The shofars didn’t start until Saturday. With them came the would-be prophets seeking to take center stage at the Asbury University chapel where students had been praying and praising God since Wednesday morning; the would-be leaders who wanted to claim the revival for their ministries, their agendas, and celebrity; and the would-be disrupters, coming to break up whatever was happening at the small Christian school in Kentucky with heckling, harangues, and worse.
But by Saturday, Asbury University was ready.
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.”
The revival began at a chapel service on February 8. Zach Meerkreebs, the assistant soccer coach who is also the leadership development coordinator for the missions organization Envision, preached about becoming love in action. His text was Romans 12.
As he started, Meerkreebs told the students, who are required to attend three chapels per week, that he wasn’t aiming to entertain them. And he didn’t want them to focus on him.
“I hope you guys forget me but anything from the Holy Spirit and God’s Word would find fertile ground in your hearts and produce fruit,” he said. “Romans 12. That’s the star, okay? God’s Word and Jesus and the Holy Spirit moving in our midst, that’s what we’re hoping for.”
Meerkreebs also talked to them about the experience of God’s love, in contrast to the “radically poor love” that’s narcissistic, abusive, manipulative, and selfish.
“Some of you guys have experienced that love in the church,” he said. “Maybe it’s not violent, maybe it’s not molestation, it’s not taken advantage of—but it feels like someone has pulled a fast one on you.”
No one came forward at the end of the service, though, and Meerkreeb was convinced he “totally whiffed.” He texted his wife: “Latest stinker. I’ll be home soon.”
A Black gospel trio sang a final song and chapel ended—but 18 or 19 students stayed. They sat in several clusters: a few along the right wall, a few in their seats, a few on the floor in the aisle, a few at the foot of the stage. They kept praying.
Zeke Atha, a junior, told a documentarian a few days later that he was one of the ones who remained in the chapel. He left after an hour to go to a class, but then when he got out, he heard singing.
“I said, ‘Okay, that’s weird,’” Atha said. “I went back up, and it was surreal. The peace that was in the room was unexplainable.”
He and a few friends immediately left, sprinting around campus, bursting into classrooms with an announcement: “Revival is happening.”
The Wesleyan-movement school has a tradition of revivals and a theology that teaches people to wait and watch for a divine wind to blow. The university is named for Francis Asbury, the early American Methodist bishop who encouraged and celebrated revivals from Maine to Georgia and Maryland to Tennessee.
There are also people in the Kentucky community who have long prayed for fresh revival at the school, including a Malaysian theology teacher who sometimes walked the streets with a cardboard sign that said, “Holy Spirit, You Are Welcome Here.”
Administrators, however, did not immediately assume a revival was starting, even as young men ran around campus shouting it was. Only as the spontaneous prayer service stretched into the afternoon and then evening did school officials realize they might have to make a decision about how to respond.
Meeting in a closet
An ad hoc revival committee of about seven people gathered in the one quiet space in Hughes—a storage closet. According to several people who were there, they pushed aside a drum kit and keyboard and sat knee to knee. Someone found a dry erase board, and they asked each other, “What are we going to do in the next two hours?”
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.
“We were just trying to keep up,” student life vice president Sarah Thomas Baldwin told CT. “There are people and they’re showing up and they’re desperate for God. We’re just trying to stay alive and trying to honor what is happening.”
Evangelical Christians must rediscover the Reformation truth that God can be glorified through a life of scholarship.“You are invited,” the invitation read, “to attend a banquet for the 48 American Jews who have won a Nobel Prize in science.” I have trouble thinking of one evangelical Christian who has won a Nobel Prize, I thought, after reading the invitation. Jews number about 8 million in the United States; some evangelicals have claimed their number to be 40 million. Why this comparative lack of scientific accomplishment by evangelical Christians?A partial answer is that not many evangelical Christians have academic appointments in the science departments of the universities where the majority of the Nobel Prizes are won. Neither are evangelicals represented in proportion to their numbers among the graduate students who will become the university professors of the future.And while evangelical Christians do graduate from college, of course, often it is not with the expectation of pursuing careers in university teaching and research. Even before they come to college, few have been challenged by their church leaders to consider scholarly science as a career that can glorify God. In many cases, such a career is even discouraged before the student arrives at college. Potential scholars are thereby lost to the academic pipeline before reaching the college gates.Little is done during the college years to change this situation. For 40 years, parachurch groups such as InterVarsity, Campus Crusade, and the Navigators have ministered to students on the university campus. That generation of students now occupies the faculty positions in our universities. Yet, the university faculties are as secular as ever. Where are the Christians?The question then becomes: “What causes evangelical Christians to turn away from a life of teaching and scholarship?”And the answer is: “Teaching and scholarship are not on the list of activities given the ‘seal of approval’ by much of the evangelical Christian community.”Approved ActivitiesA few months ago, a missionary spoke to our church and told about his family problems. Two of his daughters had been on drugs but, providentially, everything ended well: One daughter married a man studying for the ministry, the other married a missionary. But I cannot recall any evangelical Christian father who was proud and relieved that his daughter married a graduate student. While this lack of respect or appreciation for scholarship certainly does not afflict all quarters of evangelical life, it is pervasive enough to cause us concern.If one talks to a staff member for a Christian group ministering to students on a university campus, one might well hear, “We had a good year; three of our graduating seniors are going on staff.” I have yet to hear: “We had a good year; three of our seniors are going to graduate school.”And, of course, there is that Christian expression that summarizes the whole problem: “full-time Christian service.” It would be difficult to find a phrase that better implies that Christians in certain “unapproved” activities are not full-time Christians.Despite the efforts of several vocal leaders to set this matter right, students continue to hear the refrain that certain vocations are more “Christian” than others. This attitude of our evangelical culture inevitably deflects these young people from choosing a life devoted to teaching and scholarship.True, there are factors—economic, for example—that may discourage the prospective student. But economic