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| A whiteboard at the Asbury revival showing the times when the chapel is open on February 16. 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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Really great post from Christianity Today: ‘No Celebrities Except Jesus’: How Asbury Protected the Revival (February 23). It's about the very practical decisions that leaders at Asbury University made to keep the "revival" focused on the things they believed it should be focused on. (The article is paywalled, but go ahead and click it because I think they give a few free views per month... Honestly for me it *is* worth paying the $49 yearly subscription fee for Christianity Today, just to read this article. I think that says something about what specific type of nerd I am...)
I love this post SO MUCH, because I think people have this idea that things like revival "just happen" and there's no conscious human decision-making. As if God just does this thing and then everyone is emotionally caught up in it and responds automatically. No, that's not how it works at all. The reality is there's A LOT of behind-the-scenes stuff going on to keep things running smoothly. The initial trigger may have been caused by God, but the things that happened afterward, to direct the event and shape it to be a certain way, was very much a product of human decision-making. (And yes, I'm sure that people prayed about these decisions a lot, and believed that it was God telling them to do those things- still, this is humans taking action, not something that God causes to happen automatically.)
Here, let's take a look:
The school had not planned an outpouring of the Spirit. But when something started to happen in the middle of the first week of February—the middle of the semester, a few days before the Super Bowl—an impromptu mix of administrators, staff, faculty, friends, and university neighbors quickly mobilized. They gathered in a storage closet off the side of Hughes Auditorium and then repurposed a classroom to facilitate and support whatever it was that God was doing.
As word spread, the crowds came, and debates raged online about whether this was a “real” revival, these men and women worked untold hours to make sure that everyone who sought God had food and water and restrooms and everyone was safe. Part of the story behind the story of the revival is the almost invisible work that went into protecting it.
“There were 100 people volunteering at any one time, just to make these services work on the fly,” Asbury University president Kevin Brown told CT. “There was a classroom that got redeployed into almost a command center. If you walked in, there were flow charts on the wall and the whiteboards were covered with information. There was a volunteer check-in station. … It was one of the most impressive technical feats I’ve ever seen.”
Yes! Love this! This is great. A team of volunteers came together to decide how to manage the "revival." And that NEEDED to happen, otherwise it would have become a disorganized mess. But the team of volunteers is doing that work, it's not "God." Like I said in another post on the revival, there's what God does, and then there's how people respond to it.
It wasn't just "God did this"- it was "God did a thing, and then we organized around it to make it into something." (I say this because personally I think there *is* something to this that's really from God- but I definitely understand if you don't believe that, and I am SO not on board with the evangelicals who are like "hooray let's pray that this happens in other universities too!" as if it's self-evidently a good thing.) It could have gone a completely different direction if the humans there had made different decisions.
Then they started thinking slightly longer term: “Will students stay all night? What does that look like? Should we leave the sound system on? Should we let students keep bringing guitars into chapel?”
The group decided to have ministers stay in Hughes and have security watch the building but keep it open. They would let the students stay and pray and sing as long as they wanted.
Other decisions they made in the next few days seem, as the ad hoc committee reflects on them now, almost like they happened by instinct. There was no time for drawn-out discussions. They would meet in the storage closet and make decisions minute by minute. Did they want to put up screens for the lyrics of the worship songs? No. Should ministers who spoke on stage stop to introduce themselves? No. Should they put up signs asking people not to livestream? Yes.
YES! I love this SO MUCH! So practical! These are very real decisions that needed to be made, and it all happened behind the scenes- and people might get the mistaken impression that these things just happened automatically because "God did it" or whatever.
By evening the crowd had grown to about 3,000, and the university had to set up overflow rooms. At the same time, an uncoordinated infrastructure of support began to appear. An Asbury student set up a table and started handing out tea and coffee. She said Jesus told her to. A woman in Indianapolis baked chocolate chip cookies for a full day and then drove down to give them away. A professor went and got cases of bottled water.
Pizza appeared, unbidden, along with homemade potato soup, cake, a table of protein bars, and what one volunteer called “all the Chick-fil-A.” Someone volunteered to start organizing housing and put up signs with QR codes that people could scan to start the process of finding a place to sleep.
Yessssssssssssssss. Thousands of people descend on this little Kentucky town, creating PROBLEMS like where are they gonna sleep? And people needed to step in and do that organizing work. It's not an emotionally moving spiritual experience, but it's important and necessary.
As news of the singing, praying students ripped across social media and “takes” ricocheted around Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook, the team planned and organized, working out the details of how to deal with that tension. So when someone started blowing on a shofar—the curly ram’s horn trumpet that some charismatic Christians have turned into a symbol of MAGA politics and spiritual warfare—the chapel staff didn’t have a protocol for that exact situation, but they knew what to do. They asked the person to recognize the way God had showed up in the chapel and be faithful to the sweet, humble, peaceful spirit of the outpouring.
