2000
I began my investigation on revival, fresh out of journalism college by visiting my local library at the start of the millennium. Before the days of google search graphs it was much harder to figure out how interested the general population was in Christianity. I took a... roundabout way and had no real intention of starting the story you are reading now.
How did I do it? In an act of sheer inspiration and journalistic laziness, I tried to find out just how many times a book on Jesus had been taken out of my local library over the years and if it was being taken out more regularly. Cutting edge journalism, I know. After I found that the Christian book and a book about Mohammed had been taken out more or less the same amount of times I suddenly realized that I was actually going to have to talk to people about all this if I wanted to get any further. Or, as my journalism tutor had told me... 'You can do the stuff but you need to dig more.'
Life gets in the way of these things. I took up a couple of jobs in newsrooms before moving to Birmingham and finding my feet. Mostly I forgot about the subject of revival. I went to church, but the subject rarely cropped up. Street preachers still didn't draw a crowd. Most people were just getting on with their lives after the Blair and Bush years. People were war-weary and already tired of all the terrorism restrictions following 9/11 - an event which changed the world.
It was actually 2003 before I returned to the story idea. On a whim, on a windy day, I decided to vox-pop a couple of people in Birmingham city centre. Two young Muslims seemed the place to start. Why not?
I asked Imran (19, a law student) if he had heard of the term revival before and he admitted that he hadn’t heard of it in a Christian context, but he understood the concept immediately from Islam. I went on to ask what he thought Christians were doing wrong.
“I don’t know,” he said, “What are they doing right?”
His friend Salik (20) elaborated...
“The Church is a lot emptier now than it used to be, I suppose with society changing and that. It’s just the future isn’t it? Everybody’s modern lifestyle. Religion doesn’t actually take part in that type of thing any more. Religion is kind of old school.”
When I asked him if there was a counterpart to the term revival in Islam he said,
“It is the fastest growing religion in the world. Is there a revival in my faith? Possibly. With Christianity though everyone is just classed as a Christian, they’re just, sort of, classed it. If you ask them, they say ‘Yes I am’. So I don’t think there will be revival from that because I don’t think anyone is too interested at the moment…with Christianity I don’t think there will be a revival for it.”
I said that a lot of Christians hope there will be a revival of Christianity in Britain and asked if he thought that hope was realistic.
“No I don’t think that’s realistic. Unless the religion changes for the times I don’t think there will be. If you want to become a Christian you’ve got to actually follow what’s stated in the books. But what people do in general... I wouldn’t exactly call it being a Christian – it’s just what they’ve been classed as. Being a Christian is doing the actions.”
I asked him what he thought Christians should be doing to bring about a revival. The wind rattled my notebook, perhaps warning me not to pursue the topic. Salik said,
“Christians need to actually have a point where they’re bringing in people rather than shoving it in your face constantly. They need to have gatherings, not just Sundays, they need to do more for the community and for the community to become interested in the Christianity part of it. I don’t think many Christians do that. And not just have big signs up saying ‘Jesus is coming back’, they should have more information provided and make it fun as well. I don’t think Christianity should be about money either, it has got to be something that everyone can relate to.”
These were the complaints which I was to hear again and again from people of all faiths and none. What struck me was that Salik was right about at least one thing - there was certainly little fun in Christianity at the time. There was definitely no fun in fundamentalism and the rest of the UK Christian community, Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, were at least perceived as being argumentative, joyless hypocrites who didn't practice what they preached. A view which would get worse over the years.
We were clearly doing something very wrong. Could there be no revival because of us? Was it our fault?
That was, and still is, one of the perspectives - that 'revival tarries' because we don't practice what we preach. We talk of love but don't show it. We don't give or pray as much as we should. And some so-called Christians have even abused the most vulnerable. How could God heal a country if this was the state of his followers? So that view took hold and a lot of Christians, unwilling to blame God, unwilling to blame the devil, unwilling to blame the government shrugged and said, 'It's our fault again isn't it?' It was certainly the view of the Muslims I spoke to that day.
Catch 22 - No revival, no change. No change, no revival.
Others had a different view...
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