hardship has traditionally been part of the mission call, and just as we make no apology for asking people to live with economic stringencies in order to serve on the mission field, so we should make that part of the challenge to those who have a vocation to scholarship.We see a contrasting attitude among Jews. Their admiration for scholarship is the source of their scholarly accomplishments. For more than two millennia, the rabbi, or teacher, has occupied the pre-eminent position in Jewish society. Consequently, today the best of their youth strive to attain a university position where they can devote their lives to study and research.Evangelicals’ acceptance of the “approved activities” list even cripples the few evangelical Christians who manage to trickle from the academic pipeline. Consider, as an example, this perspective once voiced by a Christian faculty member: “I am being paid by the university to work 40 hours a week, and I will conscientiously fulfill that obligation. But the rest of my time is for my family and for my church.”What a contrast this is to the attitude illustrated by the delightful story of the Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli. A friend met him one beautiful spring weekend in Copenhagen. The friend asked, “Why do you look so glum on such a beautiful day?” Pauli replied, “How can anybody be happy when we don’t understand the anomalous Zee-man Effect?” Nobel Prize winners don’t punch time clocks.I am by no means suggesting that Nobel Prizes should come before families. According to Scripture, husband and wife become “one flesh,” one body. But God will not be pleased on the day of judgment if our sole accomplishment has been to care for our bodies, for our families. That would be too much like the servant who was given one talent and did not use it. Our families are given to us as a home base from which we sally forth into the world to glorify God. They are not an end in themselves.As for his relationship to the church, the academic Christian gives of his first fruits just as any other Christian. Very likely, he teaches in the church. And the quality of his teaching will be enhanced by his academic experience. Nineteenth-century physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, for example, who discovered the law for generating electricity, preached every Sunday in his little church in London. Yet, he worked so hard on his research that he suffered a nervous breakdown (which I am certainly not advocating).Evangelical Christians, however, should take care that in their haste to leave the campus and serve the church, they are not neglecting a fertile mission field in which they work every day. As those of us on secular campuses have found, opportunities abound for speaking to student groups, for discussing one’s faith with both individual faculty members and students, and for sponsoring Christian student organizations for the university administration.A caution is in order, however. When some academic Christians recognize these opportunities, they may be tempted to say, “I will teach in a university so that I can have a Christian influence on young people.” Of course, no Nobel Prize work will be done when this is the only motivation for the work of scholarship.One can excel in intellectual endeavors only by immersing oneself in his work as Pauli did. I am immersed in physics because I am fascinated by the insights that physics has obtained about God’s world. I find in physics an aesthetic appeal that enriches human existence and gives the same kind of satisfaction that is experienced by hearing great music or viewing unspoiled nature. My fascination with the physicist’s description of nature led to my seeing the same aesthetically satisfying patterns in Scripture; on this basis I became a Christian.There is an even graver criticism of the Christian who joins a university faculty solely to wield a “Christian influence.” Such a motivation, by itself, not only cripples the scholar, it leads her to join a community of scholars under false pretenses. Instead of joining other scholars to explore the frontiers of knowledge, the real purpose is found somewhere else.We have no respect for Communists when they infiltrate an organization for their own purposes. Non-Christians also have no respect for Christians who do the same thing. The opportunities for a Christian influence on a university campus are interwoven into the life of teaching and scholarship; they are not an end in themselves.Paying The PriceWhat price has the church paid for restricting its vision of “approved” activities and vocations?First, Christian influence has largely departed from the universities. And, with this departure from the universities, Christian influence has inevitably declined in our culture as well. Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches television knows how the culture of our country has changed.However, the early church flourished in a non-Christian culture, and one can contend, properly, that the church can do so again. After all, the purpose of the church is to make disciples of all nations, and we should pray to that end. For countries such as China, our prayers should have special urgency.But God does not always answer prayers as we expect. In their wilderness wanderings, the early Israelites prayed for meat, and God buried them in meat. The church in our day has prayed for the Chinese, and God has buried us in Chinese—40,000 of them, in our universities. These are not the Chinese peasants for which we have been preparing our missionaries with long years of language study (a field that we need to continue to cultivate). Rather, these are the elite of the next generation; they know our language and already admire our culture. These are the leaders of China’s next generation. What an opportunity we now have to reach China with the gospel! I know, from my own experience, how surprised the Chinese are to meet Christian university professors. They have been taught that science has exposed religion as only a superstition. They have not heard that science developed in a Christian culture and that it is reasonable for scientists to be Christians.As evangelical Christians, then, we have not only stopped influencing our own culture, we have missed an opportunity to reach another culture. Because our promising young Christians have been sent to the mission field, not to university faculties, we have missed taking advantage of a mission field placed on our very doorsteps.The Cure For What Ails UsIf some evangelical Christians have fallen into the belief that certain “works” are better than others, the cure lies in a return to the insights of the Protestant Reformation. In pre-Reformation Europe there were two classes of Christians, the clergy and the laity. This division was aggravated by the belief that salvation was by “works.” Common lay people despaired of having the time or opportunity to withdraw from the world and devote themselves properly to good works.Lord of Creation and AcademyWhat does a calling to the academy mean for the Christian?Theologian H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, written almost four decades ago and still relevant, was one Christian’s analysis of the ways Christians have interpreted their obligations to the societies in which they live. At one extreme, he observed, are the separationists, seeing culture and scholarship as evil, or at least dangerous to faith. At the other extreme are the accommodators, who reduce biblical faith to