Is A Big Fat Audacious Hairy Revival On Its Way?

Is a big fat audacious hairy revival on its way? Is that raincloud the size of a man’s fist about to shower down a typhoon’s worth of spiritual rain on a dry and parched land? Is the quiet revival going to get noisy? Is Protestantism in France going to sprout again for the first time since the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre?

So many questions!  But yet again, there are signs that something is afoot. or a Bigfoot if you like! So I ask again: Is it big? Is it fat? Is it hairy? Is it audacious? Is it a revival?

Who, apart from God, truly knows! But let’s go with it for a moment. It’s super encouraging reading reports out of the United States via The Gospel Coalition website about the sharp increase in university students inquiring about the gospel or actually becoming Christians. Dare we use the word “harvest”?

You can have a read of Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra article here. She’s a good investigative writer, so don’t dismiss this. Something is going on.  We’ve seen the stirrings of something across the West, even – as I reported -, in France recently. It feels like some dots might be joining up.

Interestingly, much of it comes off the back of a realignment in the wider intellectual culture about the place of the Christian faith in the West. It’s as if God has used the secular prophets to point out the obvious problems in a culture that abandons God, before stirring their own hearts first.

See for example historian podcast extraordinaire Tom Holland, public intellectual and former Muslim/former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author and political scientist Charles Murray, as well as Larry Sanger of Wikipedia fame.

Here’s the thing: While these types are X-Gen and older, this is not where the fruit is coming from. This is being labelled a “Gen Z” revival. And from what I have been saying, and plenty others have been observing the past few years, there’s a meaning and purpose vacuum in our culture, especially among that cohort.

Christian unions here in Australia, and in the UK and the US, have seen sharp uptakes of students, especially young men, turning up to ask about the Bible and to join small groups. I’ve had plenty of offline conversations about that. So it’s probably time to take this a little more seriously than some of the naysayers are naysaying or some of the nervous nellies are nellying.

And what are they naysaying and nellying about? The same stuff really. It’s not big enough! It’s not fat enough! It’s not hairy enough!  It’s not audacious enough! It’s not revival enough!

Okay okay, enough “enough” for a while! Whatever is happening, surely it’s something. Though perhaps those who have built a whole cottage industry on how radical we have to do church, or how we have to sell buildings, or change our messaging, or give up on sermons, or become more epistemologically humble (aka junk the authority of Scripture) don’t want a revival that doesn’t confirm their biases?

Sometimes it feels like we play a dirge and no one mourns, and then we play the flute and no one dances and sings.  Are we so cynical about the impact of the gospel, or so jaded by the “false starts” that we can’t rejoice in this? Bigger than what? Hairier than what? More audacious than what?

And let’s face it, if this is revival it’s against the flavour. But against the flavour of what Against the flavour of our expectations/ But wouldn’t you expect that if the revival was from God and not from us. The Wesley revival in England didn’t occur when the gin palaces were being emptied out, but when they were full!

Come to think of it, God sent a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief to bring joy to the world. God sent a servant to be king. God sent a crucified man to be worshipped by all. It’s almost as if God’s ways were not our ways!

Hence it kinda makes sense that the West has, up until recent times, been “full gin palaces” all the way down, so to speak. The whole vibe over the past decade has been the steady decline of the gospel in the West, with the confident prediction that as the older generations died out there would be less replacements in the younger generations. Hey I even wrote a  book that assumed that!

That was the accepted narrative, especially as the younger set appeared more progressive. And even more so as they seemed to scorn traditional ideas around sexuality.

Until of course, they didn’t. Didn’t all keep becoming progressive. There’s a definite backlash against the progressive stance culturally and politically, even if the institutions are still captured. But what did progressives expect? Well, victory, that’s what they expected. But that would go against the flow of actual history, as opposed to the busy rewriting of history that has gone on the past five decades in the academy.

And of course, the sexual revolution has created all sorts of trauma. When the only standard for what is right and wrong is consent, and even that is no longer a secure standing in people’s minds, is it any wonder that things have swung back towards a more sexually demur culture.

Add into that mix the toxic effects of online porn, the lie of the rainbow crowd that same sex marriage would not lead to all sorts of other problems (child surrogacy on a grand scale, gender ideologies that fly in the face of biology, reality and relationships, and polyamory being the new black), and suddenly everyone is starting to wonder where this is all headed.

Which kinda tells you that the mainstream churches – and the likes of formerly evangelical churches that have become revisionist on sexual matters in line with the culture, are set for a slow, painful death, if they are not there already. Spiritually if they have gone down that line, they are already Zombies, they just can’t see it yet.

Of course many people who come to investigate the claims of the gospel in these turbulent times will walk away. No surprises there surely. Jesus’ own parable in Mark 4 lays out the four responses to his kingdom message from the very beginning: outright rejection, acceptance until it becomes socially unacceptable by peers and allies, acceptance until the lure of wealth and stuff hits hard, and then fruitfulness.  One quarter hang around and produce a great crop. To be honest, I’d take those odds.

What strikes me from the article at TGC is the surprise expressed by Christian union staff at universities in the US by the sudden influx. Now, admittedly this is off a low base. And I want to remind my Australian and UK readers that it’s not the case that the USA figures for active Christianity among students are all that high.

