One Divine Moment

One Divine Moment: A History of the 1970 Asbury Revival

The Foreword to Robert Coleman's Book

The unusual revival which came to Asbury College early in 1970 and spread to scores of campuses across America is evidence that God is still at work in His world, lifting men and women out of self-centeredness, secularism, and boredom.

It came at a time when radical students were striving desperately to upset the educational equilibrium of our nation with burning, destroying property, rock throwing, and other forms of violence. The Bible says, ' . . . where sin abounded, grace did much more abound,' and His grace was displayed in a phenomenal way on many campuses, even while other campuses were on the brink of chaos.

With the Lord, it is usually in the worst of times that the best things happen. The Protestant Reformation, the Wesleyan Revival, and the Great Awakening in America in the nineteenth century are examples.

Perhaps the eruptions of revival which swept through a segment of our college youth in the early months of 1970 are harbingers of what the Holy Spirit is ready, able and willing to do, throughout the world, if Christians will dare to pay the price.

It is my prayer that what began at Asbury College, and spread like a fire to other campuses, will encourage believers everywhere to claim the promise: 'If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land' (2 Chronicles 7:14)."

These words were written by Billy Graham to open Robert Coleman's chronicle of the 1970 Asbury Revival, One Divine Moment, during the height of Graham's worldwide crusade ministry, which lasted 58 years. Reaching stadium crowds of often 100,000 people, Graham depended not upon the megachurch vibe of seeker sensitivity and entertainment but on the authority of God's Word to convict sinners of their sin. Graham was criticized for his failure to disciple his converts, and the tag of "easy believism" was attached rather glibly to his message. Regardless of his naysayers, Graham never failed to believe in the power of the simple gospel to change lives. For this reason, his efforts to set up discipling ministries remained to his dying day.

Dying at age 99 in 2018, Graham did not live to see the Asbury University campus swept yet once again with the spirit of revival in February 2023. But we can infer that this revival came in answer to his prayers and in answer to the prayers prayed by the remaining generation who remembers the divine moment when God came down. In fact, some faithful prayer warriors who witnessed the 1970 revival were indeed alive and present to experience the 2023 revival.

Was This a "Real Revival"?

To answer that question, we might of necessity parallel the Asbury revival of 2023 with the Asbury revival of 1970. And then we would need to match both with 2 Chronicles 7:14.

• Did this revival begin with "my people"?

• Did they humble themselves?

• Did they pray?

• Did they seek God's face?

• Did they turn from their wicked ways?

• Did God hear from heaven?

• Did He forgive their sin?

• Did He heal their land?

If that seems like a daunting list, we must realize first that revival is a sovereign work of God. The architecture of a nation's rebirth cannot be plotted, predicted, parroted--or even prevented, as Jonah found. And yet the Lord has laid out the pattern--a pattern beginning with prayer and humility. But human pride likes to control God, often rejecting the spontaneous as spurious. Revival always has its naysayers, including the Asbury revival of 2023. When I was researching this remarkable phenomenon in real time with a hungry heart and an open mind, I watched video after video of live coverage of the event. I also watched "discernment" videos by vloggers as popular as Alisa Childers who remained cautiously hopeful, despite fears of NAR takeover. Few "big names" seemed at all eager to welcome the movement, and some celebrities, such as fundamentalist icon John MacArthur, dismissed the movement outright.

Other Calvinist bloggers followed suit--not, as it became clear, on the basis of this particular revival's failure to fill the bill but on the assumption that "revivalism" discredits the ordinary "means of grace" to keep the elect spiritually fit. This either-or false dichotomy is articulated in R. Scott Clark's scornful article, "Asbury Is Having a Revival (Again)," published in The Heidelblog. When he put down even Jonathan Edwards' lasting fruit after the Great Awakening, I connected the dots between his cynicism and his Calvinism and commented, engaging in an online debate under the username Joy.

