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Revive Us Again

By Elesha Coffman, assistant editor of CHRISTIAN HISTORY

What has happened to the spirit of the early church, and how can we get it back? Two very different men pondered this question and, in their quest for an answer, sparked two very different revivals. Their stories are told in two books recently translated into English: History of the Pentecostal Revival in Chile, by Willis Collins Hoover (Imprenta Eben-Ezer), and The Awakening: One Man's Battle with Darkness, by Friedrich Zuendel (Plough).

Chile was not Willis Collins Hoover's first choice of mission field. Inspired by David Livingstone, he wanted to go to Africa. But Methodist missionary bishop William Taylor assigned him to Chile, so Hoover and his wife left for South America in 1889. Hoover assumed leadership of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Valparaiso in 1902, the year the adult Sunday school class was studying the Book of Acts. That was also the year a parishioner asked him, "What prevents our being a church like the early church?" Hoover answered, "Nothing prevents it, except something within ourselves."

However, as Hoover's account (the first half of the book) describes, the Pentecostal revival that began in Valparaiso was nearly prevented at many turns. An earthquake destroyed the church. Controversy raged over a woman with a dark past who, after conversion, seemed gifted with special power to convict people of their sins. Newspapers, not unlike the Los Angeles press covering Azusa Street, touted "The Work of a Swindler, or a Huckster," "Shouts, Swoonings, and Slaps," and "Tragi-Comic Scenes. Full Details." And the Methodist hierarchy worked to stop Hoover, charging him with imprudent conduct and "teaching and disseminating false and anti-Methodist doctrines" (apparently forgetting that emotional outbursts were a hallmark of Methodist revivals from the very beginning).

Hoover originally published the chapters of his account in the church magazine. Its strength, aside from first-hand freshness, is the inclusion of many supporting documents: letters, other accounts of revival meetings, and the full texts of the official church censures. The memoir is also unpleasantly defensive in spots, as Hoover was probably seeking to reassure his congregation of the revival's rightness despite fierce opposition from other Methodist leaders. Hoover eventually broke with the Methodists, and the new church split in 1933; naturally, no retelling of church splits will be entirely congenial.

The account was translated by Hoover's grandson, Mario G. Hoover, who spent 13 years with his grandfather in Chile. The second half of the book is Mario's collection of more of his grandfather's writings, reflections by his grandmother, his own personal memories of those 13 years, an update on Pentecostalism in Chile (which now claims as many as two million adherents), and brief biographies of Hoover's descendents.

If a Methodist missionary in Chile isn't a thoroughly unlikely candidate to launch a revival, a Lutheran pastor in 1830s Germany surely is. Yet it was Johann Christoph Blumhardt, serving an unpromising parish in the Black Forest, who said, "I long for another outpouring of the Holy Spirit, another Pentecost. That must come if things are to change in Christianity, for it simply cannot continue in such a wretched state. The gifts and powers of the early Christian time—oh, how I long for their return! And I believe the Savior is just waiting for us to ask for them."

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