I was recently invited to attend a forum where Os Guinness spoke on “A World Safe for Diversity,” essentially on the importance of “civility” in public life. About the same time I began reading a new book, American Grace: How Religion Divides Us and Unites Us, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell. They said many of the same things, and it was very convicting.
 

How do seasons of revival come? One set of answers comes from Charles Finney, who turned revivals into a "science." Finney insisted that any group could have a revival any time or place, as long as they applied the right methods in the right way. Finney's distortions, I think, led to much of the weakness in modern evangelicalism today, as has been well argued by Michael Horton over the years. Especially under Finney's influence, revivalism undermined the more traditional way of doing Christian formation. That traditional way of Christian growth was gradual – whole family catechetical instruction – and church-centric. Revivalism under Finney, however, shifted the emphasis to seasons of crisis. Preaching became less oriented to long-term teaching and more directed to stirring up the affections of the heart toward decision. Not surprisingly, these emphases demoted the importance of the church in general and of careful, sound doctrine and put all the weight on an individual's personal, subjective experience. And this is one of the reasons (though not the only reason) that we have the highly individualistic, consumerist evangelicalism of today.

In Jeremiah 26 the prophet preaches a public sermon telling the people of Jerusalem that disaster was coming to them from the hand of God if they did not turn from their evil ways. The response of the priests and other prophets was to seize him and call for his death (26:11). Fortunately for Jeremiah, the priests and prophets had to bring their case before a cross-section of other officials. 
 

I was very glad to see the new book by Collin Hansen and John Woodbridge, A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories that Stretch and Stir, because a generation ago there was far more interest in and desire for revival than there is now, though everyone had somewhat different conceptions of it. For many in the Baptist and Methodist tradition, "revival" meant a season of vigorous activity for the purposes of prayer, renewal, and evangelism. For Pentecostals and charismatics, it meant a time in which the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit were evident. For those in the Reformed-Puritan tradition who looked to Jonathan Edwards' theology of revival as definitive, it meant an intensification of the ordinary means of grace and a great wave of newly awakened inquirers, soundly converted sinners, and spiritually renewed believers.

We recently had an election season in the U.S. Every year, it seems, the amount of attention paid to the mechanics and outcomes of partisan politics grows. Thirty years ago there was nothing like this amount of attention given to politics. Many point out rightly that the 24-hour news cycle and the internet creates an appetite for political analysis. But I think there is more going on. It's not just that the political is given more air time, but that it's now seen as far more important to human life. The politically fragmented media, with outlets ranging from very liberal to very conservative, only seem to agree on one thing, namely, that nothing matters more than which American political party wins the most seats.