In 2022, Pew Research Center published a report on the future of religion in America. The results were not encouraging.

The share of Americans who identified as Christian fell from 90% in 1972 to 64% in 2020, while the share who claimed no religious affiliation whatsoever — the so-called “nones” — rose from 5% to 30% during the same period.

Projecting current trends into the future, Pew modeled various scenarios for religious identification by 2070. The most optimistic scenario from a Christian point of view predicted 54% of Americans identifying with the faith, while the least optimistic predicted 52% as nones.

Reading statistical projections like this can be depressing. Christianity seems to be ceding ground to nonbelievers. As a minister, it’s hard to play for the team that appears to be losing.

What statistical projections don’t account for is the possibility of revival, the history and theology of which Ian R. Hall takes up in Times of Renewal.

The author is an ordained Assemblies of God minister and a veteran educator, missionary, and evangelist. Hall’s personal testimony of conversion, healing, and experience of revival — recounted in the book’s introduction — alerts readers that the topic is of personal, not merely academic, interest to him.

In general terms, a revival is “a spiritual awakening affecting a whole community,” Hall writes. Americans further understand it as “a type of evangelistic crusade,” a means toward an end. In that sense, an evangelist holds a revival to have a revival.

Hall focuses on the general sense of the term rather than the “peculiarly American sense.”

Based on the history of revivals, Hall discerns a four-stage pattern to spiritual awakening: a period of spiritual decline leads a concerned group of believers to personal repentance and intercession for their community, which then leads to a prophetic ministry to that community.

The resulting spiritual awakening is characterized by “the renewal of the spiritual life” and “a recovery of spiritual truth.” These affective and cognitive dimensions work in tandem, and they also produce changed behavior in revived people.

A genuine revival, one might say, renews heart, head, and hands.

This pattern is visible both in the Bible and across two millennia of church history.

In general terms, a revival is “a spiritual awakening affecting
a whole community,” Hall writes.

After offering chapter-length treatments of revival in the Old and New Testaments, respectively, Hall devotes the majority of the book to narrating incidences of spiritual awakening from early Christianity to the present.

In many ways, the history of revival is simply the history of Christian missionary expansion across time and space.

This contrasts with the way some early Pentecostals understood church history. They framed the course of Christendom after the apostles but before Azusa Street in terms of “fall” and “restoration,” as if little of spiritual significance had happened between the two periods. They made allowances for the Protestant Reformation and subsequent evangelical awakenings, however.

Hall documents the ways God has renewed the Church in every age. He sees continuity across time rather than discontinuity, even while recognizing that the Reformation recovered doctrinal truths long occluded by ecclesial traditions.

Specifically, Hall writes, “Every evangelical awakening from the Reformation onward has focused upon one or another particular truth,” such as justification by faith, congregational holiness, personal holiness, missions, the Second Coming, baptism in the Spirit, healing, and the like.

Hall’s approach is both ecumenical and evangelical. It takes church history seriously, affirming that God “left not himself without witness” in any Christian age, to borrow the language of Acts 14:17 (KJV).

Yet it also recognizes the limits of revival experience in the absence of doctrinal reformation. Heart and head must move in the same direction for Christianity to be healthy.

Such a historical perspective weakens the pessimism that can arise from contemplating the kind of statistical trends Pew reports. Christians have witnessed the spiritual decline of churches across the ages, but they also witnessed their revival. The possibility of a new awakening should fill us with hope.

Hope is not a plan, however. Times of Renewal concludes with a practical theology of revival that emphasizes the sovereign move of the Holy Spirit, even as it recognizes what we must do to prepare for that move.

“We may assuredly recognize that if we pray and earnestly seek God, as so many have done through history, laying aside everything that would distract us from our main purpose, God will answer our prayers and meet us in our quest for him,” Hall concludes.

Why not here? Why not now? Lord, revive us again!

Book Reviewed

Ian R. Hall, Times of Renewal: A History and Theology of Revival and Spiritual Awakenings, 2nd ed. (New Albany, IN: Encourage Publishing, 2024).

This article appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Influence magazine.