the best that human culture and learning have attained. In between are the “churches of the center,” whose members neither reject culture and scholarship nor embrace them uncritically. Instead, such Christians affirm three important themes: (1) God in Christ is Lord over the entire universe. (2) All persons are called to obey God in their cultural activities, which include everything from language, art, science, and philosophy to government, technology, education, and recreation. Finally, (3) all of us are sinners and thus will fulfill God’s “cultural mandate” incompletely. Nevertheless, part of our grateful response to God’s grace is to embrace that cultural mandate, using our minds and skills in the transformation of culture so that it conforms more and more to God’s norms.I myself was raised in an “accommodationist” church that saw little if any tension between Christianity and the entire world of scholarship. I was first evangelized by “separationists” who catered wonderfully to my needs for salvation and fellowship but also gave me the distinct impression that the price to be paid for becoming a Christian was putting my mind into cold storage for life. (I simply put off becoming a Christian instead.) By God’s grace, when on the verge of completing my doctorate in psychology, I finally became a Christian through the witness of believers who understood that the Lord of salvation is also the Lord of creation, and the One who sends us back to the world of culture and scholarship to reclaim it for him.The Calvinist tradition of which I am now a part has always maintained that “all of life is religious,” by which is meant that whatever one does to the glory of God, be it building a business, changing a diaper, inventing a microscope, or analyzing a literary text, is, in fact, “full-time Christian service.” This is a tradition in which most adherents are as pleased with their daughters who marry graduate students as they are with those who marry missionaries. They are even learning—somewhat more slowly—to be pleased when the daughters themselves want to be graduate students.Indeed, Calvinists have been called “the Jews of Protestantism”—intellectual, clannish, and highly achievement oriented. For this reason their churches, schools, and colleges have attracted not a few bright, young evangelicals looking for ways to build a life of faith that does not disparage the life of the mind. But if Calvinists are similar to Jews in this way, why have they not garnered a similar proportion of academic accolades, such as Nobel Prizes?Part of the answer, I suspect, has to do with the question of whether Christian scholarship is best done in Christian or secular institutions. As a Christian, I have worked in both settings and can see advantages and disadvantages to both. The large university often offers better pay, smaller teaching loads, and more sophisticated facilities—especially for natural scientists. But for an interdisciplinary scholar like myself, with overlapping interests in psychology, theology, and philosophy of social science, the atomized, overspecialized university setting was often a drawback. So was its “selective secularism,” which welcomed faith-based, “world-viewish” scholarship when coming from Marxists, but scorned it as “partisan” and “subjective” when coming from Christians. It was only when I settled into my present, Christian liberal arts college that my particular scholarly interests were able to flourish optimally.Evangelicals will continue to give different answers to the question as to how Christian scholarship can best be nurtured, both individually and communally. But we need to agree that it should be nurtured, and be prepared to commit the necessary resources. Whether our universities are re-Christianized as a result is not the point. Our God demands obedience, not temporal success, and part of that obedience means using the minds he has given us to bring every thought captive to Christ.By Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, professor of interdisciplinary studies at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.All this was changed with Martin Luther’s rediscovery of salvation by faith. No longer were certain “works” required for salvation. Consecrated Christians were free to devote their lives to any lawful pursuit. Luther’s shoemaker could glorify God by making good shoes.Science, in particular, benefited from this new Christian freedom. One could glorify God by studying his creation. Johannes Kepler, one of the first scientists of the Reformation, devoted 20 years to discovering the motion of the planets around the sun. Describing his work, he said that he was thinking the Creator’s thoughts after him.Commenting on the study of astronomy, Calvin wrote: “For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God. Wherefore, as ingenious men are to be honored who have expended useful labor on this subject, so they who have leisure and capacity ought not to neglect this kind of exercise.”This kind of interest in science among Christians extended through several centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, evangelical Christians largely disappeared from the scientific scene. They had turned to “Christian works” and had become isolated from science and the universities. The Reformation’s insight on Christian vocation was forgotten.Until evangelical Christians rediscover the Reformation truth that God can be glorified through a life of scholarship, the universities—and not the church—will continue to be the source of nourishment for the secular culture of our day.By the second day, word had spread to the seminary, about a football field away, which shares a namesake and tradition but is a separate institution. People started to come from the town of Wilmore too and then the greater Lexington area.
Alexandra Presta, editor of the student newspaper, posted a report online.
“During a call of confession, at least a hundred people fell to their knees and bowed at the altar,” she wrote. “Hands rested on shoulders, linking individual people together to represent the Body of Christ truly. Cries of addiction, pride, fear, anger and bitterness sounded, each followed by a life-changing proclamation: ‘Christ forgives you.’”
Friends from other states started texting Presta, asking her what was happening and also why. She told them she didn’t know. But God still moves.
‘All the Chick-fil-A’
On Friday afternoon, groups of students started to show up from other parts of Kentucky, as well as Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, even Michigan. Some came from Christian schools. Some from campus ministries. Some just came.
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.
School officials didn’t have time to weigh whether they thought the ongoing, unplanned worship service qualified as a revival. Even when it was over, some would be unsure if revival was the correct word. But they did have to decide right then how they were going to respond as people kept coming from further and further away.
“We began getting reports from people seeing stuff on social media about people who were coming, not just from our region, but pretty significant distances,” said Mark Whitworth, vice president of communications. “I don’t remember who it was, but somebody said, ‘Going viral is not necessarily an awakening,’ and we all agreed with that. But the focus was on practical things. Like, does the worship team need to rest, and do we have enough prayer support at the altar?”
