Why I am a Christian (19)

Revivals Around the World Attest to the Continuing Power of the Gospel

In 2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.

I have so far covered themes from the realms of science, philosophy and theology before looking at five different facets of Jesus (I could have explored many more). Then I looked at the inspiration, invincibility and influence of the Bible. This is the second of the last nine posts which are more personal and are based more on my experiences.

One of my favourite subjects is revival.

In April this year, reports started circulating about some unusual and exciting goings-on in a Pentecostal fellowship called Victory Church in Cwmbran, South Wales. In one of their midweek prayer meetings (10th April) a man called Paul, who had been wheelchair-bound and in constant pain for ten years following a road traffic accident, was suddenly and dramatically healed, following prayer for his condition. The 70 or so people who were there looked on startled before bursting into spontaneous applause and cheering as Paul picked up his wheelchair, held it high above his head and began to walk around the church.

On 15th May I made the four-hour journey down to Cwmbran with a couple of friends to experience for myself the ongoing excitement in that place. For over a month they had been seeing dozens of people converted to Christ every night, often with an accompanying and immediate release from depression, self-harm, addictions and so on. It is still continuing at the time of writing this in late August.

When I got there half an hour before the meeting started, I was surprised to see that a long queue had formed. I had never before seen a crowd of people queuing for up to an hour to get into church. There were enthusiastic cheers and a gentle, orderly surge to get in to the auditorium as soon as the doors opened. It felt a bit like the January sales!

Inside, there was nothing particularly lovely about the building - rather the opposite; it is a functional, modern, converted retail outlet. There was nothing especially amazing about the band and nothing out of the ordinary about the presentation and preaching. They were good, and I appreciated them, but it was honestly nothing exceptional. So I was impressed when a short, simple, unadorned, almost restrained presentation of the Gospel was met immediately by about twenty people leaving their seats to go forward and commit their lives to following Christ.

I have to say that the atmosphere was passionate and intense but there was no crowd manipulation, no theatrics, no pressure and certainly no big appeal for money. I want to insist that what I experienced was nothing to do with hype or a worked-up atmosphere.

The basic difference between what I experienced there and what I usually experience in church was an increased awareness of God’s presence. It’s very difficult to explain or describe. The presence of God is something you encounter on a deeper level than thoughts and feelings.

Later in the meeting, another decent but unremarkable talk, without notes, from Leviticus 14 brought a conviction of sin upon virtually everyone there, including me. At the invitation, hundreds came forward seeking cleansing from God through the blood of Christ. I suppose it was the vividness of knowing I needed forgiveness from God and should eagerly ask for it that was most unusual. It was one of those few times in life when, in trying to put something into words for someone, I’d say “To be honest, you’d really have to be there to understand what I’m talking about.”

Every six weeks or so at Victory Church they baptize a group of 50-100 new believers. There have been further reports of remarkable, unexplained healings as the thing they call “The Welsh Outpouring” continues to roll on. Their church website claims “Hundreds have come in as atheists, backslidden, lost, addicted, rich, poor, confused, self-harming etc and gone out loving Jesus as He has reached them.”

What they are experiencing in Cwmbran is not a movement on the scale of a great revival or awakening, and they acknowledge this openly. But being there gave me an idea of what a full-scale revival - an amplified version of the outpouring in Cwmbran - must be like.

The Baptist theologian John Piper in his book A Godward Life wrote about revival, defining it as “The sovereign work of God to awaken his people with fresh intensity to the truth and glory of God, the ugliness of sin, the horror of hell, the preciousness of Christ's atoning work, the wonder of salvation by grace through faith, the urgency of holiness and witness, and the sweetness of worship with God's people.”

That’s quite an event! And every now and again, quite unpredictably, though usually after a season of sustained intercessory prayer, revival breaks out somewhere on Earth. Here are some examples:

- In the 16th Century, the Reformation spread like a wildfire throughout Europe as thousands became alive to God through discovering the magnificent doctrine of justification by faith.

- The brutally persecuted Camisards in 17th Century France grew exponentially; from nowhere, they rapidly accounted for 10% of the population of France. They rediscovered spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues and healing; some of their infants would prophesy while they could barely walk.

