Do We Need Revival - or Renewal?
Transformation Beyond the Altar Call
I grew up in Pentecostal and charismatic churches, and if there’s one word we prayed for above almost anything else, it was revival. We wanted the altar-call moment — the prayer circles - the line stretching across the front - the emotionally charged moment where you left feeling as though you had been given just a glimpse of the kingdom to come. While those were incredible moments, what nobody talked about nearly as much was the slower work of actually becoming like Christ. I’ve been chewing on that imbalance lately, and figured I’d think out loud about it with you.
Defining the Terms
Here’s my first problem: the words themselves can be defined a myriad of different ways. Revival, renewal, awakening — say them to five different pastors and you’ll get five different maps of how they relate to each other. Some scholars will tell you revival actually has a fairly settled definition: an intensification of religious feeling, corporate, contagious, the kind of thing that spreads through a room person to person. The word renewal is even more vague. It seems to point to a longer process of people drawing their hearts and devotion back to the centrality of Jesus - the gospel - after being drawn away.
For the sake of this article, let me define these terms as I see them in order to bring clarity to this article. Revival, as I’m using it: a move of the Holy Spirit that leads to real spiritual awakening. Sudden, usually corporate, usually something you can point to and say “that happened on this date.” Renewal: the slow realigning of people’s hearts — and the church’s heart — back toward Christ and the gospel. You more than likely can’t point to a specific date as much as you can see the effects of renewal over months and years.
We Need Both
I don’t think this needs to be either/or. Pentecost was a revival — wind, fire, the gifts of the Spirit - three thousand people added to the church in one afternoon. I’m not trying to talk anyone out of expecting God to do something sudden and powerful. In fact, I’m a firm believer that God gives us these moments and experiences as ways to help empower us towards Christlikeness.
But I also can’t help wonder if revival without renewal is a fire that burns hot and goes out fast. I’ve watched hundreds of friends and acquaintances have genuine encounters with Christ only to walk away from their faith or be led astray by false gospels. Revival often gets the headlines but renewal is what turns those headlines into lasting fruit.
Examples of Revival
Take the Asbury revival back in 2023. Tens of thousands of people came through that chapel over the course of about two weeks. What actually stuck with me, reading through the commentary while it was happening, wasn’t the skeptics who were picking it apart but the people who were experiencing it firsthand. They knew that although this was a genuine move of the Spirit, the long-term analysis of this revival would only be known in the years to come. Would it produce fruit that would lead to a long-term awakening and drawing people back to the heart of God?
Let’s look at Jonathan Edwards, the guy most associated with the First Great Awakening. He spent years asking the same question about the revival movements. While he believed the revivals of the 1730s were a genuine work of the Spirit, he also watched people confuse strong emotion with actual change and would eventually write a book, Religious Affections, trying to sort the two apart. Where Edwards landed, more or less, is that it’s not about how high emotions run in the moment but whether these experiences produce a different way of living. That would require years to fully assess.
Then there’s John Wesley. His particuar approach is one I keep coming back to regularly. Everyone remembers his revival in eighteenth-century England for the open-air preaching and the crowds in the tens of thousands. Almost nobody remembers the class meetings - the small groups of maybe a dozen people, meeting weekly, confessing their struggles, and holding each other to specific steps of growth and transformation. Wesley apparently didn’t trust a single sermon - or experience - to finish what it started. Wesley had learned that real transformation was only possible by building the scaffolding for discipleship underneath the preaching and experiences. And when Methodism eventually did decline, most historians look back to the slow deterioration of these small groups as the beginning of the decline.
A Healthy Perspective
I’ve also found the theologian James K.A. Smith useful here, even though he’s not writing about revival at all, Smith’s basic claim is that we’re not primarily shaped by what we believe, or by our best emotional experiences.
Ultimately, we’re most shaped by whatever we do over and over without thinking about it.
He calls these repeated patterns “liturgies,” and the uncomfortable part of his argument is that they’re forming us whether we notice it or not. Years ago, I remember reading a line by Smith in regard to how evangelical youth ministry in America has been shaped. We often spend years reducing discipleship down to an emotional high followed by a message, and often fail to implement in our young people the slower, unglamorous, repeated work that actually forms a teenager into the image of Christ. We’re giving them experiences without giving them what is necessary for lasting transformation into Christlikeness.
So, What Do We Need?
I’ve come to realize that revival is real, biblical, and we are people who desperately need a fresh move of God’s Spirit in our lives. But if I’m honest about what radically changed my life - the way I love, the way I see ministry and people, it wasn’t the individual moments I remember most vividly. It was something slower and something hardly noticeable in the moment. It was the ordinary practices - the “liturgies” that kept realigning my heart and life back to the ways of Christ.
While I don’t believe renewal is the opposite of revival, I do believe renewal is the soil revival needs if it’s going to make a lasting impact. Honestly, I haven’t fully worked out this theology myself but I keep landing on the same question, and it isn’t, “when’s revival coming?”
The bigger question is this: Are we becoming the kind of people that if revival did show up in our churches and in our lives, we would be good soil for lasting change and transformation?
A few sources behind this piece, if you want to go deeper:
James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit and Desiring the Kingdom
Michael J. McClymond, “Christian Revival and Renewal Movements,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity (Wiley Blackwell, 2016)
On Asbury: zunews.com — “Will the Spiritual Revival at Asbury Spread to Other Campuses?”
On Wesley’s class meetings: Seedbed — “How John Wesley Organized the Growing Revival”
On Edwards: C.S. Lewis Institute — on Religious Affections