Willow!"I actually wonder if exhaustion from culture wars, purity codes and the idolatry of ideology on all sides have led these young people to seek revival in the simplicity of constant prayer and singing in the first place." https://open.substack.com/pub/thecorners/p/on-longing-and-the-asbury-revival
On longing and the Asbury Revival.
As I write this, I have a YouTube livestream open and playing in the background, listening to the singing in the chapel at Asbury University in Kentucky - where a regular chapel service that started 12 days ago has not yet ended. From everything I have seen, the “revival” is a quiet one - it’s mostly just singing led by college students - on simple acoustic guitar and piano. I cannot claim to understand it, all I know is that every time I have tuned in over the past few days, it has made me a little teary. Which surprises me. I have not always been prone to mixing sentimentality and religion. Irony and religion, fine, but this Gen Xer usually recoils from anything that smacks of sap. But here I am, longing to sing in that room with 1,000 other open-hearted people.