Ours is a community consecrating itself to seek the Lord for revival; a fresh, generation-marking, renewing, awakening movement of the Holy Spirit, in our place, in our time. And by now, we are most familiar with Duncan Campbell’s Hebridean insight that: “For revival to come, God’s fire must fall on four altars: Heart, Home, Church and Region.” Though Campbell came to his “four altars” specifically as the result of his personal experience of a move of God in Scotland during the 1940’s, this principle was in no way original to Campbell or his time. In fact, we see these “altars” embedded in the Mosaic Law itself.
In Deuteronomy 6:4 we find the “Shema”, one of the central confessions and prayers of the Jewish faith: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might…”
Notice where the exhortation begins: with the heart! “This is how you will live rightly and abundantly and blessedly, Israel”, God says, “Train your heart to love me, and seek me with everything within you; Heart, soul, mind, strength.” This is where it begins. Right here in Deuteronomy 6, we find Duncan Campbell’s “altar of the heart”.
Beyond dealing rightly with our own hearts, however, what follows next? Moses continues: “You shall teach (these commands) diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
First, the heart. Then, the home! “Love the Lord with everything you’ve got”, Moses says, “and teach your children to do so, too”. This is Campbell’s second altar of revival: the home - intentional, multi-generational, spiritual life - as the locus of our seeking and practicing the “with-God” life of the Kingdom of the Heavens.
But while multi-generational faithfulness and blessing is the Lord’s clear vision and real hope for his people, history bears out its extreme rarity. Instead, the “deuteronomic cycle” of divine blessing, followed by complacency, forgetfulness and decline, followed by divine intervention to awaken an emerging and now spiritually impoverished generation, is the norm. We see just such a lapse, even within a generation of Moses’ own life:
“And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died… And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel.” (Judges 2:8–10)
As I was emerging into adulthood and vocational ministry around the turn of the 21st century, all talk centered on the increasingly “post-Christian” nature of Western culture and the challenges this posed to the Gospel here in New England. From the ascendency of “Baby Boomers” onward, in the United States we spent more than a generation simultaneously presuming upon the rich spiritual/cultural/ethical foundations of Christendom while also very actively, vocally exorcising the presence of Christ from the public square. Faith and “Reality” (defined materialistically) finally completed their long, messy divorce in the Western mind. Concerned missiologists would say that our society had been “inoculated” with just enough latent familiarity with the Gospel of Jesus and the teachings of the Church such as to have become immune to them, and the dawning of this century was marked by a new high water mark for the spirit of secularism. In a post-Christian age, our cultural scripts, norms and ethics were formed, not in ignorance of Christian teachings, but often in direct and explicit rejection of them. This was hard soil to till for Kingdom seed, inducing much anxious hand-wringing within the Church as well as mathematically alarming demographic trends. Following the deuteronomic pattern, it seems, rich material blessing had led to presumption and spiritual complacency, which had now led to a full-flowering spiritual and cultural decline. Secular pundits and the “new atheists” of the early 2000’s would enthusiastically deem the decline of Western Christianity irreversible; “mission accomplished” for the Enlightenment experiment, and the dawning of a new, secular age…
“But God…” (as the Apostle Paul once famously said), has not given 21st century secularism the privilege of having the last word. Just as, throughout history, decline into spiritual impoverishment has not yet ever been the last word of the deuteronomic cycle. If we are paying attention, we know what comes next.
“And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD…”
Considering the spiritual state and mental/emotional disarray of Gen-Z and Alpha, we can say with confidence that this ancient observation has emerged as true again in our own day and cultural context. On the surface, this is disheartening. To bear the ignominy of shepherding the Church in a day when this is the case is a bitter pill to swallow. It has certainly not been my personal aspiration to be on hand to witness spiritual “rock bottom” for the Western world! But, then again… to stand with Jesus in the valley of the shadow of death provides an unparalleled vantage point from which to witness the miracle of resurrection. And this is the great, open secret of death, and valleys, and of the great spiritual battle for our souls that goes on in the heavenly places, as revealed through the cross of Christ: that the Lord God allows the enemy just enough “success” to be his own undoing. And I dare suggest that we are witnessing this very cruciform dynamic happening - or at the least, beginning to happen - in Gen Z today.
Simply put, the enemy has pushed his advantage too far; done his job too well. Because what we are witnessing in emerging generations today is a culture that is actually no longer post-Christian. The advance of secularism has been so aggressive, and so successful for a generation or more now, that those emerging into adulthood today are in fact, effectively, PRE-Christian; which is to say, no longer “inoculated” to the Gospel. This is a generation no longer constructing their worldview in resistance to Christ (or, more accurately, to Christendom), but in genuine ignorance of Christ.
My eldest daughter is sixteen years old. A little more than a year ago she was shocked when, in the course of a casual conversation with one of her closest friends (at a Catholic high school), she discovered that this friend had been, up to that very moment, unaware that Easter was a Christian holiday. Not dismissive of that fact. Not antagonistic. Unaware. This was, to her, NEW information. Truly, we can say today that there has “arisen another generation… who (does) not know the Lord”!
And the good news about that convicting confession is that a generation who truly does not know the Lord is extraordinarily fertile soil for the Lord to be declared and revealed to! Like the snapping of an elastic band under tension, the vacuum created by Western secularism’s exorcism of Christ from culture will prove to be the very force that draws His Presence back into the center again, with power. Where we have been tempted to dismay over the increase of godlessness around us, it will prove to be that it is the spiritual hunger of a godless generation which the Spirit will take in hand to catalyze a revival the likes of which we have not yet seen.
And so, we pray with fervent expectation. We do not shrink back from demonstrating, and announcing the Kingdom of the Heavens, and the Gospel of our King. Because we know that the Lord is not finished with us, or with this generation. Not done. He will be glorified in our day; He’s just getting started. So daily, we covenant together and pray, “Come, Lord Jesus!”