It’s easy, but lazy, of us to say that the situation in the USA is all that much different to ours., So as the article states, the leader of Campus Outreach at University of Illinois in Chicago, Tony Dentman, is used to figures a little more like our own.

Dentman has spent the last eight years working at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He’s never been able to get kids to come to a large weekly gathering. He was feeling good that about 100—out of UIC’s 33,000 students—were coming to small Bible studies.

So nobody was more surprised than Dentman when 90 kids showed up to his first attempt at a larger gathering this fall—and 80 kept coming back each week. Before his staff even leaned fully into evangelism, young people began coming to Christ. With intentional evangelism efforts, momentum took off. Now more than 200 students are plugged into small group Bible studies, learning God’s Word and growing in their faith together.

Get that? In eight years, a percentage of around 0.003 per cent of students attending a weekly Bible study. Those are UK and Australian figures. Maybe even worse!  So everything is off a low base. But like a grain of mustard, there appears to be something exponential happening.

I recall having this conversation in Australia about two years ago and the same observation was made by staff workers who had been toiling for years with small results. Not results they despise, but results that were realistic given the soil. Then suddenly. It’s as if a cloud appeared on the horizon the size of a man’s fist.

And of course there is the Charlie Kirk effect. We have seen that in Australia. I have seen that in Australia. I have been preaching at churches that range from Presbyterian to Pentecostal and I have seen that and spoken to people who have turned up. Now if you are about to scoff, let’s just remind you of the dirge and flute thing again.

I’m reminded myself of the oft-quoted article (oft by me at least) by Tim Keller before he died, that was published in The Atlantic, in which he said that the US was due for revival. And being a good Reformed type that he was, he was adamant, no one becomes a Christian until they do!

That’s true of course, but we struggle to believe it. No one finds the Bible interesting until they do. No one sees the folly of their own sin, or indeed its ugliness before a Holy God, until they do. That’s how the new birth works. That’s the ordo salutis. We don’t find the Bible interesting, compelling and comforting and are then transformed by the Gospel. Only gospel transformation can make the Bible interesting, compelling and comforting to anyone.

Which tells us that no gimmick or impressive power event will entice anyone to become what only the all-enticing Holy Spirit can do. And this is exactly what Sarah Zylstra reports when she quotes Salt Company’s Cornerstone Church Iowa pastor, Mark Vance :

“I’ve been teaching the most foundational stuff in our sermon series the last few years,” Vance said. “We taught the Nicene Creed and the Sermon on the Mount. We’re teaching a very traditional view of marriage and sexuality. And we have incredible intellectual resources on this, because this is where the church has stood for thousands of years. People are rediscovering something that was already there.”

And in Chicago, Dentman concurs:

In Chicago, students “aren’t asking the hard, controversial questions,” Dentman said. “They’re asking Sunday school questions: ‘How do I know the Bible is real? How is Christianity different? Was Jesus God? What happens to people who haven’t heard the gospel?’ They aren’t asking it from a heady space, but a heart space—they really want to understand the answer.”

Kinda tells you that gimmickry and “wow” factor is not the game here.  Surely we’ve done those to death. Or more to the point they have done us to death.

Which shows that Gen Z are not the Boomer seekers either. A vast swathe of  Gen Z is done with gimmickry and wow factor, not just for religion, but for everything! They’ve been gimmicked and wowed to death. And they’re becoming numb to it. The felt-needs sermon series are not going to make it into the new generation. Or at least they won’t be significant players.

Now of course, a few reminders of how this will not be all plain-sailing. We still have a hostile progressive culture that gate-keeps our institutions that sees the gospel as antithetical to the future of the West, indeed Christianity is viewed as the primary problem that has caused so many of the other problems. Such types will double down when they see anything challenge their new orthodoxy.

And we have a rising alt-Right that is nihilistic and iconoclastic too. Both the progressive Left and the alt-Right will present unique challenges to the gospel. We have seen those from the Left all too often this past two decades. But the alt-Right will be interesting.

As conservative Catholic commentator Ross Douthat reminded us a few years ago when no one was listening: If you think the religious Right is a problem, wait until you see the non-religious Right. The reason I think the progressive Left is so scared of the non-religious Right is that it sees its alter-ego in the mirror.

We are set to go through challenging times of nihilism, obvious evil, anti-Semitism that results in homeland murders and the like.  Euthanasia and even more radical abortion legislation will swell in this culture of death. Don’t be fooled into thinking getting the culture back is one successful election away, whatever ‘getting the culture back” even means!

But let’s be encouraged in the midst of it all. As James Marriott wrote in The Times recently, this new, younger set of believers is into “full-fat-faith”. Not for them the enervated nominalism that got us into this trouble in the first place, a nominalism that cared for little, understood little and stood up for little. Something has sparked this new generation, and it hasn’t been the older generation!

So are we seeing something bigger, fatter, hairier and more audacious? Only time will tell. But for the moment let’s rejoice in what we are seeing. Dance to the flute, mourn to the dirge and maybe you’ll be aligning with God’s purposes.