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Showing posts with the label revivalism

Do you have revival amnesia?

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Revival tourism is a thing. Scenes of revival receive a constant stream of visitors. People want to step into the pulpit in Sandfields, South Wales, where Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones exercised a powerful ministry that ushered in revival to that blighted working-class community. In Dundee, Scotland, the grave of Robert Murray M’Cheyne beside St. Peter’s Church has been a veritable pilgrimage destination for hundreds if not thousands of people over the years. There is an irony in that man who lived by the maxim that they would only give the glory to another bask in unwished-for, postmortem glory. Revival is also an obsession with some. There are conferences and ministries dedicated to the celebration of past revivals. Now, it is a good thing to think of days of old. In an age of chronological snobbery, we need more reflection on past events rather than less. A walk to the Northampton, Mass., of Jonathan Edwards in the 1740s, would take us to the rarefied atmosphere where God wa...