• evidence of God’s powerful activity
• awareness of his presence
• faith for change

 All these are modelled in the Dry Bone Valley.They are the kind of attractions we should expect in the places we we will be dropped off in when we feel the hand of the LORD on us.

Isaiah provides an example—totally against expectation. God will make himself known to Egypt, they will draw in Assyria to worship with them and together with Israel—unlikely partners—they will become a blessing to the earth.  That’s transformation.

I have spent the last year or so looking at the significant numbers of young people who are leaving churches like ours.  Lots of my generation who experienced renewal a generation ago are losing heart too are moving away, too.  They feel that current experiences of renewal do not seem to have all that much connection with God’s mission in the world.  They may be right but sadly–along with the dirty bath water of the way we charismatics like to do things–they are in danger of losing the baby, too.

What do I mean by bath water.  It’s all the church stuff that surrounds the living, breathing presence of God among us.  Bath water needs changing.  It gets contaminated if you keep it around.  

The issue of long term faithfulness has already been raised.

There is a very real danger of losing faith in a desert situation.  There’s an excellent article by Earl Creps that we have found energising.

Ezekiel was on the edge of being negative and arguably, Elijah completely lost it in his desert.  Building a new road in the desert with declining expectation that the LORD will turn up is a short step from adding to the dry bones.

Then there is the question of singing to the well—a foundational idea for the Transform meetings.

There is also the issue of spiritual warfare.  I wonder whether that is more likely to happen in the desert working for the Kingdom, than staying back and building the church.

For now that’s where this series stops.  I haven’t tried to deal with objections, though lots have occurred to me and more will have struck you.  If we get a conversation going we will no doubt get chance to refine my thinking.  If not, its helped me to prepare a talk and I am even more excited about the prospect of a slow-burn, Emmaus Road type, Egypt style awakening theat will see the wells flowing and authentic transformation occurring in the places where we live.

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:

• Straightening the route
• Levelling the ground
• Removing obstacles
• Improving the signage

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.

Family one (with two boys) are involved in a large provincial church which is part of the New Wine Network.  The church is more than 300 in membership and has a circle of influence considerably greater.  They have a busy youth work and active prayer ministry.  Their vision is To become a worshipping community where people are nurtured in faith, growing in holiness, and empowered by the Holy Spirit to share God’s love and make new disciples of Christ.

Family two (no kids yet) have recently moved from South London where they were part of church.co.uk (Steve Chalke’s project near Waterloo).  They now live in a Cambridge commuter village with, they think, only one, not very active church.  Another couple have moved to join them recently.  As far as I know they have no plans to plant church.  They continue to be involved in Spring Harvest and Greenbelt.  Just recently the husband spent a weekend away with a group of guys with London church connections and the wife regularly meets up with the friends she used to work with at Oasis.

Family three (with one boy, one girl and another on the way) are part of a church in the Ground Level network—in the East Midlands and closely connected with people like Stuart Bell and Godfrey Birtill.  They are involved in the 18+ ministry at Grapevine.  Their church has a regular throughput of apostolic and prophetic ministry and is enjoying an upsurge in healing.  They see themselves as a prophetic, breakthrough church.

Family four (two girls) live on Pinehurst–a Swindon housing estate with multiple problems.  Over the past few years almost all of those who had joined them to serve and build church in the area have left, having seen few signs of success in the last ten years.  They have joined the nearest Anglican church and are involved (without success so far) in searching for a Priest Missioner for the area.  The husband is a chair of the Pinehurst Initiative Forum and the wife secretary of the PTA as well as being involved in evangelism among young people.  Their home is on the Circle and it is not at all unusual for them to be woken by racing joy riders or fights outside their windows—sometimes with baseball bats and knives.  They have been burgled several times and their car vandalised.

Here’s the question:

• Where would you rather be?
• Which situation is more desert like?
• How could you prepare a highway for our God in deserts not far from you?

• God intends to pour his Spirit out there
• It is uniquely a place where God’s glory rather than ours is seen.  God intentionally creates desert conditions in order to get his people’s attention long enough for sustained interaction.  That may be why none of the big revivals of the twentieth century have brought about transformation in our part of the world.
• The desert is not in essence infertile, it just lacks the conditions for productivity
• The desert requires preparation for God’s amazing activity.  (Desert living requires big thinking without the promise of results just round the corner—expectation of outpouring is no alternative to long term sustainable faithfulness.)  That is why the desert needs to sing and desert workers have to sing to blocked up wells.
• God’s plan is for those who are the lost, the least and the missing to experience the transforming benefits of change in the climate
• God operates autonomously in the desert.  We love to quote God’s plan to do a new thing but—be honest—if he only sends his Spirit where there is a group of people faithfully seeking him, that’s hardly a new thing.

