Revival

The Weekly Wrap: January 25-31

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The Weekly Wrap: January 25-31

Poetry Reading or Readings?

I asked people on my Facebook page “Do you think you appreciate poetry more as written text or when it is spoken?”. Interestingly, most preferred the written text. However, the exception was those who wrote poetry. They preferred it spoken.

Why the difference? From what I can tell, poets have a sense of the cadences, the rhythms of the lines and know better how to convey what they were trying to do. On the other hand, those who enjoy the written text like the opportunity to read the lines over and over again, to study the words, phrases, even how lines are arranged into verses.

I’ve been posting readings of poems weekly on my Facebook page. I won’t pretend to be a great reader. But I’ve had people who don’t read poetry mention that the readings might make them reconsider. But what I would say is that reading poems aloud takes me more deeply into the poem. To read well means paying attention to the sound of words, words that recur, phrasing, which doesn’t always follow the written line or even verse. Then, it means trying to discern the mood and meaning of a poem to give that expression out loud. I have learned how hard this is, sometimes recording a dozen times or more.

Of course, just as with audiobooks, a good reading is everything. One of the most memorable readings, really a performance, was the video of Michael Sheen’s rendering of “‘Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas. It’s intense and he captures the rage in “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” While reviewing it for this post, I happened to listen to several other different readings, each capturing something different.

Actually, I think both reading the written text and hearing the poetry are important. And with some longer poems, a reading may be hard to follow. Likewise, some poets arrange their text visually in ways not reproducible orally, unless simultaneously projecting the text.

All this is to say, if you struggle to get into poetry, you might try reading it aloud. Or search for someone who has read the poem. Follow along with the text. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Five Articles Worth Reading

The articles I came across this week all seemed to explore what one might call “the big questions.” What was it about the unexamined life?

Jennifer Szalai reviews two books on living a life that matters in “The Longing to Matter Is No Laughing Matter.”

The rise of authoritarian leaders, our brave new technological world, global tensions, and our swiftly warming planet have left many with a lingering sense of existential dread. But this is not new. Livia Gershon explores philosophers and theologians who address this in “A History of Existential Anxiety.”

He was on Colbert this week and turned up on a number of book sites I follow. George Saunders new novel, Vigil is getting a lot of attention. It concerns a ghost who comes to the dying, helping them make sense of their lives and meet their deaths. Julius Taranto reviews the book in “George Saunders Brings Morality Back to Fiction.“

I spent my life as a campus minister longing for spiritual revival to break out on campuses. Recently, there have been upticks in religious activity leading some to proclaim this. Maggie Phillips notes all this and says “not so quick” in “There Is No Religious Revival.” The evidence is not that strong yet.

Finally, Charles Mathewes reviews Jonathan B. Teubner’s Charity After Augustine in “Searching for Solidarity.” The article explores Augustine’s ideas of caritas and how it might help us both understand and address the rifts in our own social fabric.

Quote of the Week

Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1737. He observed this interesting distinction between reputation and character:

“Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I love the idea of being shut in during a snow storm. Except that if you own a home, you have to think about digging out. There was so much snow that it took five sessions to clear it away over a couple of days. All I wanted to do when I came in was warm up, and rest my aching muscles! I think I finally got to that reading romance on Tuesday. So all those lovely memes of curling up with a book while the snow flies–I wish!

Friday was the first day we received a regular mail delivery. But somehow, the folks from Paraclete Press got me Steven Garber’s new Hints of Hope. Steve is a good friend and a profound thinker. And I need some hope right now. Can’t wait to read it!

Just began reading Robert MacFarlane’s Is a River Alive? That is the serious question of the book and MacFarlane is an eloquent writer. For him, rivers are not an “it.”

