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A friend of mine who speaks regularly to teenagers likes to tell them, "You are not the church of tomorrow. You are the church of today." Evangelicalism has always been a dynamic movement—with all the energy, restlessness, and idealism this word suggests—in large part because it has been a movement of and for the rising generation.

Many Christians in the English-speaking world believe that evangelical revival first began in 1734 among the young people in Jonathan Edwards' church at Northampton, Massachusetts, and then spread up and down the Connecticut River Valley in New England. But there was an earlier revival in a different river valley in central Europe: the Oder River Valley. The region is known as Silesia and runs along the Czech-Polish border. The "Uprising of the Children" here in 1708 reminds us of the important place of young people in the church, both in the past and in the present.

The story of this revival is told in a 41-page tract published in London in 1708 with the long title (typical of the period) Praise out of the Mouth of Babes, or, a Particular Account ofSome Extraordinary Pious Motions and Devout Exercises, Observ'd of Late in Many Children in Silesia. The phrase "Particular Account of Some Extraordinary Pious Motions" recalls the style of Jonathan Edwards' report on the revival he witnessed in New England: A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. Both of these accounts are of the strange-but-true genre.

The revival in central Europe began when school-age children of Protestant parents were not willing, like their elders, to be silenced and marginalized by their Catholic rulers. The children at Sprottau (near Glogau) began to meet in the open fields outside the town at daybreak and two or three more times a day. They would form a circle and pray—sometimes lying prostrate—and then sing Lutheran hymns, read Psalms and devotional texts, and close with a blessing. One Protestant father was so worried about the children doing this in defiance of the authorities that he tried to lock his son and daughter in their bedrooms. When he heard that they were going to climb out the window, he relented and let them go.

Soon the adults were gathering and forming a circle around the children. As the children sang and prayed, the adults wept. In several towns, as many as 300 children gathered. Later, one observer reported a thousand. The magistrates issued orders to desist, but the children wouldn't stop. At Frideberg, the hangman was sent with a whip to disperse the children who were meeting in the marketplace, but when he saw them at their prayers, he couldn't do it. At Breslau, some of the Roman Catholic children joined the Lutheran children, despite strict orders from the magistrates for parents to keep their children at home. And still thousands looked on. Evangelicals and Catholics together.

This young people's revival was "baptized into the church," and Protestant pastors channeled it into a regional renewal movement. The nerve center of the revival was the Jesus Church in Teschen, a town deep in the south of Poland. (On a modern map of central Europe, you can find a town on the Polish-Czech border that is named Cieszyn on the Polish side, and Český Těšín on the Czech side.). The Jesus Church was one of a handful of churches that the ruling Catholic dynasty allowed the Protestants in the region to have, and they had to raise the money for it themselves. A series of Pietist pastors came in from Germany and elsewhere to oversee the church, but soon the services attracted thousands more than could be accommodated. Some people would walk all night to get there. Though the church held 5,000 and had multiple balconies, services had to begin at six on Sunday morning and continue all day in different languages. Great crowds inside and outside the church passed the time in prayers, confessions, and ardent hymn singing. Revival soon spread to the surrounding towns and villages. Teschen was to central Europe in the 18th century what Edwards' Northampton was to America.

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