It’s not rocket science. Two of those hypothetical situations are showing signs of life that make you glad to be charismatic. Two look arid and unproductive.
The big question is this: if God has plans for revival in the desert as well as irrigated places, should authentic interaction with God immediately drive us to problem housing estates or secular commuter villages rather than into ‘revival’ meetings. Once deeply involved with ‘lost’ people should we not be willing to invest without constantly looking for immediate results or having to run to well watered spiritual greenhouses for emergency rations. (Wow! how’s that for mixing metaphors.)
What would it mean to prepare a way for the Lord? Isaiah’s metaphors are:
To me these look very like what James had in mind when he said ‘We should not make it difficult for the Gentiles’. All over our area there are people who are doing the construction work, in difficult places and among currently unresponsive people groups. Of course they are missing it if they think, on one hand, that good transport infrastructure is enough or on the other hand–like many revivalists–that short-term faithfulness is enough and that absence of immediate results is proof that God is not on his way. That’s why two of my keys to motivation are about appreciating minor signs of progress and, alongside that, focusing on the harvest not the holidays.
I wonder whether—if we want a classification for it—we could talk about a missional view of revival or just plain TRANSFORMATION! It’s an alternative to contemporary revivalism. Sadly that seems to be attractional rather than incarnational. It expects the world to force its way into tasteful venues where charismatic worship fills the airwaves or at most, the revival spills out to the immediate vicinity where we feel comfortable even if lost people feel like fish out of water rather than drawn into the unimaginable love of God. That kind of revival may have been possible for the last few centuries but it’s not the kind of thing that you see in our post-Christianity world or in the pre-Christian, non-Jewish, world where Paul lived.
Tomorrow we had better conclude this journey by looking at a couple of biblical hints and some of the implications.