The going thesis--that revivals are little more than waves of emotionalism sweeping the landscape and receding back to sea--also informed his more decorous cynicism in his follow-up article, "Asbury Is Ending Another Revival." Clark's condescending thesis, of necessity, negates not only "revivalism" but also the social reform that follows real movements of God. Even though I rebutted Clark's revisionist history, citing the Wesleyan revival's impact on slavery in America and in England, he upheld his equating of revivals with revivalism, turning a blind eye to objective historical narrative. His second article also falsely associated the 2023 Asbury revival with the Kansas City Prophets, even though there was no association.

Poisoning the well, Clark makes sweeping generalizations that limit the prophetic fulfillment of Joel. Even so, I took an honest look at the Westminster Confession as I promised Clark I would (we parted online amicably), yet I inevitably concluded that this prized creation of man was eloquent but dead. If a catechism defining God's sovereignty dictates what the Holy Spirit can and cannot do, I want none of it. And if revival does not even exist but is falsely associated with "revivalism," then we are not looking for its characteristics. Therefore, we cannot find them even when they are there.

But God Himself defines revival. And it begins with a heavy heart--a heart not politely waiting upon the Lord but a heart that is raw and desperate without Him--a proud heart upon which the Holy Spirit moves.

The 1970 Asbury Revival

Robert Coleman provides one verbatim testimony after another in his book, and the theme is clear: revival comes when we turn ourselves over to the Lord with no reservations out of a soul nausea that has fallen completely out of love with ourselves. Every revival begins with a narcissist. We might even say that revival is not possible without them.

• "If my people"--are narcissists saved? Coleman writes of the 1970 revival: "Many of the testimonies reflected an inner struggle with the self-centered nature of man." One young man in particular, who had been raised in a Christian home and who never doubted the existence of God, nevertheless felt that all his strength came from himself, for he was gifted with the ability to succeed at anything he tried. But the day came--despite his initial disdain for the "holy rollers" of the revival--that he could no longer stomach himself. "I left the auditorium and walked to my dormitory where I shared with a friend my desire to let go of myself because I was so sick of being selfish and ego-centered."

• "Shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face"--he found himself twenty minutes later in the lobby of the auditorium, where he began to sweat and feel very uncomfortable inside. "Suddenly I found myself walking down to the altar. As I knelt I begged God for forgiveness for my many sins and I told Him that I wasn't going to arise until I felt assured that He had totally taken control of and changed my life. No great emotion swept me. I wasn't struck by lightning, but suddenly I felt a peace inside which I had never experienced before. I found Christ all-sufficient for each of my needs. He even took control of my superego." Can we imagine anyone objecting to that?

• "And turn from their wicked ways"--he then noted: "It was His transformation in the ego area of my life that surprised me most. I found that He did not strip me of my basic personality. I was still living, but it was no longer the ego-I, rather it was and is Christ living in me."

• Did God hear from heaven and forgive his sin and heal his land? He continued, saying, "After my experience with the infilling of God's Holy Spirit, I saw every type of personality on our campus touched and caused to respond. I can't explain the open feeling that began to exist. People were actually loving one another. I too began to learn that I couldn't love anyone with my own strength, but rather I must allow Jesus to love through me. I was never before concerned for the individual, but suddenly I was filled with a yearning for others to find what I had found."

Anyone who would chalk this up to emotionalism must have a spiritual biography drier than last year's bird's nest. Another victoriously delivered soul testified: "Even after the intensity of God's marvelous revelation has diminished, the experience of heart purity remains a reality in my life." And Coleman's book of 118 pages tells many such stories. The phenomenon of the 1970 Asbury revival even hit the newspapers.

The 2023 Asbury Revival

Beginning on a February morning almost exactly 53 years later, the Gen Z Asbury revival took even Gen Z by surprise. A chapel service ended up lasting over two weeks 24-7. Students skipped class--to many raised eyebrows--picked up their Bibles and flocked to Hughes Auditorium at all hours of the day and night. Meals were brought in, and some students even slept on site. Nothing disorderly or unseemly transpired--and why we should be so skeptical of students actually wanting to pray says far more about us than it does about them. This was three years after COVID, and Gen Z had been stripped of most of their social privileges at the peak of their lives. Some had missed high school graduations; others had laid even young, healthy friends to rest.

