Movement - Next Generation Ministry

NOTE: My title above should really be “Great vs. great.” However, my current theme will not allow lowercase letters in the title. Below is my post:

There has been a lot of recent talk about revivals and spiritual awakenings. Revivals are for the church! They wake up sleeping saints and get us back to doing what we should have been doing all along. Spiritual awakenings are for the community. Cities change, cultures are impacted, and wide-scale repentance is involved. Though church members and others can get saved in a revival, spiritual awakenings are what occur when large segments of society find new life.

Revivals lead to spiritual awakenings. Until the church is revived, spiritual awakenings in communities cannot occur. Though both revivals and awakenings come from God, I think more often, God is waiting on us for them to get started. When we, His people, apply 2 Chronicles 7:14 to our lives and to our church, we will begin to see God move.

Historians and scholars differ as to how many Great Awakenings the United States of America has had. The First and the Second Great Awakening are undisputed. What some term as the Third and Fourth Great Awakenings are questionable. It is the “Fourth Great Awakening” that is the talk of the town today. The Jesus Revolution movie captured well “The Jesus Movement” that occurred in and around the year 1970.

I, for one, don’t believe there has been a Third and Fourth Great Awakening. I believe the Jesus Movement was a spiritual awakening that had a great impact. God used the Movement to no doubt affect a nation and save many souls. Through the Movement, God also ushered in Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and the acceptance of casual dress into the church house. Today, CCM is a mixed bag and casual dress is more often the rule than the exception. For decades now, not wearing one’s Sunday best has become the accepted practice in many churches. However you feel about these things, the reviews on the Jesus Movement itself remains mixed.

For this reason, I do not classify the Jesus Movement as a Great Awakening. I am thankful for the Jesus Movement and readily admit that the Movement has affected me even though I didn’t live through it. I think so well of the Jesus Movement that I believe it may well contain the seeds that could sprout a Third Great Awakening in our nation.

I choose not to use the word “Great” lightly. Our country has seen two World Wars. These were “Great” Wars, and not “Great” in terms of having to have been fought. No war is great because in every war, people die. But in terms of sheer impact and comparison to other wars our nation has fought, WW I and WWII were Great.

Many other wars have been fought since these 2 World War’s. The impact of those wars were great too, with a lowercase “g”. The First and Second Great Awakening were Great. Could it be that the Third Great Awakening comes at or around the same time as World War III?

None of us know. God himself determines when and where a Great Awakening will occur. But like war, it’s usually a chain of events that sets things off. When it comes to a Great Awakening, only prayer will begin to set things ablaze.

In order for a Third Great Awakening to occur, the church must first be revived and then spiritual awakenings must be observed in multiple regions on multiple fronts for a lengthy period of time. When a Third Great Awakening happens, there won’t be any question about it. The reviews won’t be mixed. Everyone will agree and who knows, at that time, the angels may be in the sky.

The Church is a sleeping giant that has slumbered for far too long. What are we waiting on? Let’s humble ourselves, pray, seek God’s face, and turn from our evil ways. Both God and the world are waiting on us . . .

christian-art

While attending a Christian college around the turn of the century, I would attend Baptist Student Union (BSU) every now and then. I and every other Christian on campus must have been witnessed to a thousand times and everyone was told these words, “you should come to BSU.” I must admit my school’s BSU could attract a crowd and had a praise team that produced quality sound. The praise team would sing a song at BSU and during chapel that was a favorite of many. The song was titled Celebration and was a knock-off of a post-disco song by Kool & the Gang, released in 1980. Not only was the song a knock-off but the song was also 20 years old.

What I have recounted above is a descriptive picture of the Christian sub-culture or what many have termed “the Christian bubble.” We Christians have everything – Christian t-shirts, Christian music, Christian schools, Christian toys, Christian yellow pages, Christian arts, Christian fiction, Christian movies, and the list goes on and on. I like what Alvin Reid says about the Christian subculture in his book As You Go: “You can spot something in the Christian subculture because it looks like something you would find elsewhere, costs more, and doesn’t work as well!”

Where did all the creativity and originality in Christianity go? Why does it seem Christian innovation and imagination has all but vanished? What do Elvis Pressley, Kurt Cobain, and Katy Perry all have in common? Besides being musical icons in their own generation, they all grew up in church. The church is known for stifling one’s talent, for not allowing one to express him or herself in the way God designed them. This has proven particularly true for teenagers, when identity development enters its peak stage during the course of one’s lifespan.

Do you remember the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and all the Christian art that was produced in that time? Hold up. Time-out. That Christian art was not considered a part of the Christian sub-culture. If people wanted a “Christian” picture or painting, people did not have to go to a Christian bookstore to purchase it. The “Christian” art of the of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance was considered a part of the culture. Where are all the expressions of Christianity in our culture? What impression are we making? We need “Christian” businessmen and women, soldiers and law enforcement, lawyers, teachers, artists, and politicians at work in society. But we do not need them to work as an entire subset in and for themselves.

Fortunately, a movement has been gaining steam in Christian sub-cultures to break the box wide-open. Remember the Jesus Movement in the 1970’s? We need another movement to take place today where Christian talent and arts can flourish in society as culture and not as sub-culture. Toby Mac and LeCrae are two musical artists who have broken the bubble by topping not only Christian charts but the Billboard charts! That’s what the church needs to do! We need to get back to where we as Christians affect culture, not hide from it or become repulsive to it.

Matt Chandler, pastor of the Village Church in Dallas, TX, describes the gospel at work on the ground and the gospel at work in the air. The gospel on the ground refers to propositional truths about Jesus whereas the gospel in the air “connects human salvation to cosmic restoration.” Gabe Lyons in The Next Christians says there is a movement at work where Christians “want to be a force for restoration in a broken world” while Christians at the same time are still found proclaiming the gospel. Alvin Reid calls this being missional. Incarnating the gospel in its full form is the prescription for today’s ailing world and ailing Christian sub-culture.