Several ministers at organizations that focus on revival and organize prayer meetings, including David Thomas from the Awakening Project and J. D. Walt and Mark Benjamin from SeedBed, encouraged Asbury’s administration to prepare for what was coming.
The ad hoc committee gathered in the repurposed classroom on Friday to discuss what they were going to do. President Brown told the 15 or so people in there that he thought there was one big question.
When I realized my prayer life needed more than resolve, I began to pray about praying.When one of my sons was a toddler, recurring ear infections dulled his hearing and slowed his mastery of speech, despite his eagerness to learn. This made his part in our nightly prayer time a real trial. Micah had to take his turn after his talkative six-year-old brother, who managed to include in his prayers, it seemed, everyone he ever knew.While Micah’s command of language was limited to a few words, he so longed to participate in our bedside ritual that he bowed his head and “prayed” in what can only be described as an unrolling string of wordlike sounds, a long stream of unintelligible syllables with all the inflection and rhythm of real language. In the dark of the boys’ room, the sound of his solemn, mumbling attempts left the rest of us alternating between stifled laughter and quiet awe.To want to speak, but not know how, to want to pray, but not have the words, is a handicap that afflicts us long after childhood. It is painful to be speechless before God, to discover, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “that every call to [God] dies within itself.” For all my adult facility with language, I am still much like Micah when it comes to prayer.I suspect that our failed attempts to pray more often lie partly in this dread of not knowing what to say, in our ambivalence about sitting still in God’s presence, unprotected by distraction, unhidden by the facile words that seem to get us by in everyday speech. Like the writer’s proverbial blank page waiting to be filled with prose, the prospect of addressing God can intimidate us into silence. It is easier, some days, to avoid completely trying to piece together the words. Only the specter of not praying at all looms more agonizing and terrible. And so we keep trying.In my searching for words, I have found that the longing to pray itself holds great promise. We learn how to pray better, I believe, by first paying attention to our desire to pray.Linguists (and parents) will tell you that infants begin to pick up words without prodding or pushing, without vocabulary drills and other techniques of formal training. “Talking, like walking,” says one childhood language specialist, “is built into our genes.” The motivation to speak is instinctive. A child wants to squall out his or her need for milk, or giggle with affectionate phrases, or ask us endless questions to satisfy his or her innate curiosity.On one level, prayer is, likewise, something we want to do, something for which longing and motivation seems “built in.” One writer discovered this in a memorable way while traveling in the majesty and beauty of the Swiss Alps. Although she had rejected the faith, in a moment of insight and longing she wrote to a friend, “If only I could make some small sound of praise to someone—but whom?”We grow in prayer by attending to just such stirrings. Prayer has less to do with charts and diagrams and lists of things we must do to achieve intimacy with God, and more to do with cultivating a relationship. “We approach God through love, not navigation,” said Augustine. We learn to pray by praying, by attending to the natural longings the Creator has placed in his created. More than a class in techniques of praying, or a degree in the history of spirituality, we need to look at our desire for God, implanted within us by the God who has made us restless until we find our rest in him.This means that deep prayer is often quite uncomplicated. The prayers of the great figures of the Bible, in fact, display a simplicity that belies the need for elaborate vocabulary. Moses, it should be remembered, stammered his way through the times he had to speak to the people of Israel. “O Lord,” he complained, “I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue” (Exod. 4:10; all Scripture references from the NIV). And yet, before God he conversed freely, “face to face” (Exod. 33:11).“Often it is the simple, repetitious phrases of a little child,” says seventh-century Byzantine John Climacus, “that our Father in heaven finds most irresistible. One phrase on the lips of the tax collector was enough to win God’s mercy; one humble request made with faith was enough to save the good thief.”Indeed, prayer is rooted in God’s listening, gracious invitation. Thus Jesus reminds us, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8). What matters most is his ability to read our hearts, to understand our faltering words, to draw us to himself in a way that mutes our fears about what to say.This became clear to me in a dramatic way recently. Long influenced by the brand of piety that emphasizes the indispensability of an hour of “quiet time” every morning, I nevertheless seemed to be unable to keep it up. I would read inspiring stories of saints who would let nothing stop them from their daily hour, and something within me would stand at attention; but my new resolve never carried me beyond a couple of weeks.Recently I read again of a woman who simply decided one day to make such a commitment to pray, and my conscience was pricked. But I knew myself well enough to know that something other than resolve was called for. I began to pray about praying. I expressed to God my frustrated longings, my jaded sense of caution about trying again, my sense of failure over working at being more disciplined and regular.I discovered something surprising happening from such simple praying: I was drawn into the presence of One who had, far more than I did, the power to keep me close. I found my focus subtly shifting away from my efforts to God’s, from rigor to grace, from rigidity to relationship. I soon realized that this was happening regularly. I was praying much more. I became less worried about the mechanics and methods, and in turn I was more motivated.And God so cares for us, I realized anew, that he himself helps us pray. When we “do not know what we ought to pray for … the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Rom. 8:26).One finds in an authentic devotional life a growing awareness of this divine side of the praying proposition. We care less and less about articulating everything “just so” and more and more about opening ourselves to the one who first addressed us in Christ and continues to speak through the Spirit.“The moment you wake up each morning,” C. S. Lewis reminds us, “all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.”It is reassuring to realize that prayer is ultimately a work of that “other, larger” life, that it is something we participate in, not manufacture. Says the Quaker Thomas Kelly, “The Living Christ within us is the initiator and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock.’ And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us.” And sometimes, unaccountably, we will find the Spirit helping in a way that surpasses all expectation, lifting our praying beyond words, carrying our hearts to a communion and undiminishable wonder that language cannot capture.This is why the medieval spiritual writer likened God to lightning. “Whatever lightning strikes,” he wrote, “be it a tree, an animal, or a man, it turns the object immediately towards it. If a man has his back to the lightning, he turns around in that moment to face it. If a tree has a thousand leaves, they all turn instantly toward the flash.”That the impulse to address God lies deep within does not call for passivity on our part, however. That we are made for relationship with God does not mean we do nothing to cultivate our desire to pray or to nurture this primal impulse. We deepen our fluency in praying not only through wanting, then, but also through learning.That is why the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Teach us to pray.” There are insights to be gained. Our stuttering words and awkward silences need to be schooled in and patterned after wisdom. They need instruction in the words God has already spoken to us in Jesus Christ and Scripture. Prayer is answering the God who has already addressed us, not striking up conversation with a distant deity.This means, moreover, not simply learning what Scripture says about prayer, although that is vital, but also taking cues from its approach to and immersion in prayer. One of the most transforming insights for my devotional life came with the discovery that Scripture could not only be read, but also prayed. I began to approach the Bible as something more than a theology primer. Paul’s words to the Ephesians, for example, about their having the “eyes of their hearts … enlightened, in order that [they] may know the hope to which [God] has called [them],” began to become the basis of my own prayers. I would take such passages and fill in the names of friends, or even use them in voicing prayers for myself. “Repeating God’s words after him,” writes Bonhoeffer, “we begin to pray to him,” just as my son repeated, as best he could, the sounds of praying he heard from his father.The psalter, called the “prayer book of the Bible,” is an especially good place to begin “praying the Scriptures.” In the church’s history, in its worship and spirituality, the psalms stand out with striking singularity. Many psalms are, in fact, explicit prayers, and the whole book carries with it the inflections and rhythms of praise, worship, anguish, anger, hope, confession, and shame. It is, in other words, patently true to life.Those who discover the rich joy of praying the psalms in an ordered way may find of earlier praying, as did Martin Luther, “Ah, there is not the juice, the strength, the passion, the fire which I find in the Psalter.” And in the thick of day-to-day living, to be able to call to mind a snatch of Psalms—“[Your] steadfast love endures forever” or “Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations”—may make all the difference in how we move through an anxious moment, when prayers may not roll off the tongue.The memorizing of Scripture plays a role here, as well. We memorize not only to share it with others in “witnessing” encounters, but so that God’s Word may soak the soil of our thinking, and thereby our praying. Waiting in line at a checkout counter, riding in a car, or taking an early morning walk can become opportunities for reflective recital of the promises of God. Such passages need not be lengthy; indeed, for a time, a friend of mine spent much of his formal and informal prayer time quietly, persistently repeating the phrase, The Lord is my shepherd.That we learn to speak to God because God speaks first to us is especially true of the prayer Jesus gave his disciples. The Lord’s Prayer can be far more than a hastily recited, distracted exercise, as illustrated in a story about a nineteenth-century spiritual director. Someone asked her about cultivating a deeper prayer life. “Say the Lord’s Prayer,” she told her charge, “but take an hour to say it.”The petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, many find, can give our longings and prayers focus, helping us to think prayerfully through the issues and urgencies of our day. “Thy kingdom come” is a wonderfully suggestive request, for example, that can reorient the sometimes self-centered concerns of our little world.Luther, to cite another example, tells of praying the first petition, “Hallowed be thy name”: “[I] say, ‘Yes, Lord God, dear Father, you do hallow your name in us and in all the world. Pull up and destroy the hatreds, the self-worshiping.’ ”Luther went on to say that “to this day I am still nursing myself on the Lord’s Prayer like a child and am still eating and drinking of it like an old man without getting bored with it.”The ways to give voice to our longing to converse with God, then, are really many; they far outnumber the few mentioned here. There are many outlets, and one may fit our needs at one time better than another. Experimentation with the myriad ways of praying found in Scripture and church tradition is eminently appropriate, just as is the “practice” of children learning to talk. For a period of some weeks, I found the Lord’s Prayer the most helpful basis for praying, using it along with other kinds of praying, such as adoration and supplication. Other weeks I use a monthly cycle of psalms (such as found in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer), or I read a chapter of Scripture a day, open not only to what it might teach me about God or the world, but also alert to how it may shape my prayers.It must be said as well that our learning to pray is not a solitary exercise. Others not only have wisdom to share, but help us keep our desire for God, which can get crowded out of busy lives, fanned into flame. We need the reminder of Eugene Peterson that “the assumption that prayer is what we do when we are alone—the solitary soul before God—is an egregious, and distressingly persistent, error.… We are part of something before we are anything, and never more so than when we pray.” Prayer begins in community. The weekly, flesh-and-blood mentoring and modeling that worshiping with others can give is indispensable.It has been five years since my son graced our family’s evening prayers with his mellifluous mumbling. He has learned to pray (and talk) like a typical eight-year-old, and now gives his older brother a run for the money during our family’s nightly routine. He has learned some things about piecing together words to pray into the silence. But his mother and I still detect a frustration in him, at times, when he cannot think of the right words.I do not concern myself with it anymore. His irritation is a sign that God has indeed placed within him a desire not only to speak, but to pray. He will learn—from his parents, from Scripture, from our church—greater proficiency. And for now, we know that even faltering, stammering words are both prompted by God and heard by him.“Something really historic and really unique is happening here,” he said. “This is going to outlive us. Well after we’re dead, people are going to be talking about this. Are we going to accommodate it?”