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: The Month in Reviews: January 2026

Tuesday: Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God

Wednesday: Jared Ayers, You Can Trust A God With Scars

Thursday: Jennifer Houston McNeel, Under Her Wings

Friday: Terry Pratchett, Mort

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap  for January 25-31.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Review: The Power of Group Prayer

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The Power of Group Prayer, Carolyn Carney. Downers Grove: IVP/Formatio, 2022.

Summary: A practical guide for intercessory prayer groups, casting vision for how these may transform both the intercessors and their world.

I am so glad Carolyn Carney wrote this book! I have seen both the power of God unleashed when Christians pray together and I’ve seen painfully dull gatherings that never get beyond the participants aches and pains, usually with more talk than prayer. Carney, who has led gatherings of students and church leaders in prayer believes in intercessory prayer that is an act of rebellion against a worldly status quo and the building of highways in which we join God in the coming of his kingdom, fueling our sense of mission.

She begins with our preparation to pray, helping us identify the way we may be blocking intimacy with God and how we may nurture that attachment. She makes the biblical case for corporate intercession from scripture and identifies four marks of effective intercessory groups:

  1. Good leadership
  2. Targeted focus
  3. Listening
  4. Hunger for God’s kingdom to come more fully

Good groups have a clear focus, a sense of what they are aiming at that may be expressed through a guiding image. In praying for a community, they survey the land and identify both fertile and fallow ground. Carney offers a number of questions to help groups in this process. Well-led groups help break the habits of jargon-y, long-winded, unfocused prayer and vague requests. She talks about praying in agreement, in which groups listen to and add to what each person briefly prays about the prayer topic of the meeting.

Prayer is also listening to God, and Carney offers a number of way groups may do this as God prompts us in prayer, brings to mind scripture, a picture or vision, or physical sensation. Listening together, people can discern whether what individuals share rings true and if so, confirm what God is saying, leading to discerning how to pray and act. Scripture and worship play an important role in enlarging our vision of God and informing our prayers concerning what God wants.

Carney describes ways intercessory groups can “take it to the streets.” She gives tips on prayer walking, prayer mapping, and praying for events from worship services to major Christian conferences. She shares a vivid example around the latter of being part of an intercessory team at a major conference, where there had been a great moving of God. Organizers wanted to start “tear down” early, asking the team to vacate their room. All of a sudden, it seem everything went awry and the enemy attacked the good God was doing. The team resumed praying!

This underscores that intercessory prayer is a form of war and will encounter resistance. One of the appendices of the book includes a prayer for praying on oneself the whole armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-20). She offers counsel on facing opposition, including the role of worship in countering it, and the care intercessors should take when coming off a season of intercession. She concludes with encouraging a vision of intercession over the long haul and five practices that sustain it:

  1. Lament, sometimes with groans over how little of God’s kingdom we see.
  2. Fasting for breakthrough
  3. Expanding our view of God through worship
  4. Getting physical, whether through things like hand-held crosses, “walls” that we tear down in prayer, etc.
  5. Leaning on others.

The appendices of the book offer more practical help in specific areas from dealing with distorted views of God to specifics of planning a prayer meeting to specific counsel for prayer before worship and at large events, and finally “Lion’s Roar Prayer for Breakthrough.”

Even those of us who have been part of great movements of prayer and who have seen God work can lose our vision for the power of people seeking God together. Carolyn Carney’s vision, stories, and practical instruction may be just the thing to encourage you to gather with others to seek the work of God where he has placed you or help take to new places that prayer group that feels like it has gotten into a rut.

The pandemic years, with all their turmoil underscore our need for revival, pretty much anywhere in the world. I cannot find accounts of revival where intercessory prayer was not a central feature. It’s my prayer that every copy of this book will be like fertile seed, giving birth to prayer movements, through which God in his good pleasure may move to prepare the ground, to build the highway, through which he visits his people with revival. May it be so!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Prayer Revolution

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Prayer Revolution, John Smed. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2020.

Summary: A call to kingdom prayer movements based in houses of prayer through which Christ comes, the Holy Spirit advances, and renewal spreads in cities, nations, and globally.

