Jay’s Blog – Gathering the Church

The cartoons, westerns, and TV shows of my youth all featured quicksand as a critical plot peril. The hero or heroine (is it even correct to say “heroine” anymore, or is everyone a “hero” now?) always somehow found their way into quicksand, so often that, in my childhood, I mistakenly believed quicksand to be a common, genuine danger that ordinary people like me needed to be constantly cognizant to avoid. Turns out it’s not really much of a thing, at least in the literal sense. But, while I’ve never actually seen literal quicksand, regardless of where you fall on the sociopolitical spectrum, it appears that the cognitive foundations we once believed so solid are sinking rapidly all around our feet.

This is likely the reason I found Gather25, which aired on Friday and Saturday last week, to be so profoundly inspiring. If you don’t know, Gather25 was a gathering of the global church coming together over a 25-hour period: worshipping, praying for revival, telling stories of God at work in the world, and sharing his Word. The vision of Jennie Allen, Gather25 featured major gatherings of Christians in the U.S., Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and South America. The most compelling message from this gathering, prevalent in all the stories told, is that God is in the process of bringing revival throughout the world.

I once considered revival something that happened years ago, long past my lifetime. “Revival” conjured images of the First and Second Great Awakenings, of the early days of America, of people like the Wesleys, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Whitefield, Charles Finney, and Henry Ward Beecher. Maybe even the Jesus Movement of the seventies. But not now. Revival has long since passed, I thought. We were living in the “dead ages,” the times when Christianity was in its waning phases, the “post-Christian” era. Revival didn’t happen here. Not now, in this era.

Until it did. The shocking thing about Gather25 (which you can watch on the Gather25 website if you missed it) was that God is bringing revival throughout the world, not just in isolated locations like Asbury College or even on other U.S. campuses. In places like Malaysia, thousands of people in remote villages are coming to know the Lord. In Nigeria, where more Christians are killed annually than in any other country, the church is growing like wildfire. In Asia, the church is growing in staggering numbers, by millions. And it doesn’t stop there.

Remember how dead the church was supposed to be in Western Europe? A generation ago, I had friends who were missionaries in Italy. These people worked all their lives to build relationships for the gospel—beautiful, faithful people—only to have a small handful of those they worked with (in the single digits) come to Christ. By contrast, from 2023 to 2024, France had a 30 percent increase in adult baptisms. Twelve thousand people were baptized in France last Easter alone. France’s recent “March for Jesus” at the Eiffel Tower drew 25,000 participants. A major secular magazine took a poll of Londoners three years ago and found that only 28 percent believed in God. This year, the same magazine took the same poll and found that it had climbed to 55 percent! The number of people in London who believe in God doubled in a three-year period! God is on the move in Western Europe.

This doesn’t include unbelievably challenging places like North Korea and Iran, where the Church is growing in greater numbers per capita than most other places in the world. Jesus doesn’t need people to spread the gospel there–he’s just appearing to people in dreams, telling them who he is, and sending them to his believers in those countries to find out more. This kind of miraculous moving of the Holy Spirit is responsible for 15,000 Christians in Afghanistan, flowering under the oppressive regime of the Taliban. It’s stunning to see what God is doing.

There may be more unreached people than ever, but there are more Christians than ever to share the gospel. And by 2033, experts predict that Bible translators, using AI, will have translated the Bible into all languages worldwide. That’s less than 10 years away! Remarkable! With advances in technology and transportation, God has given us the ability to take the gospel to everyone, everywhere in the world in a way that was never before possible. We’re able to hear stories of how God is working all over the world through the power of the same technology and to hear that revival is happening right now, right here and there, in your lifetime.

Among whom is it happening the most? Who are the people most affected by the gospel, most embracing of the lifesaving word of Jesus? Your kids. The worldwide revival the world is witnessing has a greater impact on Generation Z and the one following it than on any other. These are generations of great spiritual hunger, and God is meeting them in that need. This is an exciting, amazing time to be alive!

So, what can you and I do? First, we can pray that God will bring us a passion for revival. As I’ve heard stories like the ones I’m sharing with you in the past, I’ve had the same kind of reaction as when an acquaintance tells me his son is engaged—happy for him, but in a distant, disconnected sort of way. So, I get it. But as I heard story after story from Gather25, I spent the whole day weeping and rejoicing at God’s work. The difference is that the Holy Spirit softened my heart to the work God is doing around the world. There’s a big difference between caring that comes from simply being human and Christian, and caring that comes from a burden burned into our hearts by God. We have to ask for that, and he will give it. As followers of Jesus, don’t we want to love what God loves, to be passionate for what he cares about? Don’t we, as pastor Louie Giglio said in Romania last weekend, want to be asking the critical questions? Instead of asking, “What is God’s plan for my life?”, shouldn’t we be asking, “How can my life be surrendered to God’s plan?” to what he is doing in the world around me? Taking the focus off me and placing it upon God? That starts with prayer and surrendering our hearts to God.

Then, we can begin by praying for revival ourselves. Be diligent in prayer. Ask Jesus to bring revival to our school, our community, our country, and the world. I remember something else Giglio said–When you want to start praying for revival, you begin by drawing a circle, then kneeling within the circle, then praying for revival and repentance to begin with everyone within that circle. Revival starts with you and me. Repenting for our sin. We surrender our lives to the Lordship of Jesus, leaving no other competitors for our allegiance.

We know that revival always starts small, but God brings forth a flourishing harvest. We may think of revival as the Great Awakenings of the 18th century, but Oxford Pastor Stephen Foster reminded us that just before those great movements of the Spirit occurred, attendance at Easter services in England was measured in the single digits, and commentators were saying that the generation alive at the time would be the one in which Christianity died. The prospects for the faith looked much more dire than today, until John and Charles Wesley, and a group of others gathered on New Year’s Eve in 1739 and prayed for the Holy Spirit to act to save their country. And He did, and changed everything for England and America.

Finally, we want you and your kids to be a part of our community, and we want you to bring others here. The generations of teenagers and children in our school are experiencing God’s greatest work, and he is using you and me to equip them. It is a blessing and an honor to be training up the next generation of Christ’s church, this generation that will lead worldwide revival. God will grow our school and his church, and we want you and your kids to be a part of God’s great work here. We want you to tell others what God is doing here, and to bring them here so that they will know Jesus and be saved and equipped to be on God’s great mission for the gospel. Join us in being a part of God gathering his people together and sending them out to change the world.

Jay Ferguson, Ph.D., Head of School at Grace Community School, writes regularly on his blog, JaysBlog.org.