IS REVIVAL really something we truly desire?

 It's good to talk a lot more about the need to evangelise. It's good to give close consideration to the needs of our area and of the fertile crescent between Marrickville and Randwick. But I wonder whether, for us Baptists, evangelism is easier to grasp than revival, so we are more ready to focus on it? I confess that I tend that way.

 Effective evangelism must begin with a spiritual revolution. A church which has not been effective for decades certainly will not begin doing it without definite, thorough-going changes.

 I have outlined some of the factors in revival, and shall attempt to pull them together here. It may help us understand what the real needs are.

1. REVIVAL: A PEOPLE SATURATED WITH GOD
 I am constantly troubled by the difficulty we Baptists seem to have with grasping the priority of worship. If God is supreme, the sovereign of all, and if, in love, he has accomplished for us all that he has in Christ, what can we do, but worship? It's our highest aim! Once anything else becomes our highest aim, whether evangelism, the Bible, fellowship or anything else, we become idolaters on a par with those who carve and paint their pagan deities and bow before them in vain hope of blessings.

 As Kierkegaard pointed out, commenting on "blessed are the pure in heart", purity of heart is to will one thing: the will of God. Our supreme goal must be to know and to be in intimate contact with God through Jesus Christ.

2. REVIVAL: RENEWED COMMUNITY IN CHRIST
 The steps to creation of a community -- of any kind -- are the same as the steps to revival. As M Scott peck shows, from a state of pseudo-community, where everyone plays the game of community and are nice to each other, the group next descends into chaos as falsity is uncovered and true agendas are exposed. This can be an extremely painful time, and people often rebel and try to re-establish pseudo-community.
 The next step is brokenness, where people abandon their personal agendas and begin to form a group consciousness which doesn't override individual initiative or personal rights, but values the group's welfare more highly than my own: in other words, it is less self-focused than it had been.
 Finally comes true community as the group re-forms around its new self-concept.

 In revival, that self-concept is closely allied to the group's concept of Christ as it attempts to live Christ's life in the world as a group (the body of Christ).

3. REVIVAL: RENEWED CONCERN FOR THE WORLD
   Occasionally a group gains some aspects of a renewed work of God and/or a new sense of community, but fails to allow these to work out in a renewed concern for the world.

   The Bible tells us that

 God so loved the world [not the church!] that he gave his one and only Son,
 so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

   To reflect Christ, we will also have to reflect his love for the world. This love reveals itself both in a new zeal for evangelism (how can we concern ourselves with a person's here-and-now needs and not also care for them through eternity?) and in a concern for all aspects of his or her everyday welfare.
   Let's keep seeking revival!

© Peter R. Green 1998.