OhOn February 8, 2023, a routine 50-minute chapel at Asbury University turned into a 16-day event that attracted worldwide attention.
I streamed the service from my office that morning. After a message from the speaker, a student gospel choir closed with singing. I left my computer and headed to my next meeting. Later, as I was getting ready for lunch, my wife texted me that some students were still praying and worshiping in Hughes Auditorium.
Other students came. And then more.
Over the next few weeks, what university leaders described as an “influx” grew exponentially, reaching an estimated 50,000 visitors who descended on our two-stoplight town in central Kentucky. They spilled over to simulcast sites hosted at the nearby seminary and local churches. They knelt, prayed and sang on the cold ground of our vast campus.
Asbury archivist Charlotte Staudt has identified more than 250 podcasts, 1,000 articles and dozens of sermons and lectures discussing what happened. More than 100 local, national and international media visited our campus. There have been approximately 250 million social media posts related to #AsburyRevival or #AsburyRevival2023. I have never seen such a gathering of men and women of all ages, backgrounds and nationalities, agitated, searching, repentant and united.
Throughout all of this, the internet was filled with debate about what defined a revival and whether the events in Asbury were one. Comparisons have inevitably been made to pre-Asbury revivals, notably that of 1970. These are fair discussions. Words like the comeback, renewalAnd awakening have nuanced theological and historical significance.
It may ultimately be up to historians to catalog the long-term consequences of last February’s events and determine whether it was a revival or something else. For now, looking back after only a year, I believe effusion is broad enough to accommodate a variety of understandings and avoid prematurely defining what unfolded before us.
There is one thing, however, that I have come to see very clearly as a result of these 16 days: Generation Z is emerging as a corrective to the casual Christianity that has marked our religious landscape and characterized our de-Church movement.
To understand why, you first need to understand some of what Gen Z has experienced. In media interviews last year, I have often suggested that the social, economic and emotional burdens of our country – as well as the moral failings within the Church itself – have been felt acutely by younger generations. “There’s a thirst for something more,” I said said a journalist.
I asked the students what they thought of my comments. While agreeing in spirit, one student told me he would phrase it differently. “We don’t want something more,” he said. “We want something less.” He spoke of his generation’s desire for something distilled and real – an anchor amid the disorientation and dynamism of this moment.
Students are less interested in “beliefs” than in a functioning faith. There is a glaring void of meaning in our country, fostering widespread spiritual hunger.
A former Iraq War medic — a nontraditional Asbury student who participated in the outpouring five times — described to me the heartbreaking look of despair on a soldier’s face before he died. “I saw a similar look on visitors’ faces,” he said.
Jason Vickers of Baylor University writes in his book Effusion (co-authored with Asbury Seminary theologian Tom McCall) that the long lines of people trying to get into Hughes Auditorium were reminiscent of lines for soup during the Great Depression. “The connection was obvious and shocking,” Vickers writes. “They were hungry and thirsty for God. And they sincerely believed that God was there.
The existence of a spiritual hunger in America is perhaps evident. But what struck me about our students was how they responded to that hunger. These lines of visitors reflected the order that marked the entire event. Its leaders sought order but not orchestration – and some of the most visible leaders were students, who could be found witnessing, serving, and leading worship.
We counted student visitors from 285 colleges or universities who came over the 16 days. An estimated 100 worship teams took the stage. Without being directed, they performed from the side of the stage, out of the spotlight. This was consistent with a broader, unspoken sensitivity to distancing oneself. Before leading worship, teams spent an hour in a “consecration room” that we had reserved, praying and receiving prayers. Although this invisible space has received little attention, one person described it as the “nuclear reactor” of the bestowal.
I don’t believe there is anything special about Asbury University or even the year 2023, in the sense that God can use any place and any time to pour out his mind. Indeed, similar spiritual outpourings have since occurred at Samford University, Lee University, Baylor University, Texas A&M, and Auburn University.
There is something special about people though. A year ago, I witnessed the best of our student community and the faculty and staff who guide them: faithful men and women with a high spiritual temperature, a holy imagination, and a desire to exercise radical altruism.
