Related articles and links |  1 of 2

Earlier this month, students at Asbury College in Kentucky arrived for their morning chapel service—but they didn't leave. In fact, it was days before everyone left the building. In the meantime, the chapel was filled with singing, prayer, and worship. One participant said, "Those days and nights in Hughes [Memorial Auditorium] provided a catalyst for renewal, for freedom, for seeking the heart of God."

Christian colleges provide the tight-knit community that many revivals require, says Timothy Larsen, associate professor of theology at Wheaton College. Larsen is most recently the co-editor ofReading Romans Through the Centuries: From the Early Church to Karl Barthand author ofContested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology. CT online associate editor Rob Moll spoke with Larsen aboutrevival and what brings it about.

How do revivals get started?

First, I believe in the work of the Holy Spirit and that revival is the work of the Holy Spirit. So nothing I say is in opposition to that. I am a charismatic myself, and I allow a large space for God intervening in dramatic ways. But, thinking about it as a historian, a hidden determinant is that for revival to happen, you have to have a sufficient cross-pollination within the community. It has to be a community where people are in one another's lives very thoroughly. If you look at the history of revival, they happen in pretty homogeneous communities. And if you look at the history of revival in Britain, which I know best, they tend to push out to the periphery. You have the great Welsh revival, around 1906, because Wales is still the kind of place where neighbors know one another.

For revival to have that kind of dynamic, it has involve people talking to one another, and they have to be bumping up against each other in a way that you can affect the whole community. That is harder to do now on a town level or a city level in most of the modern world. People run along networks; they don't run across a neighborhood.

A college campus gives you a community where people know each other and are interacting with one another thoroughly. It still has a small-town feel to it. It's possible to create that dynamic on a college campus in a way that is more difficult to create in a major city.

How does the Azusa Street revival fit into that, because that revival was cross-cultural and in a major city?

We can see Azusa as the first network revival as opposed to a city revival. Azusa is extraordinarily effective, but it is effective along lines of networks. So people are literally affected by Azusa Street in India and Norway before other neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

It goes straight down certain Christian networks, and it spreads rapidly through those networks. You have ministers coming to Azusa Street and going back, transforming whole denominations. You have missionaries coming in and transforming the settings of their work. You have people reading the newspaper and starting a revival prayer meeting with their contacts halfway around the world and finding a similar event happening with them. So Azusa is very dramatic and effective as a revival, but is not a Los Angeles revival. It is a kind of fire spreading along trenches that have already been dug.

Were you at Wheaton during the revival in 1995?

No.

At Wheaton today, do you see any lingering effects from that revival?

I think things are still different because of the revival. It is kind of the chicken and egg question there. I see our students as very spiritually earnest and dedicated. I think that is both a fruit of the revival, but also a kind of building of consciousness that made the revival possible.

next page... |  1 of 2

February (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50