What Does Revival Look Like?

I believe God is working a revival in my local Church and in my community at large that will manifest itself through a radical resurgence of prayer.  Where prayer has become a ceremonial closing to a good night of “fellowship” I see the shift going to a evenings of invoking the spirit of God to expose sin and unify the body in responding to truth.  Reading the Word, responding to truth in prayer, and closing in prayers of surrender to “choose” to participate in the works God is doing in the community.  I’ve seen the effect which prayers that include confession and repentance can do to a group; namely, inspire more confession and repentance!  One night I confessed my struggle with shaming my children versus extending grace and it was followed by many other confessions regarding inadequacies of righteous parenting.  Everything from confessions of divided attention to lack of motivation.  These confessions were groundbreaking as they were voiced for the first time.  Freedom came to the group that evening as shame and guilt were put in its proper place; that is, on the cross.

Eugene Petersen said it best in his book "Working the Angles," “If we skip prayer, or allow ourselves to be stampeded into activities other than prayer, we end up in the tragic impasse that the Prometheus myth describes so exactly.”1  The tale of Promethius is an ingenious description of what may be happening in the Church.  Promethius is known as the one who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity.  He essentially gave humanity technology to cook food, make weapons and fire pottery.2 But like Steve Jobs and the advent of the iPhone, the technology, which is a good thing, backfired and became a tremendous source of suffering.  

But an even more subtle backfire of technology and blessing was the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1437!  Who would have thought that the invention of the written Bible would be so detrimental to community and prayer.  Pre-Gutenberg the word was perpetuated by oral history through the community.  Now that I have Bible in my pocket, I don’t need to get the story from the community - I can just do it on my own.  

“A thoroughgoing orality in which the word held people in a listening community gave way to discrete individuals silently reading books alone.  Mass-produced, inexpensively published books generated a motivation to read, which developed into a widespread literacy that changed the act of reading from an oral-aural community event into a silent-private visual exercise.”3

As tragic as all this may seem for the Church, I am excited that the Promethian spirit is no longer going to devaluate the formative action of prayer - at least in our local Church.  Prayer is making a “comeback” and it will be the means by which we engage in Spiritual Warfare. We choose not to be bogged down by activities other than prayer.  We choose not to allow our minds to shift from the brokeness of the world onto the latest and greatest technological innovation.  We’ve been there, done that, and are well aware that a new source of technological blessing could be a source of suffering when it surpasses prayer. 

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1. Peterson, Eugene H. Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987. p. 29.
2. Ibid., 20.
3. Ibid., 64.