I want to remember the family who drove 30 hours each way from Mexico for someone to pray over their baby for healing. They went immediately to the altar and collapsed in front of it. I don't want to forget the Latino family-grandpa, dad, uncle, kids, mama-who when they made it into Hughes after what must have been a wait of hours-didn't even go to their seats. As theologians and well, everyone, everywhere-name and debate what it was and wasn't, what I do know for sure is that people are longing for God. Throughout the days as we passed each other in the halls and outside, we kept saying to each other- "can you believe this?", "is this really happening?". I am sure we have a lifetime of journaling, prayer, and deep conversation ahead. ĭay 18: We are returning to ordinary life-which is just as full of God as the last 17 days-just a bit more quiet. He concluded: "If you're imagining a renewal for American Christianity, all the best laid plans-the pastoral strategies, theological debates, and long-term trendlines-may matter less than something happening in some obscure place or to some obscure individual, in whose visions an entirely unexpected future might be taking shape." ![]() New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's weekend article cites an 1822 letter in which Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I trust that there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die an Unitarian." However, less than a year earlier, a young man named Charles Grandison Finney had a transformative encounter with Jesus.Īs Douthat writes, "This experience set Finney on a path that would help bury Jefferson's confident hypothesis-toward leadership in an age of revivalism, the Second Great Awakening, that forged the form of evangelical Christianity that would bestride nineteenth-century America."ĭouthat then applied his point to the current context: "Whatever the Asbury Revival's long-term impact, the history of Finney and Jefferson is a reminder that religious history is shaped as much by sudden irruptions as long trajectories, as much by the mystical and personal as by the institutional and sociological."
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