Singing A New Song

My wife and I slipped into our seats at the theater last Thursday to view the opening of The Jesus Revolution, the movie just released portraying the Jesus Movement of the 1970s.  It brought back memories. 

 We were not California hippies in 1970, though I did wear bell-bottom pants, a white belt, and played a guitar.  I was already a 24-year-old pastor.  The Lord had called me into the ministry a bit earlier, in 1965.  I remember celebrating what God was doing on the West Coast among those of my generation that had “turned on, tuned in and dropped out.”  It was thrilling to see thousands coming to faith in Christ.

 That movement changed things.  It changed how we do church. The music changed.  We had been singing the hymns of our fathers and grandfathers, the songs that emerged from the previous spiritual movements that swept our country.  Songs written by John and Charles Wesley during the Great Awakening of the 1700s.  Songs like O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing. Christ The Lord Is Risen Today, Love Divine All Loves Exceling. Songs written by Ira Sankey and Fanny Crosby during the days of Dwight L. Moody: Blessed Assurance. All The Way My Savior Leads Me , Jesus Is Tenderly Calling and many more.

 In the late 1940s a youth revival movement swept the nation.  During that movement Dick Baker wrote over 200 songs, among them Longing For Jesus, His Way Mine, I’d Rather Have Jesus, All To Thee and Have You Been To Calvary?

 After the Jesus Movement, organs were out. Pianos disappeared.  Drums and electric guitars took center stage.  The songs and hymns of previous generations were replaced with songs of praise such as  Lord I Lift Your Name On High, Shine, Jesus Shine, Shout To The Lord.

 A new spiritual movement erupted spontaneously three weeks ago at Asbury College in Wilmore, KY.  Characterized by humility, confession and prayer more than 50,000 showed up from over 200 other campuses and many countries. The college of 2,000 was overwhelmed.  It has ignited similar movements on campuses at Samford University in Alabama, Lee and Belmont Universities in Tennessee, Anderson University in Indiana, Baylor University in Waco and Texas A&M. In all at least 20 campuses have reported revivals.

 Those involved are mostly Gen Z, young adults born after 1995 and the advent of the internet, true “digital natives.”  Demographers say they live more slowly than previous generations, consume less alcohol, have lower rates of teen pregnancy and are better at delaying gratification. A profile of Gen Z by The Economist considered them highly educated and well behaved, but noted high levels of stress and depression. According to the CDC 1 in 5 Gen Z high school students have seriously considered suicide.  

We can hope the movement continues to spread and demonstrates lasting power so that a new generation once again steps forward to inspire the world with hope and faith.  Perhaps they will teach us to sing a new song.

 Movements of the Holy Spirit are always accompanied by music. It was so in the first century and has been so in every century since. When Jesus finished His last supper with his disciples, the Bible notes, “after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives,” (Mark 14:26).

 The Apostle Paul exhorts all believers, “ be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your hearts to the Lord,” (Ephesians 5:18-19). 

Bill Tinsley's historical fiction, Bold Springs, is free as an eBook on Amazon Kindle February 28-March 2.  Bold Springs received the Reader's Favorite Award as the best Christian historical fiction in 2022.

Asbury Awakening

 On February 8, students at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, filed into Hughes Auditorium for their regularly scheduled chapel service.  What happened was anything but regular. What has continued to happen is far beyond anything anyone could have scheduled.

 A spontaneous prayer meeting broke out that has continued for weeks.  Tens of thousands of people have since been drawn to Asbury to participate in the outpouring. This week, the continuous prayer service is being moved to various other sites to accommodate the crowds that threaten to overwhelm the small town.   The University posted on its website: “the university in consultation with local law enforcement and city administration notified incoming visitors that parking and seating had exceeded capacity.”  The University’s Communications Director said people were coming from all over the country, including some who just arrived from Finland and the Netherlands.

 According to the executive editor of the campus newspaper, the continued prayer meeting has been “a mix of worship, testimony, prayer, confession and silence.”  According to other sources the Asbury experience has spread to at least four other Universities, including Samford, University in Homewood, Alabama.

 According to Beck Taylor, President of Samford, "This is spontaneous, organic, student-led worship.”  He continued, “What's happening isn't contrived, programmed, or scripted. Nor is it performative or disingenuous. Students and others see it as an opportunity for the Samford campus to find unity in Christ, to encourage one another to faithfulness, and to extend the love and grace of Jesus to everyone.”

The participants are young, many are students, others in their 20s and 30s.  It is not the first time.  In 1970 a similar spiritual movement started spontaneously at Asbury and spread across the country.  The broader context of that movement came to be know as The Jesus Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s.  Thousands of lives were changed as many who had sought fulfilment in drugs and the hippie culture found faith in Christ.

 There have been others spiritual movements in our nation’s history, most notably the Great Awakening of the 1700s that swept England and the American Colonies.  That movement included John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield and was witnessed by Benjamin Franklin who published Whitefield’s sermons. 

