By James Wilson
The American colonies were the fruit of an
English revival rejected by the English people and government. The Puritan vision was of a reformed and
re-vitalized England brought about through enthusiastic embrace of the Living
God. When the Puritans found themselves
despised they came to America and set up a culture of that embrace, believing
that when those they left behind saw what God did with them they would hunger for
the same. The Pilgrims were more
radicalized, but their sense of a city on a hill – observed and hungered for –
was just as strong. Yet revivals do not
form nations; awakenings do.
The
first American Great Awakening rocked the Atlantic seaboard in the 1730s and
40s. It began in the pastures of the
Connecticut River Valley as the Holy Spirit ignited preaching with signs and wonders. The Spirit drew hundreds of thousands and the
emphasis was on receiving and growing a relationship with God in the Person of
His Son. These relationships were as
intimate as they were dynamic – and uncomfortable for observers. People coming under the Spirit would
frequently cry out, weep, laugh, and convulse on the ground. Fruit was that jails tended to empty as
people became less inclined to commit crime, families tended to come together
as parents became parents and spouses re-committed to loving and faithful marriage. Colonists saw themselves as Americans rather
than British ex-patriates. This social
and spiritual cohesion enabled Americans to fight a revolutionary war and write
a Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Just
as the first Great Awakening formed an American identity, the second formed an
American character in which concerted efforts from barn raisings to spanning a
continent to walkers on the moon were simply viewed as the American way. Public schools and social welfare movements
were its creations. It birthed a
commitment to live in freedom for all – the commitment that abolished slavery
and struggled for another century to make manifest what they had mandated.
Revivals
often lead to Awakening – when they are not managed to death by the very people
who triggered them – but revivals are confined to the Church while awakenings hit
the streets and transform cities; they often begin outside institutional
churches. The charismatic revival of the
sixties featured thousands being healed, renewed in their faith and – in many
cases – coming into a relationship with Jesus for the first time. But the cities at its heart – Los Angeles and
Seattle – were no different after the revival than before it. The Toronto Blessing that rocked churches all
over the world is a formative influence on my own character and approach to God
– but Toronto remains the city it was pre-1994.
Many want to hail the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 as an awakening, but
that revival was destroyed by the failure of leaders to confront the racism that
strangled it. Los Angeles remained as it
had always been, only bigger and richer as oil and entertainment industries
came of age there.
It
can be argued – and I would – that Azusa Street was resurrected in the
charismatic renewal triggered by Dennis Bennett. This revival led into the Jesus People, which
is the third Great Awakening in America.
The
Jesus People began outside the Church – on the beaches of California and
Oregon. It began with drugged out
hippies who had radical encounter with Jesus and took Him along wherever they
went. They birthed modern worship music,
a renewed emphasis on families, and a normalized view of signs and wonders on
city streets. The modern recovery
movement and the Messianic movement among Jews are from the Jesus People. The idea of vision preceding product in the
business world is fruit of this movement, as is the movement for reconciliation
with people groups and across all dividing lines. Jesus People picked up where Azusa left off
and got it right re racial integration.
I
do not mean to imply the Awakenings are cool and revivals are not. Both have a place of honor in the Kingdom of
God. But the one tends to be a fuller
manifestation of the larger Kingdom while the other is more instrumental to
it. Awakenings tend to be rejected by
the larger Church until the fruit comes into the bin while revivals tend to
dramatically stir the Church – or at least the streams in which they come. The kiss of death for either is the urge to
manage and tame them by leadership. But
the kiss of life from the Lord comes – always – in response to a season of
repentance from that cross-section of the Body hearing the promise of the Lord
without seeing its manifestation.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living
As Ambassadors of Relationships and The
Holy Spirit and the End Times – available at local bookstores or by
e-mailing him at
praynorthstate@charter.net
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