But God had not forgotten Gen Z--the first generation totally submerged in technology. And the absence of technology alone in this revival commanded attention. What marked the 1970 revival also marked this one: no single celebrity was in charge. In fact, if you watch the videos--many of which I did, spellbound with tears raining unbidden down my face--there seemed to be no sort of system whatsoever. And yet the flow of worship was seamless. With scarcely a lull, one song broke out after another and yet without announcement. The movement was entirely organic and congregation-driven.

And perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of all was that everyone was singing. The main feature was not the praise band playing but the congregation singing. One of the criticisms was that there was very little preaching. But that does not mean there was no Bible. Student after student read favorite passages as each spoke to the need of the moment, while streams of others headed to the altar to pray. There was nothing loud, nothing showy, nothing dramatic--not even when people flew in from all over the world to catch a glimpse of one divine moment--a moment that didn't want to end.

And, in today's world--today's metamodern megachurch world--the lack of drama alone was enough to make people think nothing was happening; it wasn't a real revival. But Gen Z and God did not allow jaded mindsets to define His work. I was teaching at Grace Christian Academy in Knoxville at the time and had taught many a Gen Z student in my day, and I knew how desperately they longed for reality and spiritual foundation--even when they didn't have the vocabulary to ask for this. But God knew the hearts of these precious, often empty young people whose daily lives were so bombarded by the phony, the false, and yes--the phenomenal. Cynicism soon sets in like spiritual rigor mortis when we must live from thrill to thrill.

The revival was so quiet that there seemed to some people to be no reason for classes to be disrupted. Was this a scam? A ploy to get out of work? Come on, now . . . Who could argue that some did not take advantage? But we cannot judge the real by the presence of the false. Remember that when Moses was seeing God write the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, his brother Aaron was fashioning a golden calf on the plain below. Ananias and Sapphira faked being filled with the Holy Spirit, but that only underscored the reality of those whose lives were forever changed.

If you listened to the videos, you heard one young person after another giving testimony to being delivered from depression, suicidal tendencies, addictions to pornography, and many other crippling plagues. No one was sparing self; all was exposed and yet without pretense. The tear-washed, chastened, yet shining countenances of these young lives gripped me with a sense of reality I had scarcely felt in church since my girlhood camp meeting days ages ago. The expression on their faces was one, not of overwhelming euphoria, but of exalted peace.

Then that February, the spirit of revival visited my church, too. The singing--which I often find performative and repetitive--suddenly took a third dimension. Impossible to explain, it seemed as if a new and eternal energy suffused the words and music all across the congregation. We all knew that we all felt it without saying so. The singing became suddenly sweeter and fuller. There was a Power, a Presence, and a love right in our midst, as if the Holy Spirit moved with wings above us stirring our souls. My pastor believed in the Asbury revival and recognized that the Lord was moving.

The Asbury revival of 2023 found no corollary in any form of modern worship--unless in the singing. Some critics complained that they sang shallow CCM choruses. But whose fault is that? Those were the only songs they knew. It was my generation's fault that the hymns were allowed to die out without a profound struggle. And yet even these often worn-out songs deepened with new meaning and sincerity shorn of showmanship.

What Does Any of This Have to Do With Revelation?

Jesus called five of the Seven Churches of Asia to repent. But none did. There is a point of no return when even the masterful persuasion of Christ falls on deaf ears and fails to revive a corpse. But what of us? We might wonder which church of the seven describes the church today. The truth would be that all of them do: just as Laodicea is arguably the sum total of all the vices--the coldness, the compromise, the corruption, and the complacency--so is the true Bride of Christ the sum total of the virtues that still remained in these flawed churches but especially in Smyrna and Philadelphia. If we take a trip around the world, yes, we might see the ubiquitous influence of the metamodern megachurch creeping into the global church, but we more likely than not would find that most churches are small--in hiding and in homes--because there is no religious freedom where the church is thriving today.

No matter how dark the hour, we must remember that One Divine Moment is only one moment away. The moment we reach up to God, He will reach down all the rest of the way. And it is His grace that draws us to seek His Face. We are His workmanship, after all.