The group quickly came to a consensus that they hadn’t started the outpouring, hadn’t planned any of this, but they were nonetheless called in that moment to be hospitable. They would work to host it and hold it, all the while keeping in mind that they were not in control.
“There was a tension,” Brown told CT, “between ‘How do we maintain orderliness?’ and ‘How do we create space for this spiritual unfolding that we haven’t planned, we don’t know where it’s heading, but we know it’s good and bigger than us?’”
Shofars, exorcisms, and angry prayers
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.
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.
“Saturday and Sunday, we were asked all day long, ‘Can I give a word?’ ‘Give a word?’ ‘Give a word?’” Baldwin said. “Well, tell us your word first.”
Matt Smith, a Wesleyan pastor from a nondenominational church in Johnson City, Tennessee, noticed the ministers holding onto the microphone when he got into the chapel on Monday, February 13. After seeing reports of the revival on social media, he, his youth pastor, and his minister father all drove the four and a half hours to see it for themselves. They were immediately hit by the sweet, peaceful presence of the place, and as ministers, they also noticed the staff working hard.
“I think most of us in the evangelical world have been in a service where someone walks off with a microphone,” Smith told CT. “At the same time, God works through people, so you don’t want to shut that down. You can’t control everything that’s said, but you have to have healthy spiritual oversight.”
Smith said he was impressed with how the ministers maintained the delicate balance. Wesleyans, however, have a long tradition of figuring out how to nurture an outpouring of the Spirit. Once in 1804, the school’s namesake had 20 watchmen carry long peeled rods to protect a camp meeting from frontier ruffians. “The work of God is wonderful,” Asbury wrote another time, when some people showed up to try and take control of a revival in Delaware. “But what a rumpus is raised!”
No celebrities here
On social media, a number of controversial charismatics announced they were headed to Asbury. Todd Bentley, who once claimed God told him to heal a woman by slapping her in the face and who was deemed unfit for ministry by a panel of pastors in 2020, tweeted out “I’m going.” Greg Locke, who found fame defying COVID-19 health mandates and spreading misinformation about the 2020 election, announced he was planning a trip as well.
The staff managed to keep anybody from taking over the microphone, though, and avoided too many disruptive confrontations.
When I realized my prayer life needed more than resolve, I began to pray about praying.When one of my sons was a toddler, recurring ear infections dulled his hearing and slowed his mastery of speech, despite his eagerness to learn. This made his part in our nightly prayer time a real trial. Micah had to take his turn after his talkative six-year-old brother, who managed to include in his prayers, it seemed, everyone he ever knew.While Micah’s command of language was limited to a few words, he so longed to participate in our bedside ritual that he bowed his head and “prayed” in what can only be described as an unrolling string of wordlike sounds, a long stream of unintelligible syllables with all the inflection and rhythm of real language. In the dark of the boys’ room, the sound of his solemn, mumbling attempts left the rest of us alternating between stifled laughter and quiet awe.To want to speak, but not know how, to want to pray, but not have the words, is a handicap that afflicts us long after childhood. It is painful to be speechless before God, to discover, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “that every call to [God] dies within itself.” For all my adult facility with language, I am still much like Micah when it comes to prayer.I suspect that our failed attempts to pray more often lie partly in this dread of not knowing what to say, in our ambivalence about sitting still in God’s presence, unprotected by distraction, unhidden by the facile words that seem to get us by in everyday speech. Like the writer’s proverbial blank page waiting to be filled with prose, the prospect of addressing God can intimidate us into silence. It is easier, some days, to avoid completely trying to piece together the words. Only the specter of not praying at all looms more agonizing and terrible. And so we keep trying.In my searching for words, I have found that the longing to pray itself holds great promise. We learn how to pray better, I believe, by first paying attention to our desire to pray.Linguists (and parents) will tell you that infants begin to pick up words without prodding or pushing, without vocabulary drills and other techniques of formal training. “Talking, like walking,” says one childhood language specialist, “is built into our genes.” The motivation to speak is instinctive. A child wants to squall out his or her need for milk, or giggle with affectionate phrases, or ask us endless questions to satisfy his or her innate curiosity.On one level, prayer is, likewise, something we want to do, something for which longing and motivation seems “built in.” One writer discovered this in a memorable way while traveling in the majesty and beauty of the Swiss Alps. Although she had rejected the faith, in a moment of insight and longing she wrote to a friend, “If only I could make some small sound of praise to someone—but whom?”We grow in prayer by attending to just such stirrings. Prayer has less to do with charts and diagrams and lists of things we must do to achieve intimacy with God, and more to do with cultivating a relationship. “We approach God through love, not navigation,” said Augustine. We learn to pray by praying, by attending to the natural longings the Creator has placed in his created. More than a class in techniques of praying, or a degree in the history of spirituality, we need to look at our desire for God, implanted within us by the God who has made us restless until we find our rest in him.This means that deep prayer is often quite uncomplicated. The prayers of the great figures of the Bible, in fact, display a simplicity that belies the need for elaborate vocabulary. Moses, it should be remembered, stammered his way through the times he had to speak to the people of Israel. “O Lord,” he complained, “I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue” (Exod. 4:10; all Scripture references from the NIV). And yet, before God he conversed freely, “face to face” (Exod. 33:11).