“Asbury is like a riverbed,” art professor Chris Segre-Lewis said during a community panel after the outpouring. “When the water comes, it knows where to flow.”
This radical altruism, coupled with Gen Z’s evident thirst for something simple and authentic, is a sign of hope for the future of Christianity, its institutions, and the Church.
VSCommentators have been abuzz with data from Jim Davis and Michael Graham’s 2023 book, The great unchurching. Over the past quarter century, approximately 40 million Americans have gone from regular church attendance to less than once a year—a number greater than all the conversions of the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and of all Billy Graham’s crusades combined.
Of those who left the Church, approximately 10 million did so under the banner of “harm to the Church,” due to factors such as spiritual abuse or loss of trust. Michael Graham calls these exits “losses.” But the remaining three quarters are “casual” outings. These are men and women who stopped attending because they moved and couldn’t find a new congregation or because busy schedules or lifestyle changes crowded out weekly worship .
Occasional departure from church is a function of occasional faith. Like theologian and author Stanley Hauerwas suggested, pockets of contemporary Christianity have been domesticated into a set of propositions that we carry mentally but which have little impact on our daily lives. Casual faith produces a belief system that demands little and makes pale statements like “I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal opinion.” »
I think Generation Z is different.
“They are a generation of extremes,” Staudt, Asbury’s archivist and a Zoomer herself, told me. She’s right. I am surrounded by young adults and adolescents with unsatisfied hunger, ready to “count the cost” of their commitment to Christ. Gen Z Christians are serious, and they are not satisfied with the institutional status quo.
Research from the Barna Group shows that Generation Z considers spiritual growth a top priority. In general, they reject empty words and hypocrisy and want values to be embodied in action. They to prioritize behavior rather than words as a strategy for sharing the faith.
This is no surprise for a generation that elevates authenticity as a core value.
In a podcast, journalist Olivia Reingold, who describes herself as “not very spiritually inclined” and says she has never set foot in a church, farm with this remarkable statement about what happened last year in Asbury: “Regardless of what you believe, you cannot deny that there are young people who sincerely believe in God – and now, I think, you can say that you started a movement of sorts.
I hope Reingold is right.
I hope that a remnant will emerge from this cohort whose unwavering commitment will radically restore an undomesticated, exilic, and fundamentally demanding spirit of historic Christianity.
I hope they want pictures of serious and devoted saints like Sophie Scholl, Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Óscar Romero or Martin Luther King Jr., instead of fashionable priestsevangelical prosperity theology, celebrity culture churches, or an individualistic, therapeutic god who deceives and only exists to affirm our preferences.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Generation Z is producing precisely these types of believers. Our students shaped outpouring in a small but radically countercultural way for the Church today. They had no interest in platforms celebrity artists or media personalities on campus. They did not offer a biography when they witnessed or worshipped. During the prayer, many students placed their phones on the altar. They prayed for the faculty, staff, and administration, including me.
Generation Z is often described as a highly pathologized cohort. They are less religious. They leave the church. They distrust institutions. They are anxious, depressed and ill-educated by technology and social media. You would have good reason to be skeptical that such a group holds the answer to what is plaguing evangelicalism today. Them?
But this question bears a striking resemblance to the interactions with Christ in Scripture. Jesus, do you know who washes your feet? Do you know who you are eating with? Them?
This outpouring raised many questions for me, many of which cannot be answered today. But it helped me see this generation in a new way. What if, instead of the Anxious Generation or the iGeneration, we witnessed the rise of the Corrective Generation?
I know some Gen Zers are tired of the inflated expectations that they will clean up all the messes their ancestors left behind (which leads to another nickname, Generation Fix-It). Yet I can’t help but wonder if they will embody a resilient, committed, and costly faith in Jesus Christ as an antidote to the casual Christianity that has emptied church pews in recent decades.
I wonder because I’ve seen it before.
“Revival,” said Charlie Cox, an Asbury student, “is when dead things come back to life.”
Kevin Brown is president of Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky.