 At noon on September 23, 1857, a businessman named Jeremiah Lamphier waited for others to join him for prayer in a room on Fulton Street in New York.  Six people showed up. The next week, 20 came.  Then 40.  They started meeting daily. The crowd swelled to more than 3,000 following the financial panic of October 14.   In less than 6 months, 10,000 businessmen were attending daily prayer meetings in New York. More than 10,000 came to faith in Philadelphia, 5,000 in Boston. At its peak, 50,000 people a week were professing faith in Christ.  In Bethel, Conn. businesses closed for prayer.  Led by laity and crossing denominational lines, the movement swept more than one million people to faith in Christ leading up to the Civil War.

 We don’t know what the long-term results will come from the current experience at Asbury. It is too early to tell.  What is undeniable is the evidence of deep and widespread spiritual hunger among the young across our nation.  We can pray that God will do something in our day and in this generation that will redeem our nation and produce the fruits of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23).

What Do You Know?

 No one knows what you know. And everyone else you meet knows things you don’t. Even though my wife and I have been married more than fifty years, we each know things the other doesn’t.

At birth we know nothing, but we immediately begin to build our knowledge from family and friends. Most of us tend to remain close to those who first taught us for a lifetime. But as we grow, our knowledge differs. We follow different paths, study different subjects, pursue different careers, live in different places, and meet different people. Our individual knowledge becomes unique, like our fingerprints.

The pursuit of knowledge is a good thing. And we should celebrate each achievement that increases our knowledge. But how much does any one of us really know? And how much do we all know if the knowledge of every human being could be combined?

Scientists are continually trying to piece together the puzzle of the past, to reconstruct our origins and the path we have taken to get to where we are. In 2012 physicists discovered the Higgs boson, what some refer to as the “God particle,” which could answer the origin of all mass. But, even with this discovery, the sum total of our scientific, philosophical and historic knowledge represents only a small fragment of the total knowledge in the universe. The more we discover, the more we realize what we don’t know. The puzzle pieces of the past are often misleading, having to be rearranged and reconfigured to correct our preconceived ideas.

Solomon, considered by many to be the wisest man to ever live, wrote, “I concluded that man cannot discover the work which has been done under the sun. Even though man should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise man should say, ‘I know,’ he cannot discover.” (Ecclesiastes 8:17).

Perhaps the most important discovery is not what we know, but the fact that we are known. David wrote, “You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, and are intimately acquainted with all my ways.Even before there is a word on my tongue, behold, O LORD, You know it all.” (Psalm 139:2-4). To Jeremiah, God said, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” Jesus said, “the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”

As we expand our personal knowledge and strive to understand the universe, we can live with confidence that the One Who made it all knows us and loves us as He demonstrated in His Son, Jesus.

Once You See

 Every once in a while, a book comes along that stops you in your tracks. A story that challenges all previous assumptions.  Over the holidays I read such a book, Once You See: Seven Temptations of the Western Church, a book written by Jeff Christopherson. It is a novel, Jeff’s second work of fiction.  The unlikely intersection of his characters spins a story that peels back the veneer of western Christianity and exposes a crisis of faith for America’s future.

 Jeff is Canadian.  I first met Jeff in 2003. He was the keynote speaker at a missions conference in Atlanta. He had started a church in Toronto two years before called the Sanctuary. It was already averaging over 300 and had started 4 other Sanctuary churches.  He recognized my name tag and remembered my early church planting book, Upon This Rock.  He said 15 years earlier he was a discouraged young church planter on the verge of giving up until he read my book.  He said it changed the trajectory of his life.  Today he is the Executive Director of the Canadian National Baptist Convention, as well as the Executive Director of Church Planting Canada.

For many years we have known that Christianity in the West, especially in the United States, is in decline.  At the same time, the Christian faith has exploded in Africa, South America, and Asia. According to Lifeway Research, “In 1900, twice as many Christians lived in Europe than in the rest of the world combined. Today, more Christians live in Africa than any other continent.”  Many have attempted to address this growing discrepancy, often with detailed research full of demographic data.  Many times their efforts are dry.  But Jeff Christopherson has charted a new course to reveal the spiritual and social forces at work.  He has chosen to write a  novel-length parable full of insight and inspiration.

 The story revolves around three individuals. The son of an African American pastor from Philadelphia who is grieving over the death of his father and dreaming of a better way.  And then a pastor of a waning mega-church in Atlanta who struggles to live up to the reputation of his famous preacher-father. And a promising law student in Yemen who experiences a crisis in his Muslim faith, finds peace through the witness of a faithful Christ-follower, and then faces persecution.  All three of these intersect in a profound discovery of faith in the 21^st century.  Jeff’s writing style reminds me of John Grisham whose stories are so mesmerizing that I forget I am reading words.

 All of us are like the blind man at Bethsaida, (Mark 8:22-25).  Once Jesus touches us we see things differently. Often, we need a second touch so that we see things clearly.  Christopherson’s book may be just what this generation needs to experience a second touch from God.  “Once you see, you cannot unsee.”