History Repeats: Could The Asbury Revival Last 100 Years Like The Moravian Revival in Germany?
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(OPINION) As you may have heard in news reports, a spontaneous religious revival broke out Feb. 8 at a chapel service at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky.
As I write this, nearly two weeks later, it’s still going. So far the revival has continued nonstop, but university officials have announced they will end public services on the university’s campus as of Feb. 20. What happens after that remains to be seen.
“As part of Asbury’s intention of encouraging and commissioning others to ‘go out’ and share what they have experienced, all (further) services will be hosted at other locations and no longer held at Asbury University,” says a notice on the school’s website. Those other locations aren’t specified.
The faithful and the curious have flooded into tiny Wilmore by the busloads from around the state and the nation to be part of the experience. That has strained resources for both the university and the town.
“It’s not winding down,” observed Craig Keener some days ago, during the height of the fervor. Keener is a widely regarded biblical studies scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary, a separate institution across the street from the university.
“People have been praying for it for years,” he said. “I was hoping it would happen before I retired.”
At some points the university’s chapel has been so crowded the seminary’s chapel has been used as one of several overflow sites.
Keener emphasized he wasn’t involved with the revival’s outbreak and isn’t a leader of the ongoing events. But he attended services at the university multiple days.
“It started with the students,” he said. “I think they’re the most important component.”
The revival erupted during a regularly scheduled 10 a.m. chapel service. For some reason, this one didn’t end. People didn’t want to leave. They felt what they interpreted as an unusually palpable presence of God.
Keener said the gathering has been marked by prayer and worship, mainly, with an occasional sermon or celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
As odd as all this might seem, spontaneous revivals in Christianity aren’t terribly unusual.
On Feb. 3, 1970, a revival erupted at what was then Asbury College. That one, too, began at a morning chapel service. It lasted 185 hours nonstop. Intermittently, it continued for weeks. Ultimately it spread across the United States and to other countries.
I wrote an in-depth story about it in 1990 to mark its 20th anniversary and interviewed alumni and academics who told me they were still feeling its spiritual effects two decades later.
Previous revivals had struck Asbury in 1905, 1950 and 1958.
Asbury is an interdenominational religious school whose roots are in the Wesleyan tradition of the Methodist Church. John and Charles Wesley, brothers, were 18th century revivalists. In a sense, revivalism is baked into Asbury’s DNA.
Revivals also are baked into Kentucky’s DNA.
An important revival in Logan County sparked the even greater Cane Ridge Revival in Bourbon County in 1801. Cane Ridge drew upwards of 20,000 people and introduced the massive Second Great Awakening to the South.
One historian has called it “arguably … the most important religious gathering in all of American history.”
It helped transform the South from a refuge for violent brigands into the Bible Belt.
But revivals aren’t just a phenomenon of Kentucky or the Bible Belt.
Before the Second Great Awakening, there had been the First Great Awakening. It swept Britain’s American colonies beginning in the early 1700s, partly as the result of a religious ferment roiling Europe.
Or we could talk about the 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. It broke out among a ragtag congregation in a rundown neighborhood and ran day and night for years. Scholars consider it the birthplace of Pentecostalism, which has grown into the second-largest branch of Christianity, next only to the Roman Catholic Church.
Across the centuries there have been other landmark revivals in Canada, Wales, Timor, you name it. Revivals here, there, everywhere. And of course, the Christian faith itself was birthed in a revival recounted in the biblical Acts of the Apostles.
As you might imagine, there are as many explanations for these revivals as there are pundits to comment on them. Unsurprisingly, the explanations tend to mirror each pundit’s a priori assumptions about God and the nature of reality.
Some view revivals as manifestations of superstition, hysteria and social contagion. Some see them as reactions to major social upheavals — revivals occur when we’re rattled and want quick fixes for our uncertainties.
Others see them as merciful visitations from God, who cares about people and occasionally shows up in especially dramatic ways to let us know it.
I suspect there’s an element of truth to all the explanations. One explanation doesn’t rule out the others. Causes, like effects, overlap, intermingle and vary from revival to revival and participant to participant.
Some revivals last days or weeks. On the other hand, as Keener the professor pointed out, the Moravian revival in German Saxony, which began in 1727, lasted 100 years.
Whenever a spiritual visitation such as this arrives, you just never know. That’s part of the excitement. Any new revival could prove to be a very limited matter, soon past and forgotten. Or it could change everything, forever.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.