the Ephesians Paul hopes that Christians, who already know rationally that Christ loves them, will have “the eyes of [their] heart . . . enlightened” (1:18) so they will “have power . . . to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (3:18). Paul’s prayers in Ephesians show that Christians can expect the Holy Spirit to continually renew their boldness, love, joy, and power as they go beyond merely believing in the things that Jesus has done to experiencing them by the work of the Spirit.
Unbalanced revivalism indeed undermines the work of the established church. But balanced revivalism — a commitment to corporate and individual gospel renewal through the ordinary means of grace — is the work of the church. This is because it is possible (even common) for a person to be baptized, to be an active member of the church, to subscribe to all biblical doctrines, and to live according to biblical ethics, but nonetheless to be wholly unconverted. Revivalist ministry emphasizes conversion and spiritual renewal, not only for those outside the church, but also for those inside the church. Some need to be converted from clear unbelief; others need to see, to their surprise, that they’ve never been converted; still others need to sense their spiritual stagnation.
In commenting on “the truth of the gospel” (Gal 2:5), Martin Luther says the gospel is for us “the principal article of all Christian doctrine . . . Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.”14 If it were natural or even possible for our hearts to operate consistently from the truth and in the life-giving power of the gospel, we wouldn’t need to have it beat into our heads continually. We wouldn’t need a persistent, balanced, revivalist ministry of gospel renewal. But of course it isn’t possible; and so we do.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Have you ever experienced spiritual renewal in a corporate setting as described in this chapter? If so, how would you describe it? How did it differ from a more personal experience of renewal?
2. What training currently takes place in your church for teaching children and new believers, and what three things could you do differently after reading this chapter?
3. What does it mean to say that “the basic insights and practices of gospel renewal ministry are right for two reasons: they fit our times, and they center on the heart in a biblical way.” How does gospel renewal ministry fit our times, and how is it uniquely focused on the heart?
4. How can you bring more of a gospel renewal focus to your existing ministry?