They did the same thing, Asbury staff told CT, when someone started praying loudly and aggressively. And again when someone started attempting an exorcism—not arguing about demonology or citing university rules, but invoking the authority of the outpouring itself.
“We want to be true to how the Holy Spirit showed up with our students,” said Baldwin, the vice president of student life. “We experienced joy. We experienced love. We experienced peace. There was lots of singing and testimonies. Those became our signposts. This is how, in front of our eyes, we are seeing the Holy Spirit come upon our students, and we want to honor that.”
Most people complied, though a few had to be asked to leave. One street preacher came wearing a T-shirt condemning gay sex and a plan, according to staff, to shout at students about perversion. He was escorted off the property. Another person wouldn’t stop praying aggressively and was told he had to go outside.
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH.
So, because this became a huge thing that attracted thousands of people, inevitably they got people who wanted to come and make big political/controversial/wacky overtures. And this volunteer team at Asbury did not allow that. Good for them! I love how practical this is- they don't just naively assume that since this is "from God" then nothing bad will happen.
It's interesting that the reason they give isn't "that's offensive" or "we don't agree with those beliefs"- instead, they said it was because they wanted to stay true to what the revival had been about from the beginning- about people having the experience of feeling God's presence. About singing and testimonies. By using this as the reason, they don't get into debates about which beliefs are right and which are wrong. Very interesting.
But you can see here that these sorts of practical decisions can potentially cause the "revival" to veer away from what God intended it to be. What if that weirdo trying to perform an exorcism was called by God to do that, and the Asbury volunteers were wrong to put a stop to it? Isn't this the kind of spiritual experience where you should be open to whatever God is doing, even if it's something really weird like having somebody loudly perform an exorcism?
So, my point is, this is a decision. If the would-be exorcist was sent by God, and you stop them, then you cause everyone to miss out on whatever amazing spiritual things God was planning to do involving the exorcism. But if you err in the other direction- if they're not from God, but you let them go ahead and do whatever they want, then they are doing something weird/offensive that messes up other people's spiritual experiences. And maybe more weirdos will show up and do other things like that, and turn the whole event into some kind of circus.
They had to make a decision- and it's a human decision, it's not something that happens automatically because "God." (Though yes, I'm sure the Asbury people were praying a lot to ask God what decisions they should make about all these practical things. Probably exorcist-person was also praying though!) Because of my own personal beliefs regarding exorcism, I think this exorcist-person was, uh, wrong, and the Asbury team made the right decision. But you see, my ideas of what's reasonable and what's not are very much rooted in my own beliefs about exorcism. It's not God making that decision- it's humans, with all their existing biases.
It makes me wonder what decisions they would have made on other "controversial" "issues", like existing as a queer person. But, again, these kinds of practical decisions are unavoidable.
When the chapel staff opened up the microphone again for testimonies, they started vetting them first. As an added precaution, the Asbury team held on to the microphones while people talked.
YES! Vet the testimonies! I LOVE IT! OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE THIS ARTICLE SO MUCH!
I grew up evangelical, so I have been to many testimony services, where any random person from the audience can come up to the microphone and tell their story of how God has been working in their life recently or whatever. Before the testimony time starts, I've often heard the speaker remind everyone of "The ABC's of testimonies: audible, brief, Christ-centered. And D: don't preach."
I have even been at some testimony services where some adult role model came up and offered a bit of vague pushback on some of the ideas from the students' testimonies. For example, in one testimony service I attended, a few students mentioned God telling them something in a dream. Later, one of the adults went up to the microphone and said, you know, just because something's in a dream doesn't mean it's from God- it could be caused by indigestion. It was very nice, gentle, didn't name names, but just wanted to correct an idea that was mentioned, so people in the audience didn't think that teaching was endorsed by the church in general.
And at Asbury, where thousands of people were coming from all over the country, man, you have no idea who is gonna come up to the microphone during testimony time and what they're gonna say. Vet the testimonies beforehand. Yes. I love it.
(Again, though, this is a point where this very practical, very necessary human decision-making may end up doing something contrary to God's opinion. I wonder what would happen if somebody's testimony was "God is telling me it's okay to be gay. God loves me just the way I am." Or "God is telling me that I need to trust him, and he'll give me the strength to overcome my same-sex attraction." I assume that since Asbury is a Christian university, their policies are not queer-accepting.)
There were also announcements that if people were moved by the Spirit to jump up and down, they shouldn’t do that in the nearly 100-year-old balcony.