I write this review amid a global pandemic with accelerating case numbers and deaths and in a nation in the middle of efforts to violently subvert the constitutionally governed processes of presidential succession. If ever there was a time for a prayer movement, it seems now would be a good time.

John Smed would agree. He believes we are in a world desperately in need of a prayer revolution, and having led prayer movements, he lays out in this book a biblical basis for prayer movements, how prayer movements break out and how they break through to bring renewal to church, city, and nation. Jesus is central to his focus as the risen King who comes to his people as they seek his kingdom in prayer. He writes as one who has prayed what he preaches. He writes:

Immersing myself in the prayer practices of Jesus, my prayer life changed. Praying like Jesus became a discipline and a habit. Like Jesus praying all night before choosing His disciples, before major decisions and crossroads, I take seasons and days of prayer. Our team does not make plans, we make prayer plans–meeting regularly for interactive times of prayer and planning. We have learned to face the ever-present onslaught of electronic noise and busyness by waiting on God.

Smed begins by laying a basis for kingdom prayer movements by talking about how the king comes as his people pray. The Lord’s prayer shows the Lord’s strategy for prayer–focused outward on kingdom advance rather than inwardly. He wants to work through “houses of prayer.”

This kind of prayer breaks out. The ascended Lord hears his people throughout the world as they gain a vision for renewal. This leads to advance through the work of the Spirit who empowers the church in multiplying ministry. That can scale to a global movement and to the renewal of our cities.

Ultimately, kingdom prayer breaks through. It brings national renewal and repentance from idols. In scripture it has sustained exiles, and those present day “political exiles.” Churches are revived and cities renewed.

Appended to this work is a ten step description of how to implement kingdom prayer, a prayer grid using the Lord’s prayer, and a prayer exercise that may be used for praying for nation or city. Also, the author includes stories of kingdom advance through prayer in history from the Moravian movement, the Welsh revival, the Fulton Street awakening, and the prayer movement in Cuba.

What is puzzling to me in our present moment is that there are professing Christians who have joined in violence, others who are making statements of all sorts. Most of us are just “doomscrolling” through endless stories on our phones that make us sadder or angrier. We are watching bodies stacking up massively while we argue with instead of submitting to sensible public health mandates. Where is our urgency in prayer? Where is repentance? Where is pleading for the peace of our cities and for the inbreaking of the just rule of Jesus?

Prayer Revolution is that call to prayer. It is a book that offers hope of what God may do and vision for how we as God’s people may pray. It’s a book for our time. Many times in history prayer movements break out in desperate times. And God hears. How desperate must things get before we pray?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Longing For Revival

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Longing for Revival

Longing for Revival, James Choung and Ryan Pfeifer. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Summary: A practical work on revival that begins with defining what it is and why we ought hope for it; second, what it means to experience revival; and third, what it means to lead in a time of revival.

The word “revival” conjures up all sorts of associations from “revival meetings” to the “sawdust trail” of frontier revivals, to the experience and writing of Jonathan Edwards in New England. For me, it recalled the Jesus Movement, of which I was a part during my high school years. Spontaneously, throughout the U.S., there was a movement of God that resulted in a great turning to Christ of many in the youth culture of the day. Many of us are still following Christ fifty years later, and particularly, in this time of turmoil, and in this time of declining numbers in many churches and the exodus of many youth, we long to see something like this again. But dare we believe for such things?

