Revival and the Everyday

One more brief post on revival, mostly containing quotes from Greg Boyd’s new book Present Perfect (ht Jon Tyson). They deal with the “big event” phenomenon that I’ve written about before. That is, the thought that organizing a spectacular, well-attended event will bring about transformation and long-term kingdom fruit.

Here’s Boyd on that subject:

The fact is, if we can’t discern God’s presence in our day-to-day lives, it’s unlikely that we’ll find him at a revival. We may find a lot of excitement, great speakers, superb music, and maybe even some “signs and wonders.” But unless a person learns to find God as much in the ordinary as in the exciting, the exciting will do nothing more than serve as a momentary distraction…

Your evening at home with your family may not have the fanfare of a great revival, but God is as much at work there as in any revival. And there’s at least as much important Kingdom work to engage in there as in any revival. The question is, Are you remaining awake and looking for God–here and now? Are you living in love as Christ loved you and gave his life for you–here and now? For if you are, every moment becomes a marvelous opportunity to receive and express God’s love. The most trivial circumstance and most insignificant moment becomes a sacred moment when we invite God into it…

The best thing we can do for our society and for the world, therefore, is to be as surrendered to God’s will as we can possibly be, moment-by-moment. People are often impressed by large political or religious rallies calling for social change, but the main way the mustard-seed Kingdom expands and transforms the world is by God’s people staying awake and responding to him each moment. Rallies last a night or a weekend and are usually more symbolic of what people believe should change in society than they are expressions of how people are living to bring about change in society. They create a lot of energy and may sometimes result in a few changed social policies and programs, but they usually leave people fundamentally unchanged…

By contrast, remaining aware of God’s presence moment-by-moment can’t help but revolutionize how we actually live. Surrendering to God’s will takes us out of our self-focused flesh-mind-set and empowers us to see what God sees, love as God loves, and sacrifice for others the way God has sacrificed for us. Nothing could be as socially impacting as this.

And also Dallas Willard, whom I have quoted before, from his book Knowing Christ Today:

Among the many misunderstandings Jesus had to counteract in his teaching was the one that held the kingdom to be some gigantic event in some special place. This was human thinking about human kingdoms, which always fit that description. He was constantly faced with people who wanted to know when the kingdom of God was coming. When is the big commotion? He patiently replied that the kingdom of God was not that kind of thing. It was simply God reigning, governing. It is not a special event you could see happening over here or possibly over there. “Now look,” he said, “the kingdom of God is right here among you” (Luke 17:20-21, paraphrase). His main sermon line was: “Get a new thought! The kingdom of the heavens is available to you from right where you are!” (Matt 4:17, paraphrase).

It seems to me that trying to engineer and organize big events as a means to revival or city transformation is probably an exercise in futility. Real transformation starts a lot smaller and takes a lot longer. Less like a fireworks display and more like, say, a mustard seed that grows to be a large tree over many seasons. Less like a rally and more like a little bit of yeast someone worked into some dough; slowly but surely it permeates the whole batch.