The Asbury revival – understanding the charismatic non-stop spontaneous worship

Religion Media Centre Podcast

For almost two weeks, a revival has taken place at Asbury College, Kentucky, where thousands of people have taken part in non-stop praise and worship. It began with students following a regular chapel service that snowballed through live feeds and social media to include thousands of people of all ages, some of whom travelled thousands of miles to be part of the experience.

It resembled revival meetings of old, with singing of familiar songs, free-flowing prayer, and kneeling in repentance. But this was a charismatic experience, which included soft speaking in tongues, movement and arms held high in praise.

In our briefing, historians observed that revivals are a fairly regular occurrence at Asbury college, which grew out of the Methodist revival movement.

Academics who have studied revivals explained they can be explained not just as a psychological phenomenon but as a response to change, often happening at a time when people feel they are losing something important to their identity. Now American religion is in decline, with fewer people, especially younger people, saying they are affiliated to Christianity, and it is a moment of cultural crisis.

Comparisons were noted with the insurrection on Capitol Hill, where protesters blew shofar horns, sang songs and prayed, and it is said there is an overlap between some of the people attending the revival and those who were Trump supporters. Politicians, it is said, have used the model of revival worship to whip up political support in campaigning tactics.

The Asbury revival has united people of different generations and political ideas. It is different to others in that it has no identifiable leaders - it sprang up spontaneously and is organic in nature. It is an amateur rather than a professional enterprise which has a paid group of preachers leading it.

Could it happen in the UK? A Methodist minister, Rev Ashley Cooper, explained that all Methodists pray for revival, but in the broadest sense of the transformation of the church and the nation, not for an effervescent moment, though it is in those warm experiences that awakening can occur.

Our guests in the briefing were Bob Smietana, reporter with the Religion News Service; Dr John Maiden, Head of Department of Religious Studies at the Open University; Dr Leah Payne, Associate Professor of American Religious History, George Fox University; Rev Ashley Cooper, principal of Cliff College, Derbyshire; and Kami Rice, former student president at Asbury College.

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