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).