Getting back to our core idea: if God has an interest in bringing about climatic change in arid regions even more than those where there is already a degree of fertility what might a spiritual desert look like?

Here’s the core idea.  God has an interest in dropping us in the desert—the place where there is no fruit.  It isn’t so that we will experience being abandoned and learn survival techniques, but initially to get our attention.  If you think about Hagar and Ishmael, Moses and the burning bush, Elijah, even David; important things happened for them in a place which was infertile.  Cooper and Woodbridge talk about the story of Hosea in terms of God’s desire to show his steadfast love or faithfulness, though of course the desert is not the only place God shows his love.

There is clearly a thread in the Bible that demonstrates that God—as well as showing his unimaginable love—has an interest doing transformation in the desert.  The most accessible example is probably the story of the valley of dry bones.  The issue for Ezekiel was that there was nothing he could turn to, not a single sign of life. Elijah’s experience of gradually seeing resource removed is probably even more impressive.  To fill out the picture we need to look at Isaiah’s perspective on the desert before spending a couple Wednesday to Friday trying to pull together the biblical and the practical.  Any thoughts?

The idea of Bradley Aron Cooper and NB Woodridge of the South African Theological Seminary is that increasing secularisation and declining church attendance may actually be key steps to a coming revival—not because the situation is getting so bad but because churchgoing and Christian culture (perhaps including charismatic culture) are actually barriers to a revival worth having.  Cooper and Woodbridge have written a well rounded paper and I am just going to cherrypick from their work before suggesting some ways of seeing how it fits in our context so I hope you get the picture.  By the way when I talk about church decline I don’t mean all the churches except ours.  I mean especially ours!

A revival worth having will perhaps do a better job than we have ever seen in combining words, works and wonders.  At present, if we are honest, we all focus on one of these more than the others.  That may be down to God-given gifting but when it means that we end up effectively doing down the others we are bound to miss the point.  On the one hand, you get those of us who never get to extended prayer because there is so much to do and on the other there are those who so enjoy their new experiences that they schedule hothouse meetings where they wait for lost people to find their way in, instead of getting down and dirty looking for them.  Of course, a few people will find their way in—no doubt just enough to assuage the guilt feelings about being ‘attractional’ rather than incarnational.  Somewhere along the line there has to be a revival which goes straight to the streets.

In previous revivals many people knew where to turn.  That isn’t always the case. It wasn’t in Lystra.  The people there interpreted the healing they saw in the light of their multi-god religion.  Paul and Barnabas had to work hard to explain who was doing the healing.  It did not happen automatically.  It needed context.  And that’s true today as well.  I have been told of a sex worker who received prayer on the street and returned the next day to tell how it had helped her with her customers.

Of course there are occasions where God reveals himself without the need for the drawn out work of explaining the good news but even in the New Testament, once outside the Jewish community, they were few and far between.

It seems unlikely that a revival which touches those with no bible background is going to be a slow-burn sort of thing.  It is still going to be more often the road to Emmaus than the road to Damascus.

Friend and golfer, David Sandberg, put it another way today.  We expect that revival will mean that every ball goes in the hole.  That may happen in a Christendom culture where everybody knows the gospel story.  In our world most people are like golf balls still on the tee.  I’m not sure that I like the idea of thinking of people missing from God’s kingdom as golf balls which need whacking down the fairway and keeping out of the rough but as an image it sort of works.

Lawrence Singlehurst covers the same ground in July’s Christianity Magazine where he comments on the great healing stories coming out all over the place.

“I see these things as God strengthening, enthusing and encouraging us with his presence but in the end we’ve still got to do the hard work of going out and loving people.

“There is something inside of many of us that we seek revival and think that will mean God will do all the work. So, while I’m not against any of the expressions of this `outpouring’, when I read my Bible, I see Jesus saying `Go’. If we are coming to be blessed we should realise that God is blessing us for a purpose. So if your experience of these things helps you love your neighbour more, if you’re healed for action, filled for purpose — then great. But I don’t see that as revival in itself. Revival to me comes out of the sacrificial love that Christians have for a lost world.”

