“What’s your take on the ‘quiet revival’?” I am asked repeatedly in person and online. The Quiet Revival Report itself has been withdrawn; so are there really more young people becoming Christians and joining churches, and if so in what numbers? What will the revised survey later this year reveal? I am no statistician, so instead of number-crunching, here are my observations of four unhelpful – then four helpful – responses to the debate and the contested data.
Four unhelpful responses:
1. Over-reliance on statistics. Statistics are very interesting and can be encouraging or discouraging, but our faith is not in them. The gospel isn’t more true if millions believe it, or if we think we are the only one left. Likewise, the gospel of Christ isn’t validated by numbers, but by His resurrection from the dead. Our faith is only ever in Jesus – not in results.
2. Cynicism. Some Christians have become professional cynics and seem to want to pour scorn on any evidence of God at work today. Their operating assumption is that any church reporting growth must be attracting crowds by appealing to their flesh and entertaining them – and that it can’t be a genuine work of God. This is a lack of faith in the power and goodness of God and saps away our confidence in both prayer and proclamation.
3. Triumphalism. At the other end of the spectrum are my more excitable Christian friends who are gleefully sharing reports and stats and seem to be celebrating like FA Cup winners lifting the trophy, when the match is far from over! It is singularly inappropriate to be triumphalist when the vast majority of our friends, neighbours, colleagues and contemporaries are far from God and beyond the reach of the gospel.
4. Hyper-Calvinism. Equally, the “God is sovereign, so it’s nothing to do with me” response is a travesty of Biblical teaching. We get our doctrine of the sovereignty of God mostly from the pen of the Apostle Paul who was also a fearless and relentless evangelist. If our lives don’t look like his, then maybe we haven’t understood his doctrine as he intended us to! Paul’s distress at Athenian idolatry and bold proclamation of the resurrection is a more appropriate response to our times.
Four helpful responses:
1. Invitation. The Quiet Revival Report claimed that one-in-three people would accept an invitation to a church event, service or evangelistic course. Problems with the data-set aside; suppose that figure is twice as optimistic as reality. That would mean one in six would come! So now is surely the time to go to the “highways and byways” and invite as many people as possible. Hand out flyers, post online, ask friends and neighbours to your Christianity Explored or Alpha, get the word out – (we can debate whether there is a quiet revival or not next year) because there is certainly a new quiet openness.
2. Talk about Jesus. People don’t want to hear about church, religion, institutions, events, or programmes. Get the memo: “Christendom is dead, but Jesus is alive!” As Christian people we need to talk about Jesus and the difference He makes to our lives. Telling stories of hope, forgiveness, repentance, and lives reborn is shooting at an open goal in this lost, lonely, broken and beleaguered culture.
3. Prayer. The jury might still be out on the statistics. However, evangelicals around the country are reporting that there is a new spiritual hunger in our land. Whatever else we do, now is surely the time to pray with a new urgency that the Lord would move in mercy and bring many to faith in Christ. Pray that the positive signs which the statisticians tell us are happening will not be an anomaly, or a blip in the graph, but just the beginning of God summoning this nation back to Himself.
4. Give. All this takes place in the context that many evangelistic agencies are facing funding shortfalls and need to increase their income to keep their existing front-line gospel workers in the field. We should be thinking about how we can grow the number of evangelists, missionaries and church-planters today, because the fields really are “white unto harvest”.
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This article was first published in Evangelicals Now. 3/5/26