The two authors of this book, a current and a former campus staff minister with InterVarsity/USA (the organization in which I am also employed, in the interests of full disclosure), write about their own journeys of moving from a holy discontent with the status quo to a breakthrough faith that believes God and begins to experience revival, both personally, and by the power of God, in ministry. They begin with a definition of revival that has been accepted within InterVarsity circles as our working definition of what we mean by revival:

A season of breakthroughs
in word, deed, and power
that ushers in a new normal
of kingdom experience and fruitfulness

They then unpack this definition, noting the importance of “season,” the significance of having word, deed, and power with love at the center, of new normals, for example, where it is the expected reality to see people regularly come to faith, and where the nearness of the kingdom, the presence and rule of Jesus is apparent. This is followed by several chapters tracing the breakthrough U curve: beginning with holy discontent, there is an initial descent to untested faith, then a descent into crucified hope, where our own dreams and expectations die, a crisis of faith where we hit bottom, the revival of hope, not in our own dreams but in God and his capacity to lead us into a new season, followed by breakthrough faith enabling one to minister in word, deed, and power in the confidence of who we know God to be.

The writers then lay out four steps in the experience of revival, exploring how we live in faithful expectancy, yet look for a work only God can do. They walk us through consecration, the setting of ourselves apart to God, to long for more of his presence in our lives; calling, using the example of Peter stepping out of the boat, hearing the Lord’s invitation, obeying in faith, and experiencing the Lord lifting up, as we pursue something new and audacious; contending in prayer and fasting, not to earn something through our spiritual efforts but learning to persist and not give up until we see God act in power; and finally, character, particularly the humility that guards us by reminding us that it is not about us but about Christ, keeping us from being derailed personally, and in leadership.

Choung and Pfeiffer assume that many of those reading this will be leaders. They emphasize the importance that leaders don’t keep the work of leading revival to themselves but have an “all play” mentality. Choung talks about an experience of speaking at a retreat where he desperately wanted to give a call to faith, but agreed to let student leaders do this in small groups, resulting in twenty-seven non-Christians out of thirty-one coming to faith and students who had never invited a student to believe seeing their friends respond. We often oppose planning and the mysterious powerful work of God. These writers explore how the two may walk hand in hand and enhance each other. They offer five questions to guide groups in communal discernment, crucial to groups moving together united in head, heart, and action:

  1. Is it biblical?
  2. What did you hear in prayer?
  3. What if fear wasn’t involved?
  4. Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit?
  5. What does the Christian community say about it?

Finally the authors cast a vision for a revival that is about kingdom building, not empire building. It is not about our organization or church, or national power. It is about the advance of the rule in Jesus moving out from ourselves to our community, our region, our nation, to the world.

Pardon some autobiography. After my experiences of the Jesus movement and my college years, I began working with InterVarsity. As I moved into leadership and to a new city in the early 1980’s I became involved in the Concert of Prayer movement, an effort to seek God’s reviving work. For a time it appeared to gain momentum until I saw many Christians (and perhaps myself) swept up in the Reagan revolution and the hopes of Christian influence in politics. Later, I found myself in a place of disillusion, both that God hadn’t brought the revival for which I hoped and that instead, I witnessed a church increasingly captive to partisan politics rather than the kingdom of Jesus. For most of the time since, I think I opted for the “faithfulness” which settles for the subnormal rather than the new normal of revival. I invested in students and faculty, saw some come to faith, and built and led teams that planted new ministries. But I stopped believing in revival, even though I longed for it, all the more as I’ve witnessed the unraveling of the social and political fabric of our country, and the ravages not only on body but on spirit of this pandemic.

In early January, the national staff of InterVarsity gathered in Orlando, the title of this book serving as our theme (we all were given copies of it). During a day of prayer and fasting, I became aware of how I had surrendered to despairing of revival and made a decision to dare to believe again, to be a “watchman” in prayer waiting for the dawn. I felt God breaking the hard cynicism that had encrusted my heart over thirty-some years.

This book showed me that what happened back in the 1980’s was the death of my own hopes. It gives me hope that God wants to do something new. It also challenges me to the expectant work of consecration, calling, contending, and character. I believe that the only hope for our campuses and our country and our world is not a vaccine, it is not electing or re-electing a president, but the revival of which these authors speak. If you share that conviction, I believe this book will both engender hope and offer practical direction to turn your holy discontent into breakthrough faith.

