Meditations on Revival

How the church ought to respond to a rising interest in Christianity

Photo by Bree Anne on Unsplash

I wrote a few weeks ago about the dangers of hanging on to hope that “the tide is turning,” and I stand by those remarks: “I worry that sometimes the desire to make such claims, or at least the way we hear them, can come from an anxiety of cultural influence, a desperation to find signs of victory rather than a confidence in Christ to renew all things, to bring about his Kingdom.” We may be still witnessing some of that today, but there are certainly signs that young people are turning to the church. For example, according to Barna’s research, Generation Z is leading the other generations in church attendance. That’s remarkable and exciting. Something is stirring among the young.

Many cultural critics I’ve seen have attributed this stirring to political conservatism, anti-wokeness, and figures like Charlie Kirk. The question then becomes, how healthy is that union between politics and faith? For example, Ross Douthat at the New York Times warns that: “if the post-Trump Republican Party is immediately identified with Christian revivalism and vice versa, then the pre-Trump dynamic could easily reassert itself, and any Christian renewal could hit a ceiling outside the distinctive culture of the G.O.P.” One way of reading Douthat’s words is as a criticism of this “Christian renewal,” but I choose to read them more charitably as words of caution. There are no clean revivals. All of them are messy. The question for the church is, if we are seeing new young people come to church, what are the unique challenges we have in our culture for ministering to them? How can we present the gospel to them unadulterated? How can we help disciple them in Christ so that we don’t “hit a ceiling outside the distinctive culture of the G.O.P.”?