‘I am not into religion’ said Joanna Lumley, ‘but I am into spirituality’.
There are those who say that Joanna Lumley is not unique and that ‘it’s cool to be spiritual’ today. Phil Rankin in ‘Buried Spirituality’ found it with young people he interviewed all over the country, as did the BBC ‘Soul of Britain Survey’ which found that 70% of the UK population believed in God. Another survey found that 34% of people outside church are happy to say that God has answered their prayer, suggesting that an autonomous spiritual interest and experience is alive and well, even if few of these people go to church.
There are those who even suggest that this interest can be called a ‘Spirituality Revolution’. The significant secular work of David Tacey in his book of that name is one example, while Heeles and Woodhead on research in Kendal called ‘Spiritual Revolution’, another. They distinguish between ‘religious’, and ‘spiritual’, as per the Joanna Lumley quote and another lady who said, ‘I am a spiritual person so I didn’t want to get married in church’.
If there is such a thing as a spiritual revolution, and I am aware that there is some debate about it between different researchers, this poses a huge challenge and opportunity for the kind of traditional, ‘inherited’ mode of ‘church’ which most people associate with ‘religion’ and ‘going to church’. Could the ‘revolution’ lead to revival?
This is the background to a question put to me by an Evangelism Enabler for the Methodist Church, called Roger Johnson. At a recent presentation of the workbook ‘Equipping your church in a Spiritual Age’, produced by the Group for Evangelisation (GfE) of Churches Together in England, he asked, ‘if there is all this spiritual interest around in people outside the church, what might revival look like in the twenty first century?’
The companion books to ‘Equipping your church in a spiritual age’ , explore various aspects of the ‘spiritual revolution’ but do not go on to explore if any possible ‘revival’ might follow.
However, the Group for Evangelisation, like Roger, has looked with interest at how churches have been able to share the good news of Jesus Christ together. Nurture courses like Alpha; the ‘Mission Shaped Church’ report and the rise of ‘Fresh Expressions’ are significant growth factors. We might well go on and ask the question, ‘could Revival follow?’ What is God doing and how might the churches respond? All of which leads to Roger’s question, ‘What will revival look like in the twenty first century?’
Before answering the question, we just need to step back and answer one or two more first; like ‘what is revival?’ and ‘is it a good thing?’ ‘Revival’ is not a word found in the Bible, and there are many people like ‘The Gloomy Dean’, William Ralph Inge of St Paul’s Cathedral who said years ago: ‘Revivals are shallow things, since they aim at reproducing what never existed or what has perished with the age that gave birth to it’. Indeed, I have heard it said of the famous Welsh Revival: ‘by 1914 only the same number of people attended church as before the Revival’.