Review: Make Way for the Spirit

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Make Way for the Spirit

Make Way for the Spirit, Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (edited by Wolfgang J. Bittner, translated by Ruth Rhenius, Simeon Zahl, Miriam Mathis, and Christian T. Collins Winn. Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2019.

Summary: A reflection on the ministry of Johann Christoph Blumhardt by his son, identifying both the continuity, and divergence of their convictions.

Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt had to fill large shoes. His father Johann Christoph Blumhardt had been at the center of a great awakening around the village of Mottlingen, and a later ministry at Bad Boll, that Christoph took over at his father’s death. It began with the deliverance of a young woman from demonic powers and resulted in the repentance of many villagers, especially from occult practices as well as other sins, and the introduction by Johann of granting absolution, which had a profound effect. Johann weathered critical scrutiny and criticism by church authorities, walking a delicate boundary of exercising a Spirit-directed and empowered ministry while submitting to church strictures. Another Plough publication, The Awakening (reviewed here), describes that ministry, with its rallying cry, “Jesus is victor!” in much greater detail.

One of the underlying ideas of this book is the forward moving work of the Spirit of God throughout history. The problem, as Blumhardt, the son, sees it, is that people often do not won’t to go on with the Spirit. Instead of an empowered, apostolic church defeating the powers of darkness, the church substituted structures and creeds and institutional power while remaining Christian in name.

What happened at Mottlingen illustrated both. There was a resolute struggle against the dark powers, and real breakthroughs in the advance of the kingdom in the lives of the people of Mottlingen. Yet according to Johann Blumhardt, ultimately people sought spiritual and physical healing apart from completely giving themselves to the cause of God. They sought their own comfort rather than the kingdom and righteousness of God,

While Johann admires much in his father’s life, particularly his steadfast obedience to the Lord’s leading, he faults him for being too eager to please both the people who came to him, and the church authorities, when for the sake of the ministry of the Spirit, they should have been resisted. He also describes three hopes his father entertained, that he affirms, and three false staffs that led to the disappointment of those hopes in his father’s time:

  1. The hope of a new and continuing outpouring of the Spirit. The false staff was the visible church, whose structures were not able to receive the outpoured Spirit.
  2. The hope for God’s Zion, a “city” to which the nations would stream. The false staff was mission that spread the gospel without building up Zion.
  3. The hope for the defeat of death on earth and the false staff was personal salvation and a hope of heavenly bliss that saw death as a pathway rather than the last enemy.

This last was something I had serious questions about, even though I appreciated the emphasis on a ministry of life focused on bodily resurrection. He rightly points to ways we too easily give way to death in both our physical and mental dispositions. And certainly in our own day, we witness a culture of death about which many Christians are relatively complacent. But if I’m reading Blumhardt right, it seems he believed the defeat of death on earth, without mention of the return of Christ and the resurrection, a real possibility, albeit one thwarted by wrong belief. Blumhardt’s references are somewhat allusive, and this was one point where I wish I could have asked him to tell me more, because it seems what he proposes is unorthodox at this point.

Some of the most challenging parts of this book have to do with the issue of progressing so far and then stopping, settling rather than continuing to make way for the Spirit. Connected to this is an embrace of comfort rather than a passion for the rule of God being extended, what he refers to as Zion. There is also some insightful observations about the link between physical and spiritual healing and how this should be approached in pastoral care.

What Blumhart does in his reflection on his father’s ministry, and the Spirit’s bidding for his own work, is explore the question of why awakening or revival does not continue to flourish and grow. He explores both the inner and outer dynamics that have an impact. The editing and compiling of Blumhardt’s papers into this volume (one of the reasons it may seem repetitive at points) is a gift to those who both study and seek revival. Along with scholars from Jonathan Edwards to Richard Lovelace, this study offers rich resources for those who seek to prepare both themselves and the people of God for such awakening work.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Awakening

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The Awakening

The Awakening, Friedrich Zuendel. Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2000.