“Often it is the simple, repetitious phrases of a little child,” says seventh-century Byzantine John Climacus, “that our Father in heaven finds most irresistible. One phrase on the lips of the tax collector was enough to win God’s mercy; one humble request made with faith was enough to save the good thief.”Indeed, prayer is rooted in God’s listening, gracious invitation. Thus Jesus reminds us, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8). What matters most is his ability to read our hearts, to understand our faltering words, to draw us to himself in a way that mutes our fears about what to say.This became clear to me in a dramatic way recently. Long influenced by the brand of piety that emphasizes the indispensability of an hour of “quiet time” every morning, I nevertheless seemed to be unable to keep it up. I would read inspiring stories of saints who would let nothing stop them from their daily hour, and something within me would stand at attention; but my new resolve never carried me beyond a couple of weeks.Recently I read again of a woman who simply decided one day to make such a commitment to pray, and my conscience was pricked. But I knew myself well enough to know that something other than resolve was called for. I began to pray about praying. I expressed to God my frustrated longings, my jaded sense of caution about trying again, my sense of failure over working at being more disciplined and regular.I discovered something surprising happening from such simple praying: I was drawn into the presence of One who had, far more than I did, the power to keep me close. I found my focus subtly shifting away from my efforts to God’s, from rigor to grace, from rigidity to relationship. I soon realized that this was happening regularly. I was praying much more. I became less worried about the mechanics and methods, and in turn I was more motivated.And God so cares for us, I realized anew, that he himself helps us pray. When we “do not know what we ought to pray for … the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Rom. 8:26).One finds in an authentic devotional life a growing awareness of this divine side of the praying proposition. We care less and less about articulating everything “just so” and more and more about opening ourselves to the one who first addressed us in Christ and continues to speak through the Spirit.“The moment you wake up each morning,” C. S. Lewis reminds us, “all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.”It is reassuring to realize that prayer is ultimately a work of that “other, larger” life, that it is something we participate in, not manufacture. Says the Quaker Thomas Kelly, “The Living Christ within us is the initiator and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock.’ And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us.” And sometimes, unaccountably, we will find the Spirit helping in a way that surpasses all expectation, lifting our praying beyond words, carrying our hearts to a communion and undiminishable wonder that language cannot capture.This is why the medieval spiritual writer likened God to lightning. “Whatever lightning strikes,” he wrote, “be it a tree, an animal, or a man, it turns the object immediately towards it. If a man has his back to the lightning, he turns around in that moment to face it. If a tree has a thousand leaves, they all turn instantly toward the flash.”That the impulse to address God lies deep within does not call for passivity on our part, however. That we are made for relationship with God does not mean we do nothing to cultivate our desire to pray or to nurture this primal impulse. We deepen our fluency in praying not only through wanting, then, but also through learning.That is why the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Teach us to pray.” There are insights to be gained. Our stuttering words and awkward silences need to be schooled in and patterned after wisdom. They need instruction in the words God has already spoken to us in Jesus Christ and Scripture. Prayer is answering the God who has already addressed us, not striking up conversation with a distant deity.This means, moreover, not simply learning what Scripture says about prayer, although that is vital, but also taking cues from its approach to and immersion in prayer. One of the most transforming insights for my devotional life came with the discovery that Scripture could not only be read, but also prayed. I began to approach the Bible as something more than a theology primer. Paul’s words to the Ephesians, for example, about their having the “eyes of their hearts … enlightened, in order that [they] may know the hope to which [God] has called [them],” began to become the basis of my own prayers. I would take such passages and fill in the names of friends, or even use them in voicing prayers for myself. “Repeating God’s words after him,” writes Bonhoeffer, “we begin to pray to him,” just as my son repeated, as best he could, the sounds of praying he heard from his father.The psalter, called the “prayer book of the Bible,” is an especially good place to begin “praying the Scriptures.” In the church’s history, in its worship and spirituality, the psalms stand out with striking singularity. Many psalms are, in fact, explicit prayers, and the whole book carries with it the inflections and rhythms of praise, worship, anguish, anger, hope, confession, and shame. It is, in other words, patently true to life.Those who discover the rich joy of praying the psalms in an ordered way may find of earlier praying, as did Martin Luther, “Ah, there is not the juice, the strength, the passion, the fire which I find in the Psalter.” And in the thick of day-to-day living, to be able to call to mind a snatch of Psalms—“[Your] steadfast love endures forever” or “Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations”—may make all the difference in how we move through an anxious moment, when prayers may not roll off the tongue.The memorizing of Scripture plays a role here, as well. We memorize not only to share it with others in “witnessing” encounters, but so that God’s Word may soak the soil of our thinking, and thereby our praying. Waiting in line at a checkout counter, riding in a car, or taking an early morning walk can become opportunities for reflective recital of the promises of God. Such passages need not be lengthy; indeed, for a time, a friend of mine spent much of his formal and informal prayer time quietly, persistently repeating the phrase, The Lord is my shepherd.That we learn to speak to God because God speaks first to us is especially true of the prayer Jesus gave his disciples. The Lord’s Prayer can be far more than a hastily recited, distracted exercise, as illustrated in a story about a nineteenth-century spiritual director. Someone asked her about cultivating a deeper prayer life. “Say the Lord’s Prayer,” she told her charge, “but take an hour to say it.”The petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, many find, can give our longings and prayers focus, helping us to think prayerfully through the issues and urgencies of our day. “Thy kingdom come” is a wonderfully suggestive request, for example, that can reorient the sometimes self-centered concerns of our little world.Luther, to cite another example, tells of praying the first petition, “Hallowed be thy name”: “[I] say, ‘Yes, Lord God, dear Father, you do hallow your name in us and in all the world. Pull up and destroy the hatreds, the self-worshiping.’ ”Luther went on to say that “to this day I am still nursing myself on the Lord’s Prayer like a child and am still eating and drinking of it like an old man without getting bored with it.”The ways to give voice to our longing to converse with God, then, are really many; they far outnumber the few mentioned here. There are many outlets, and one may fit our needs at one time better than another. Experimentation with the myriad ways of praying found in Scripture and church tradition is eminently appropriate, just as is the “practice” of children learning to talk. For a period of some weeks, I found the Lord’s Prayer the most helpful basis for praying, using it along with other kinds of praying, such as adoration and supplication. Other weeks I use a monthly cycle of psalms (such as found in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer), or I read a chapter of Scripture a day, open not only to what it might teach me about God or the world, but also alert to how it may shape my prayers.It must be said as well that our learning to pray is not a solitary exercise. Others not only have wisdom to share, but help us keep our desire for God, which can get crowded out of busy lives, fanned into flame. We need the reminder of Eugene Peterson that “the assumption that prayer is what we do when we are alone—the solitary soul before God—is an egregious, and distressingly persistent, error.… We are part of something before we are anything, and never more so than when we pray.” Prayer begins in community. The weekly, flesh-and-blood mentoring and modeling that worshiping with others can give is indispensable.It has been five years since my son graced our family’s evening prayers with his mellifluous mumbling. He has learned to pray (and talk) like a typical eight-year-old, and now gives his older brother a run for the money during our family’s nightly routine. He has learned some things about piecing together words to pray into the silence. But his mother and I still detect a frustration in him, at times, when he cannot think of the right words.I do not concern myself with it anymore. His irritation is a sign that God has indeed placed within him a desire not only to speak, but to pray. He will learn—from his parents, from Scripture, from our church—greater proficiency. And for now, we know that even faltering, stammering words are both prompted by God and heard by him.There were also Christian leaders who went quietly, just to pray and participate without trying to take the stage. Kari Jobe, the contemporary Christian music singer who won a Dove Award for “The Blessing” in 2021, went to Asbury and went down to the altar. Several students prayed for her, according to Asbury staff, without appearing to know who she was. A leader of the Vineyard Church came and went without announcing anything on social media.
By the time the revival entered its second week, there were regular announcements made about platforming celebrities. Throughout the day, ministers who didn’t stop to say their own names or job titles would say, “There are no celebrities here, no superstars, except Jesus.” The term “radical humility” was used regularly.
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.
In the midst of this, the students’ worship continued. Though the chapel could feel crowded and like they were going to be pushed aside by “revival chasers,” many of the young people still testified to the transformation they saw happening.
“I know this campus very well. It’s small,” Alison Perfater, Asbury’s student body president, told a documentarian. “And I know exactly which students on this campus hate each other. Those are the people I have seen praying together, singing together, hugging, crying. … It’s been totally life changing.”
The organization of logistics got a little easier the second week, as things got “operationalized,” according to Asbury administrators. Teams formed for each specific need, and the revival committee said yes to a growing number of volunteers offering professional services—like an event manager from Phoenix who showed up unannounced with a plan to coordinate volunteers. Staff jumped in anywhere there was a need. A human resources coordinator, for example, spent the week answering the phones, as people from around the country and even abroad contacted the school for information about coming.
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.
Faithful to their part
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.
In the classroom-turned-command center, the team discussed concern for students and the school’s responsibility for their education. Nurturing their spiritual experience and formation might, at some point, need to mean the school stopped welcoming people to campus.
The team also talked about the exhaustion of the volunteers. President Brown noted he’d seen one person helping out at 8 in the morning, then again at 1 a.m., and at 8 a.m. the next morning. That incredible generosity wasn’t sustainable, and they needed to find a “horizon.”
At the same time, the school was hearing reports of prayer services at other Christian colleges and universities. At Samford University, in Alabama, one student began singing in the chapel in the evening and was soon joined by hundreds. It kept going overnight and continued the next day. At Lee University, in Tennessee, students were seen running to chapel. One freshman told a local reporter she thought it was just a copycat event until she went herself.
“The Spirit was 100 percent moving in that place,” she said.
Something similar happened at Cedarville University in Ohio. And there were reports of extended prayer, singing, confession, and testimony at Baylor, Belmont, Campbellsville, Hannibal-LaGrange, Valley Forge, Milligan, and other schools.
“It reminds me of a Christmas Eve service,” Asbury spokeswoman Abby Laub told CT. “We were holding a candle, and now we’re passing it around. And that’s what you want. You don’t want to be the only one holding the candle.”
The ad hoc committee felt a sense of release. The fire was spreading, and they had been faithful to their part. They decided to announced things would be winding down. Starting on Tuesday, February 21, they would limit the service to people under 25 but livestream each night starting at 7:30 p.m. Then they would end on midnight on Wednesday, a full two weeks after a few students stayed in chapel to talk and pray and sing, and then felt a holy wind.
On Wednesday night, a staff member at the front of Hughes Auditorium greeted the room full of students born after 1998. “Welcome to the move of God,” he said.
A few hours later, as midnight approached, a young woman in an oversized gray sweatshirt that read “Zionsville” raised one hand to heaven and led the students in singing Chris Tomlin’s “How Great Is Our God.”
“The Godhead three in one,” she sang. “Father, Spirit, Son. … How great is our God? Sing with me.”
More than 1,000 students did, raising their hands and lifting their voices. The surge of their worship filled the chapel to the rafters, overwhelming the thin audio of the livestream.
“How great is our God,” they sang. “All will see how great, how great is our God.”
