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Saturday, February 18, 2023

"There is no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred": What people do with "revival"

Image text: "Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly. Micah 6:8" Image source.

My posts on the Asbury revival:

February 13 Blogaround
"There is no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred": What people do with "revival"
Does God Use Miracles To Take Sides? 
The Logistics of a Revival 
Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"

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So, about what's going on at Asbury University.

Why students at a Kentucky Christian school are praying and singing round the clock (February 14)

Last Wednesday (Feb. 8), students at Asbury University gathered for their biweekly chapel service in the 1,500-seat Hughes Auditorium.

They sang. They listened to a sermon. They prayed.

Nearly a week later, many of them are still there.

“This has been an extraordinary time for us,” Asbury President Kevin Brown said during a gathering on Monday, more than 120 hours into what participants have referred to as a spiritual revival.

The revival has disrupted life and brought national attention to Asbury, an evangelical Christian school in Wilmore, Kentucky, about a half-hour outside of Lexington. Videos of students singing, weeping and praying have been posted on social media, leading to both criticism and praise from onlookers. News of the revival has also drawn students and other visitors to the campus to take part in the ongoing prayer and worship.

(I have some Facebook friends who have gone to see this revival and written about it on Facebook. A lot of people in evangelical circles are talking about it.)

See the Slacktivist's post about it: Revive us again (again), and also what I wrote in my latest blogaround.

So, first what I want to say is: I believe in God. I'm a Christian. Therefore I believe that it is at least theoretically possible that God does sometimes come and "pour out Their spirit" in a certain place, and people there do feel Their presence and have very strong emotional/spiritual experiences. Yes, it's at least theoretically possible, but I believe we should always be skeptical of any actual reports of this actually happening. Because it is much more likely to be caused by the way the music and the environment of the worship space manipulate people's emotions- and this can be used in nefarious ways by Christian leaders who know what they're doing.

So, I see articles from Christian sources about what's going on in Asbury, and I do feel like there's something real about it. Like God really has chosen to cause Their presence to be powerfully felt there. (Maybe I'm wrong though, who knows? I have ex-Christian Twitter friends who are side-eyeing the entire thing, and I get that.) My *feeling* is there really is at least a part of this that's from God- I don't think it's *all* because of someone's skill at playing emotionally-manipulative music or whatever- and I say that because what's happening at Asbury is very grassroots and student-led. 

But that doesn't mean that Christians who describe what's happening, or say "this is what it means," are right about that.

There's what God does, and then there's how people respond to it.

It makes me think about the healing of the man at the pool, in John 5:1-15. "Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. [footnote, only found in some manuscripts: and they waited for the moving of the waters. From time to time an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first one into the pool after each such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease they had.]" Apparently this was the way God worked at this miraculous pool.

But it's not just about how God works, it's about how people respond. Jesus sees a man who had been sick for 38 years, and the sick man says, "Sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me." Like... should someone have taken charge and set up a system where new people couldn't cut in front of people who had been waiting there for years, who were too disabled to get into the water? Or... maybe not... something seems kind of wrong about people putting rules and restrictions on a miracle, setting up neat systems to make it work according to their own opinions about who God "should" heal first... but at the same time, it wasn't fair to this guy, right?

I've heard that at Asbury, some Christian celebrities have shown up, and the students there do NOT let them have the stage. The worship music on stage is student-led. Whoever is in charge there doesn't want anyone to co-opt it for their own purposes. Maybe someone should have done something like that at the pool in Bethesda.

But if you're making decisions on who can or can't have the stage, then that aspect of it is from humans, not God. But there is no alternative- if no one puts a restriction there, then inevitably some power-hungry person will use it for their own ambitions/ political goals/ etc.

There's what God does, and then there's how people respond to it.

I believe in a God who lets people have the freedom to respond- and to be wrong sometimes. God does something, and then some believer says "God did this in my life, and this is what it means" and maybe their explanation on "this is what it means" is so completely different from God's actual opinion. But what is God going to do- only allow people who are right about everything to have spiritual experiences? Mind-control people to make sure they have the correct opinion about their spiritual experience?

I believe in a God who is a full person with Their own opinions and Their own experiences, and people are created in the image of God- God wants people to all be free to have their own opinions and their own experiences. It's not about making sure everyone knows the "right answer" about every issue- that's not important to my God at all. God does things and lets people make of it whatever they want. (Death of the author, I guess.)

And maybe I have an opinion and I believe that God shouldn't do those "spiritual experience" sorts of things, because of how people take it... like taking it as confirmation that all their already-held beliefs about God are true. I think about when God rescued Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the fiery furnace (Daniel 3), and I wonder if there was some other friend of theirs who was also very devoted to God, and made a nuanced argument about why it's okay to pretend to bow down to the statue, and so he wasn't thrown into the fiery furnace, and didn't experience the miracle, and then... then what? What does that do to his faith? (Maybe someday I'll find the time to write a bible fanfic on this.)