- The Great Awakening associated with Jonathan Edwards in New England (1730s and 1740s) was an important movement in which people en masse cried out to God, begging for mercy such was their heightened awareness of the immediate danger of hell and the urgent necessity of being saved through faith in Jesus.

- The Methodist Revival, marked by John Wesley’s inspirational preaching and Charles Wesley’s rousing hymns, changed the face of 18th Century Britain. It has often been said that this revival, accompanied by the sweeping social reforms of Christian visionaries like Lord Shaftesbury and William Wilberforce, saved Britain from the kind of political turmoil that resulted in the blood-soaked, anti-theist French Revolution across the channel.  

- The 1905 Welsh Revival, (some date it to 1904) associated with former collier Evan Roberts, was a sweeping movement in which the pubs emptied and the chapels swelled in a matter of months. 100, 000 people were converted in less than a year. Crime came to a virtual standstill. Councils held emergency meetings to discuss what to do with the police who had nothing to do all day. The number of children born outside of marriage dropped 44% within a year of the beginning of the revival. It is said that the ponies that worked down the mines were confused and didn’t know what to do as they were used to responding to daily physical brutality and hearing orders in foul language. Both fell into rapid disuse as miners were converted in droves.

The Azusa Street Church at the centre of the 20th Century Pentecostal Movement

- The Azusa Street Outpouring in April 1906 grew rapidly into the fastest growing religious movement on Earth; Pentecostalism. Thousands of church leaders from all over the world visited Azusa Street between 1906 and 1908 and exported this fiery, passionate expression of Christianity everywhere they went. There are over 500 million Pentecostals and Charismatics today and the movement is still growing fast.

- The East African Revival of the 1920s and 30’s which dramatically altered the spiritual landscape of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Congo, and the Argentinian revival in the 1970s which transformed sections of society, starting with the prisons are two other well-documented examples. There are dozens more.

- A friend of mine from the Church Mission Society recently visited Nepal and reported that the church is doubling in size in that country every two and a half years. It has gone from practically nobody to over one million people in just sixty years.

- Then what about South Korea? After years of bloody persecution, the church grew sharply post Second World War as this BBC report shows. According to the Korean Overseas Information Service, before 1945 approximately 2% of the Korean population was Christian. By 1991, less than half a century later, the figure had ballooned to 45%.

- China too has experienced extraordinary revival, with reports of amazing healings, even resurrections, since the outlawing of Christianity by the Communists. Brother Yun’s book The Heavenly Man documents the cruel suffering of some Chinese Christians and the spectacular growth of the underground church there. According to Brook Lee writing in the World Policy Journal in 2012, the Chinese government acknowledges the existence of 14 million Christians in China, but it is widely believed that there are at least 70 million more than that. In fact, there are more disciples of Jesus Christ in Communist China today than there are members of the Communist Party.

What all this says to me is that the gospel is still just as potent as it ever was when, in the first three centuries A.D., it took on the mighty Roman Empire, got absolutely battered with wave after wave of oppression and persecution - and then came out on top.

The gospel has extraordinary power to turn society’s greatest ills on their head by changing lives. And sometimes, this occurs in a sweeping movement that not even the hardest opponent, the most defiant society or the most resistant government can suppress. The gospel is unstoppable, especially so in times of revival.

There is no way in my mind that, during these revivals, the numerous conversions are just the result of heightened emotions and mass manipulation, and that the healings associated are just psychosomatic, and that the resulting impact on society is just lots of people trying hard to be nice at the same time.

It seems to me that revivals are a sovereign work of God that demonstrate his supremacy and amazing grace, affording the world a temporary glimpse of both. In a sense, revivals are a foretaste of heaven.

This is the nineteenth reason I am a Christian. 

And I think it’s telling that you never really hear sceptics bothering to research this amazing phenomenon, still less venturing to offer an explanation for it. I seem to read scoffing remarks every week about "no evidence." Well, here's exhibit (a).

All my Christian life I have prayed for renewal and revival; renewal for the church and revival for the world. I have probably heard hundreds of prayers for this in every church I have belonged to. It remains a deep yearning in my soul.

Lord, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, Lord.
Repeat them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

(Habakkuk 3.2)

Oh, that the church would wake up! And oh, that the world would taste and see how good the Lord is!