TRANSFORM started out as Revival Seeds.  We had a working definition for revival—a move of God which results in large numbers of people coming to faith in Christ and bringing about changes in society at large.  At the time that seemed non-controversial but we found that many of our invited speakers used the term interchangeably with renewal, where the focus is much more on re-energising the church.  They weren’t to blame.  The evidence for either term in the New Testament is a bit thin.  In the end we decided to change the name of the events to TRANSFORM.  It seemed to signal better our missional passion for a change in the spiritual climate where we live that would see no area of society unchanged.

That’s the way I want to use the word revival.  It may be a bit like Humpty Dumpty, who said in a rather scornful tone, ‘When I use a word,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less’.  Nevertheless by putting God’s mission front and centre in any conversation about it does suggest that a revival worth having is one which will, from the outset, emerge on the streets rather comfort an ever less influential Western church.  What do you think?

Much of the comment on practice is pretty much summed up in a brilliant video which Paul Roberts linked to. But I think it is possible to see a theological basis for, particularly, the alt.worship angle.  I think its possible to see a strong influence of Jurgen Moltmann’s Spirit of Life. 

Here’s what I have written.  I’ll post my reflections later.

The challenges of the emergent critique are initially directed to practice rather than theology and many would be supported from parts of the charismatic community[1] as well as by Jamieson’s research.[2]  However while the emerging project is a Christological and ecclesiological, rather than a, Spirit development, it is possible to identify elements of a deeper pneumatological critique which provides an underpinning for some of their challenges to charismatic practice. 

Paul Roberts suggests that charismatic worship has significant weakness in that it focuses on perceiving God outside the physical domain, whereas alternative worship is sacramental, encountering God through the created things around.[3]  When asked about his own pneumatology, Roberts claims a ‘more Trinitarian view of the Spirit’ (than that of the charismatic, Christological, perspective) and cites Jürgen Moltmann’s desire to emphasise the role of the Spirit in all creation[4]. 

Given the limited extent of the emergent critique there is relatively substantial evidence from at least four UK sources that by one means or another the emerging churches have been absorbing and in some cases promoting a pneumatology that owes much to Moltmann.  Roberts had not been aware of this development but when asked about it commented: ‘That suggests to me a kind of tiredness with the limitations of ecclesio- and missio-centric pneumatologies’.[5]  A preference for the Spirit as creator was already evident in Roberts writing on alternative worship and other emergents have been absorbing a similar pneumatology.  In a response to online articles on the Holy Spirit by Brewin, already cited, a blogger identifies affinities between Brewin’s emphasis on the relational Spirit and that of Moltmann[6] and such correspondences could be recognized in his thinking about spiritual gifts and his exposition of the concept of ‘Christ in the City’ in The Complex Christ.[7]  Gareth Powell of Moot has claimed that the ‘emerging church’s perspective on the Spirit is one that closely resembles Moltmann’s’.[8]  Baker has claimed that Moltmann’s Spirit of Life is ‘the best book of theology on the Holy Spirit’[9] and follows through Roberts argument that alternative worship resists a theology of supernatural encounter as a basis for worship, though he does not want to go as far as suggesting that there is nothing of ecstatic encounter in ‘incarnational worship’.  In their view charismatic worship has a tendency to lead to a negative view of culture and ‘the world’ and to exaggerated claims of truth about God and what he has said[10].  Alternative worshippers are sceptical about experience and resistant to using it as an ‘absolute touchstone’ for confirming an encounter with God.[11]  Experience is so easily gleaned from computer games and Ecstasy in pill form, that spiritual experiences are not a strong motivator.  The search for meaning is all.[12]

A current paper by Patrick Oden has sought to place the ‘nine practices’ of the emerging church within the context of the pneumatology of Moltmann[13].  In an introduction to a more popular version of this work, Alan Hirsch bemoans the absence of an emerging church pneumatology and welcomes Oden’s work as the start of a journey[14].  While no British emergent has addressed pneumatology in this detail, Hirsch, in common with other commentators seems to have missed what has been going on in the UK. 

The emergent critique of charismatic practice is, in the main, commonplace.  Its significance is in that the emergents see defective practice as evidence of a failed spirituality. Of greater importance is the evidence that there is a high degree of congruence between emergent perspectives and a pneumatology which has marked differences from that of the charismatics. The emergent critique is rather more than an attempt to gain distance from ‘the particular religious culture through which the belief has been expressed in the last few decades’. [15] What initially appeared to be an attempt to change the ‘bath water’ now looks like a search for an alternative ‘baby’.