We lived a half mile from the church, occasionally walking to the service when the weather was nice. This proximity to the church and my mother’s love of hosting meant that many traveling preachers shared meals with our family. At our church, the primary reason preachers from out of the area came around was to facilitate a week of revival services in the spring and again in the fall.
Revival services were key moments in the spiritual rhythm of our church. Several weeks before the arrival of a preacher we were often implored to begin praying for the meetings, building readiness and anticipation for what God was going to do. The kids would groan at the thought of being in church every night during the week, but we also knew revival week sometimes provided spiritual intrigue and excitement. We sat in rapt attention one year as a middle-aged man in the church tearfully confessed his reliance on alcohol. Another year, a young man spent a tense period of time wrestling with God in our church balcony, unsure about committing his life to Christ. Some adults in the church made their way upstairs to pray with him, praying with all the fervor a group of stoic Swiss/German folks are capable of.
Do these spiritual highs dissuade and undermine a continuous and consistent walk with Jesus?
At least once during the week, services ended with the front of the church filled with people who were rededicating their lives to God. In retrospect, part of the dramatic impact these events had on my young life was observing older people I deeply respected expressing their commitment and submission to God.
Times change. The church I pastored didn’t have regular “revival services.” I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. We occasionally were invited to openly repent and rededicate our lives in our weekly services. People were busy, at least prior to the pandemic, and a week of services was a big commitment. But there was something else: I and others at the church questioned the health of planned annual meetings that often culminated in spiritual highs.
“Is it healthy for a continuous cycle of recommitment, and are we trying to manipulate God’s Spirit by planning for these times of revival? If we know people will recommit and feel ready to live for Christ, and then that fire will slowly fade away, is this spiritually healthy?” I wondered. “Do these spiritual highs dissuade and undermine a continuous and consistent walk with Jesus? Or do they create an addiction to the quick and easy spiritual fix of dramatic emotional encounters, serving as a kind of spiritual sugar rush and causing people to avoid a healthy diet of spiritual veggies: prayer, Bible reading and obedience?”
Several years ago, I posed this line of questioning to a pastor friend. He pointed out that God seems to encourage spiritually intense seasons because he built rhythms of revival into the annual calendar of the Israelites. Each year, there was a system of feasts, festivals, and days of remembrance. His people were forced to pause, to offer sacrifices, remember his goodness, renew their commitment to him, and then celebrate their life as God’s people.
Additionally, there are stories of special seasons of revival. 1 Kings 22 tells the story of Josiah, the young king who recognized the sinfulness of God’s people and how far they had drifted from God. He called the people of God to a special season of repentance. They looked to the scriptures and began to pray. They became ruthless about removing the areas of sin in their lives, and they pursued obedience to God’s Word. They had a revival and renewal of their hearts.
I find myself wondering if we inadvertently removed a key component of spiritual formation from our church bodies when we removed seasons of intense focus on God. Seeking a direct encounter with him as a people can draw God’s people together and help reset the tendency toward a dull spirituality. These seasons of heightened spiritual focus will likely look different from the context in which I grew up. That’s fine. However it looks, it seems helpful to consider again the benefits of a rhythm of spiritual renewal in which God’s people together set aside time to seek his face.
4 Responses
My viewpoint is that we need some rhythms to our spiritual life so that all worship services don’t blend into one indistinguishable blob. We need times of repentance, “that seasons of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord” as Peter preached in Acts 3:19.
I like that Jerry!
An aspect perhaps worth pondering is what came first, the apparent cooling of ardor for things ecclesiastical, or the gradual neglect of the rituals of our tradition. More important is what could be done about it. I think most of us do not think it is a good thing, this relegating of church to the margins of our lives, but it seems we are at a loss as to how to reverse the trend. Or maybe we don’t even, as a collective majority, consider it to be a problem, indeed, the jettisoning of tradition may be considered progress. (Re-reading the above, it sounds even to me like I have no idea what is going on in my own church, which may be an accurate commentary on my qualification to comment in the first place)
Alvin, what I have found interesting is that 20 years ago it seemed my friends who left the Mennonite church joined a more charismatic body like the Vineyard. Over the last 5-10 years the trend has been to join churches like the Anglican or Eastern Orthodox Church who have very carefully constructed yearly rhythms of liturgy and practice designed for spiritual formation. (This is an unscientific and anecdotal observation of course.) In speaking with friends who have converted to these expressions of the church, it’s clear that they desire deeper commitment and long to be part of churches that demand something of them. I have often wondered if the “cooling of our spiritual ardor” is a reaction to some of the legalism of our past. Have we have cast off restraints of all kind and with it lost practices that consistently call us back to Jesus? I long for embracing again a fearless hunger for obedience to Jesus and His Kingdom as described in the Scriptures.
Understand that this paragraph is simply a questioning and is not a proclamation.