Tracking Revitalization in the Global Church
Dr. Steve O’Malley
John T. Seamands Professor of Methodist Holiness History
For the past four years, the Center for the Study of World Christian Revitalization Movements at Asbury Seminary has been tracking the course of where and how revival and movements of Christian Revitalization have been occurring and making significant human impact in various locations around the globe. The record of this research has recently been published in a volume with 22 contributors representing the global Church. The initial purpose of its publication is to inform the discussion at the forthcoming Toronto consultation of the Center, where its insights will be tested in light of a group of diverse case studies from strategic revitalization ministries now developing in that city.
This project developed from an effort to restart and extend the work of the former Wesleyan Holiness Studies Center that worked with the holiness archives of Asbury Seminary. We observed that renewal movements of all kinds have proliferated in recent years across the global Church, but little attention was being given to understanding and assessing what was authentic and fruitful for the Kingdom among these disparate movements. We are speaking of initiatives and movements found within and without the major expressions of the Christian tradition throughout the world, and particularly in the Global South and East. This project has been an interdisciplinary effort, bringing together students and faculty from a wide spectrum of academic fields comprising the Seminary curriculum.
Writing from the perspective of a church historian, I have been challenged by this project to rethink the ways in which movements of revitalization have informed the development of Christianity over the ages, and particularly in the formation of the Wesleyan movement. Our approaching consultation at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto will feature a group of case studies concerning revival now occurring within different ethnic communities within a city that is the most ethnically diverse metropolis on our continent. A common thread in each of these revivals and movements of revitalization is the fact that each is concerned with reaching a particular demographic group that has come to Toronto representing a diaspora from one or more nations in the Global South and East.
This “diasporic” feature appears as a prominent feature of 21st century movements of revitalization within global Christianity. It is known that there are currently over 200,000,000 persons uprooted from their national homelands and living as transnational persons in diaspora in all parts of the world. However, a review of the narrative makes clear that movements of diaspora lay behind many of the major movements of spiritual awakening in the history of Christianity. Further, the Wesleyan movement was no exception to that feature, and in fact, exemplified it in an extraordinary manner. The following discussion, reflecting recent research I have undertaken on this subject, will serve to substantiate that observation.
First, if we consider the English text of the spiritual homilies of the pseudo-Macarius, which appeared concurrently with their German translation by the radical Pietist Gottfried Arnold, it is noteworthy that its intended audience included persons uprooted from traditional social structures. Its appeal was strong among those for whom the radical Pietists wrote: those persons dislocated by the massive social destruction that had wracked central Europe in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, including the incursions of Louis XIV and the dislocation of Protestants from the Hapsburg lands. To expellees on the continent, swept up in the revivals birthed by radical preachers like von Hochanau and Tersteegen, the homilies offered evidence that an unpartisan (or unconfessonal) true Christianity existed from apostolic times. In contrast to the confessional strife that had embroiled European Christendom on the Continent, the Marcarian text exhibited the path for true believers to traverse the dominion of evil and its ultimate expulsion from the heart by the Holy Spirit, creating “a perfect man in God and an heir and son.”
Wesley included the homilies in his Christian library, helping this work to become an influential model for the eremitic life within Protestantism. Early converts to Methodism included those dislocated from rural to urban settings as a consequence of the industrial revolution in England. For Fletcher—whose position Wesley would come to embrace—the pneumatology of the homilies provided an apostolic grounding for the expectation of an inbreaking dispensation of the Spirit, consistent with Wesley’s expectation for the “General Spread of the Gospel” in his time.
Second, John Wesley’s encounters with Christian David at Herrnhut, in the autumn of 1738, after his conversion at Aldersgate, placed him in touch with a revival that resulted from movements of diaspora among people groups in eastern Europe. David helped Zinzendorf form this proto-Moravian settlement near Berthelsdorf and he would become the chief itinerant evangelist for the Moravians in Europe and North America. Wesley reports hearing David preach three times on the subject of those who were weak in the faith, likening that condition to that of the disciples between our Lord’s crucifixion and the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. In extensive conversation with the newly converted Wesley on August 10, 1738, David related how he had first experienced the power of the gospel of Christ while in Moravia, moving him from “being justified” to having the “full assurance of faith.” This conversation was acknowledged by Wesley as foundational to his grasp of this basic tenet of Wesleyan soteriology.
Christian David traced this awareness to a time of illness, when he was visited by Johann Schwedler, the noted Lutheran pastor and hymnwriter from Niederwiesa, in Upper Silesia. This locale was then being swept by revival among Silesian Protestant refugees fleeing imperial persecution in their homeland. David thereafter heard the preaching of men sent to Moravia by the leading pastor from the Silesian revival, Johann David Steinmetz, then serving the largest church of refugees of that day. His “Jesus Church” was located in Teschen, Silesia (now in Poland), which was a neighboring province of Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic).
The Jesus Church at Teschen was a megachurch of some 40,000 Czech, Slovakian, Polish and German refugees fleeing political and military advances directed against Protestants of that province. David made his way from Moravia to meet with Steinmetz at Teschen, whose soteriology is enshrined in a volume of addresses on The Sealing of Believers with the Holy Spirit, in Some Revitalizing Pentecost Meetings Based on Ephesians 4:30 (1720). Under the guidance of this “awakened” Lutheran pastor, David, of Roman Catholic origin, was confirmed in this new faith, conveyed now as the whole economy of God, from justification to the sealing of the Spirit in entire sanctification. It was this “revitalized” version of Lutheran soteriology that David set forth to the inquiring Wesley. These discoveries help to illumine the observation of the German Methodist scholar Martin Schmidt that John Wesley “owed more to David than to anyone, Peter Böhler only excepted,” in his faith formation.
Among the observations that may be drawn from this encounter for the subsequent Methodist movement is that the link between revitalization and diasapora is of paramount importance to understanding the genesis of Methodism, as well as other modern movements of awakening in global Christianity. These lines of influence suggest the critical role of indigenous revival movements among persons “scattered” by human oppression to “gather”—to be reconstituted from a condition of dispersion across national boundaries to a realization of the promise of full salvation in Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit. Wesley’s journal attests that it was this diasporic-driven message of Christian revitalization that exercised the heart and mind of the father of Methodism in his formative years. It is also the hope of the Center for the Study of World Christian Revitalization that such streams of deeper Christian revitalization may be discovered to be at work among the diaspora movements that we will encounter in Toronto. Why this hope? It is because it is in diaspora, the scattering of people groups, that God has been working to reach and to revitalize the people of God, from Genesis to the present day.
