Is it because we are too lazy to get off our own butts?

Snappy headline, huh!?

Belfast-born Aussie Andrew Hamilton writes about our supposed ‘craving’ for a revival on his Backyard Missionary Blog...

I began pondering why we crave this revival experience and I wonder if it because we are too lazy to get off our own butts and get involved with the people in the communities we live in and do the hard yards of making connections, knowing that many of them will never lead to a person coming to faith? I wonder if we don’t just want God to do the ‘hard work’ of mission (we will hold prayer meetings – until we get bored because nothing has happened) and then when he has done his thing people will flock to our churches to join us… and become like us… and we won’t have to change one bit… we won’t have to experience any discomfort at all. Of course we only want ‘appropriate’ people to join our churches so it would need to be a selective revival of the middle classes.

Ouch. That hurts.

I am tired of this revival talk and these false prophets, because in the 30 years I have been old enough to understand the concept I have actually observed the church (overall) in decline. And I haven’t seen any of the revivals that have been predicted ever actually happen.

True for Australia, True for Britain. True (despite a lot of shouting and hot air) for the USA.

I have recently been wondering, what if our generation’s contribution will simply be that of ‘holding our ground’?

Now that’s an interesting idea. But would we book a speaker, hand over our cash and help to fund his or her international travels if THAT was the message they were teaching. Probably not. That’s not so much having our ears tickled – more like having our heads patted.

Anyway, you can read the rest of Andrew’s blog post here – don’t miss the excellent discussion amongst the commenters.