Summary: An account of Pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt’s victorious ministry with a demonized woman, Gottlieben Dittus, the awakening in the village that followed, and the miraculous works and the reactions that followed.

Pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt at thirty-three was assigned to ministry in Mottlingen in 1838. Very soon he learned of a woman in his parish suffering a strange illness, accompanied by bizarre symptoms that her doctor had been unable to alleviate. The symptoms were not limited to her body, but also in her surroundings. There were sounds of tapping, objects moved and more. Sometimes she reacted with great fear or hostility to prayer. Ruling out other explanations, Blumhardt entered an extended fight to rid this woman of demons, which eventually is accomplished. Blumhardt attributes the victory to Jesus. We see a pastor who quietly persists in invoking the name and power of Jesus in commanding the demons, who sometimes try to negotiate the terms of their departure, to leave.

Subsequent to this, an awakening breaks out in Mottlingen and the neighboring parish of Haugstett. A parish that had been indifferent to the things of God suddenly becomes stricken with their sins, coming to Blumhardt to confess those sins. As he hears their confessions, he experiences the Spirit’s prompting to absolve them in Christ’s name, a controversial act, but one marked by transformed lives in many who came to him.

Then miracles began. Blumhardt was eventually banned from personal ministry, limited to urging people to attend to the preaching of the gospel, and responding in faith to what was proclaimed, and still more miracles occur. This extends to deliverance of Blumhardt from several enemies who sought to kill him, including one who had broken into his home at night who was miraculously transformed when Blumhardt cried out, “Jesus is victor.”

This phrase, “Jesus is Victor” could have served as the title of this book. What is striking about Blumhardt is the combination of humility and authority that characterize this man. He has a humble estimate of his own abilities, but acts with conviction and confidence in the power of Jesus to counter the powers of sin and evil that he meets. One has the sense that the fight with Gottlieben was one engaged reluctantly, not sought. He refuses to use manipulative techniques to stir people up, trusting to the ministry of the Word and the work of the Spirit.

The book also makes a powerful case for the reality of spiritual warfare, the real existence of demonic personalities that may invade and afflict individuals. Much of this is connected in this narrative with engagement in magical and occult practices which opened people to these dark powers.

Blumhardt also contends that all he did was ask for and do what he saw in the gospels, coming importunately in prayer and exercising the authority Jesus spoke of to forgive sins. He wrote:

Jesus says, “I have authority from my Father to forgive sins, and those whom I forgive are forgiven.” What the Lord did ought to continue, for everything he did as a man shall be done by other human beings until the end of days. The Father authorized him, and he authorized others. He said to the disciples,”As my Father has sent me, so send I you.” Thus his disciples could say to repentant sinners as decisively as Jesus himself did, “Take heart, your sins are forgiven.” And what is to shake our conviction that this power remains in force for those proclaiming the good news today–that they, too, should have authority to forgive sins.

Blumhardt’s words offer a bracing challenge to those who seek revival. Are we prepared for spiritual warfare, and have we fostered a life of dependence upon the power of God? Are our revivals marked by deep grief and repentance for sins, and do we offer the assurance of the Lord’s pardon warranted in the finished work of Christ? His book also reminds me that we live in dark times where our nightly news carries reports of acts of singular evil. I’m troubled by our tendency to reduce all of these to mental illness, though in some instances, there is clear prior evidence of illness. In a society increasingly open to dark powers, might it not be possible that at least some individuals, or even groups have been invaded by such powers, giving themselves over to destructive evil. Blumhardt raises the issue of the call of the people of God to confront such evil under the greater authority of Jesus. Will a politically captivated, culturally co-opted, and personally compromised church be able to respond? Who are the Blumhardt’s of our day? Where is the repentance that marks a truly reviving church?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.