For me, actually, it used to be that a big part of this was wanting "evidence" that God exists. When I was evangelical, that's what I wanted. I was always very aware of atheism, and always fighting it... wanting a "spiritual experience" because then that would be "evidence"- wanting to investigate other people's accounts of their own spiritual experiences, to prove atheism wrong. 

Now I don't care about that anymore, though- now I would say I have more in common with atheists who criticize Christianity, than with conservative Christians. I don't think being wrong about the existence or non-existence of God really matters as much. So I hear about this revival, and my concern isn't about if it's "real" or not. It doesn't matter to me if it's real or not. It matters what people do with it. Are people going to say "and this means that God is confirming I was right about how being queer is a sin/ God is confirming I was right about how being queer is not a sin" etc etc etc?

(Maybe we should say that these spiritual experiences shouldn't be used to prop up one side or the other in a culture war- but isn't that what happened in Acts 10:44-48? There was the question of whether Gentiles could be Christians, or if only Jewish people could- and the Holy Spirit came on the Gentiles and they spoke in tongues, and that was evidence for which side of the argument God was on. Couldn't a similar thing happen, where God's spirit is clearly present in queer Christians, and that's evidence that the church should be queer-affirming? To some extent I think that has happened but in a more long-term sense- there are Christians who changed their minds because they got to know queer Christians and saw that the queer Christians really are devoted to God, etc.)

And I know a lot of Christians want to have these kinds of spiritual experiences, to have that feeling, to feel God's presence. Chasing that emotion, specifically. I'm not into that anymore either. I have boundaries with God; I've decided I won't have a "personal relationship" with any god. I won't be vulnerable to any god in that way. I've had spiritual experiences like this before, but I don't feel I need that now.

Like, honestly, I'm not on board with the idea that we "need" this kind of "revival." I'm not on board with Christians who long for it (because that's often tied up with ideas about Christians getting more political power...). It's just an emotional experience. Like, okay sure it's the presence of God or whatever, but, God is always with us. Where can I go from Your spirit, where can I flee from Your presence? We don't need God giving us our own personal little emotional experiences- we need to bring justice to the earth. Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God.

(Also I'm giving a lot of side-eye to Christians who uncritically accept that this really is a "revival", and don't have any concerns about it, and are like "let's pray for it to happen at our church too!")

Actually, I want to say a bit about where these emotional spiritual experiences figure into evangelical culture. I've been to Christian conferences where the worship service goes on a while and people are like "God is here!" and ... I would say the result of this is the way it inspires the people who experience it. The emotions of it can be so strong, that it's something that stays with you for years, and you base your life on it. There was one conference I was at, in college, that as I was kneeling in the front, with the worship music playing, I had this idea to start 2 bible study groups. And then I ended up actually doing it, over the next few months. I was inspired, I had that emotional experience, and I went on to do it. (At the same time, I wonder about people who made these big commitments about all the things they were going to do for God, during high-emotion spiritual experiences, and then don't end up doing them- I really wonder about the statistics on that.) And... I mean, yeah, hopefully people are inspired to do things that are good, but this is limited by the ideology you already believe in. Like, in those 2 bible study groups I started, I did that because I believed my friends needed God, and needed to become Christians. I don't believe that any more.

There's what God does, and then there's how people respond.

And I've been to Urbana (Intervarsity's huge missions conference). And it is a known phenomenon, that people "get the call to missions" at Urbana- like, you're having these emotional spiritual experiences, and in the midst of that, you feel like God is "calling" you to go be a missionary in some country. Actually, when I wanted to go to China, I didn't have that experience- and I worried SO MUCH that I wasn't "allowed" to go to China because God didn't "call" me. Like it was something I can't just choose to do myself, I can't just say "here are my reasons"- it's only valid if it just pops into my head as a random thought during a very spiritual experience. It really gave me a lot of angst back then, choosing to move to China because I wanted to, not because "God" "called" me.

Anywayyyy, maybe this post is all over the place, but I just want to write these things down... My point is, I think it's real, at least to some extent, but the important thing isn't if it's real, it's what people do with it. 

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Follow-up post: Does God Use Miracles To Take Sides?

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Related:

My Urbana 12 Commitment Card

"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me" 

When God Agreed That a Crush Was Dangerous

The things I've never let myself say about worship

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Some tweets (after the jump):


This thread and the replies:

This thread questioning how it can be of God if it's a mass gathering without masks in a pandemic:

This thread:

This whole thread:

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