From news editor Daniel Silliman: I don’t know if Barton Stone meant to be funny when he wrote about a religious revival in 1801, but I laughed out loud reading his description. Stone, one of the religious reformers who launched my own tradition, sometimes called the Stone-Campbell movement, described people at the revival singing, laughing, dancing, falling, and jerking around. “There were,” he concluded, “many eccentricities.” 

For Stone, that weirdness was okay, because it all had the effect of focusing people on Jesus and bringing about church unity. That’s how you could tell it was a real revival. 

The word revival was much debated by revivalists and is still debated today by Christians who believe the Spirit moves people, touches them, and changes them (with or without “the jerks”). It’s such a debated word that some people try to avoid it. Many of the leaders at Asbury University prefer to call what happened to students there last year an “outpouring,” just to sidestep the question of a definition. 

Others are less cautious about the word and use it for any kind of resurgence or renewal. And the word can be invoked for political movements too. People probably know that when politicians say “revival,” they don’t mean what Barton Stone meant. But still, it doesn’t hurt to ask, as he did, why something is or isn’t a revival. Especially when there are “many eccentricities.”