What is revival?

In Scripture the idea is carried by the Hebrew verb chayah, "to live" and, in its causative sense, "to revive".¹ It is the word behind the prayer of Psalm 85:6, "Wilt thou not revive us again: that thy people may rejoice in thee?", and of Habakkuk 3:2, "O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years." In both places those who pray are already God's people. Revival in the biblical sense is therefore not first the conversion of outsiders but life given back to a people in whom it has grown faint.

The Old Testament records several such seasons: the reforms under Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 29-31) and Josiah (2 Kings 22-23), and the reading of the Law under Ezra and Nehemiah, when the people wept, confessed their sins and renewed the covenant (Nehemiah 8-10). The New Testament pattern most often appealed to is Pentecost (Acts 2), where the Spirit is poured out on a praying company of about a hundred and twenty, the word is preached with conviction, and about three thousand are added.

The modern use of the word owes most to the eighteenth-century awakenings. An account of what happened in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734-35 under Jonathan Edwards records that the town "appeared to be full of the presence of God."² When the wider Great Awakening was attacked as mere enthusiasm, Edwards answered in The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, arguing from 1 John 4 that a true work is known not by noise or bodily effects but by whether it raises esteem for Christ, turns people from sin, and deepens regard for Scripture, truth and love.

A century later Charles Finney gave a very different account. In the first of his Lectures on Revivals of Religion he denied that a revival is a miracle and called it "a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means".³ On this view God has appointed means, such as prayer and plain preaching, and a church that uses them rightly may expect revival, much as a farmer who sows may expect a crop.

That difference still divides writers on the subject. Others, without accepting all that Finney taught, point out that Scripture joins God's promise to his people humbling themselves, praying and turning from their wicked ways (2 Chronicles 7:14).

Accounts of particular revivals describe much the same things whatever the setting: an unusual sense of God's presence, deep conviction of sin, earnest prayer, and effects that reach beyond the church. The prayer-meeting revival of 1857-58 began with a noon meeting in New York led by the lay missionary Jeremiah Lanphier. The Welsh revival of 1904-05 is remembered in the same terms, as is the awakening on the island of Lewis from 1949, which Duncan Campbell described at first hand.

Across these differences there is wide agreement on the centre. Revival is not a campaign of meetings, and it is not the same thing as evangelism, though conversions commonly follow it. It is God giving new life to his own people, so that Christ is prized, sin is forsaken and prayer becomes earnest, on a scale and to a depth beyond the ordinary.