YESSSS I love this SO MUCH. Like, there's this idea that in worship, you're supposed to be just totally carried away by your feelings towards God, and you just can't help it if you respond by raising your hands/ dancing/ jumping/ shouting. That's not true at all. You can control yourself. Asbury announced that jumping is okay but not if you're in the balcony.
Seminary students also got involved, sometimes formally, sometimes informally. Hermann Finch, a Methodist youth minister from Zimbabwe who is studying at the seminary, told CT he was asked directions to the toilet. So that’s how he decided to volunteer, pointing people to the port-a-potties for an evening.
This is so real. I was going to just say "he's doing the Lord's work" but people would think I was making a joke, and I'm not- that really is the Lord's work, helping people find the bathroom.
Going into the second weekend, however, the revival committee decided they would need to announce a limit to their hospitality. The town of Wilmore was overwhelmed, traffic was impossible, and news of the revival was only spreading more rapidly. Tucker Carlson, host of the most-watched TV news show, did a glowing segment on Asbury and told viewers the next day he was “still thinking about it.” Carlson said he “didn’t understand it … but whatever is going on seemed wonderful.” On Friday, former vice president Mike Pence tweeted he was “deeply moved to see the revival taking place at @AsburyUniv!” and noted his own religious awaking at a music festival there in 1978.
Early Saturday morning the school set up two large screens in the grassy semicircle outside the chapel to try to accommodate everyone. An estimated 7,000 people showed up that day—more than doubling the number of people in Wilmore. Most had to stay outside the chapel, even though the temperature reached only the 40s. Some reports placed the total number of weekend visitors around 20,000.
At some point, the team decided they had to bring the revival to an end, because the town was overwhelmed with people, and the volunteers were overwhelmed by working there all day long. Okay, this is great, I love this. Very real human concerns, like exhaustion, traffic, not wanting to be a burden on all the residents of this tiny town.
And, also- this is my view, not what the article says- God is everywhere. We don't need to keep this specific instance of "revival" going, because it's just feelings. What actually matters is what you do with it- and we already know what God wants us to do. Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly before God.
Another thing not mentioned in the article was that the Asbury team decided to prioritize people under 25 years old ("Gen Z"). For people under 25, there was a separate line which moved much faster, to get into the chapel. (Source- I've heard/read this in a lot of places, here is one example.) This is a very human decision, and I find it very interesting because it is blatant discrimination. Now, I don't think this "blatant discrimination" is necessarily a bad thing- this is a college, of course their priority should be their own students rather than whatever random people drive in from who-knows-where. (They decided to expand it beyond their own students, to everyone in that age group.) I don't think there's anything wrong with that. My point is, this is quite obviously a decision made by humans, not something that God did. (And setting up 2 separate lines and directing people toward which line they should be in- also very much done by humans.)
They believed that the meaning of this revival is closely tied to college students/ Gen Z experiencing God, so that's why they prioritized people in that age group. That was their belief about God's purpose in the revival. I'm not saying it's right or wrong- I mean, I'm fine with it, they're a college, it makes sense that they focus on that age group- but I'm saying this is a human belief about what God is doing and what the revival is supposed to be. Humans decided that, not God. And, again, it's fine, I'm not saying it's wrong- I'm just pointing out that this revival wasn't something that "just happened" because "God did it"- it was very much shaped by fallible human decisions.
Okay, now here's a question: What if someone made the argument, "Yes, it was human decisions shaping the revival- but, since it was started by God, we can be confident that those human decisions were the right ones. Because, God knows the future, and God wouldn't have even started it if God knew that people wouldn't handle it right"?
No, I don't buy that.
I'm just really uncomfortable with the idea that, if you're fated to screw it up, then God's not even going to give you a chance. God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. I think people should have a shot at experiencing revival, even if they're people who aren't going to respond in the most perfect ways.
And, therefore, when God starts something, we absolutely can judge and critique how people respond to it. There's no "well God chose them to experience this, therefore whatever they do is automatically right." (Let's also judge and critique God!)
In summary: Wow, I love that Christianity Today article so much, because it's about the practical, behind-the-scenes work that shaped the Asbury revival. I love it because it's something that most Christians don't seem to be aware of at all. Like there's this myth that God just does these things, and then the rest just plays out automatically- but that's so not true. It was people making these decisions. And things could have been very different if they had made different decisions.
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More posts about the revival:
The New York Times (paywalled): ‘Woodstock’ for Christians: Revival Draws Thousands to Kentucky Town (February 23)
Relevant: Why Asbury University Decided to End Revival Services This Week (February 21)
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Related:
Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk
The things I've never let myself say about worship
