Return to Red River

In the archives of the first year of this blog there is a post on "Monuments" in which I mention the Red River Meeting House, the site where the Second Great Awakening began in what was then the American West in 1800.  We had quit attending their annual commemorative event, in part for the reasons mentioned in that post, in part because we had moved farther away, and in part because of time pressures.

But this year my wife and I went back down, taking a weekend vacation after a year in which we've mostly been on the fast track.  It was restful (The grounds still seem a peaceful place; I've heard it is like that at Cane Ridge, where an even larger revival meeting took place the following year, but I've never been there).

The grounds looked much the same:  the gravestones in the cemetery are maybe in a little worse shape, the log replica "meeting house" still stands but needs work.  But the people who came had largely changed.  Two couples among the locals who put the event on were still there, but of the historical re-enactors who used to attend, only two of our old friends were there with us.  The historical camp was still about the same size, but with a whole new crew of people.  On the other hand, the modern camp was larger, and there were a lot of small children.

But the bigger change was in the attitude of those who were there.  I came away with the impression that these folks are no longer content with polishing the monument:  They have moved beyond that and are praying for the fire to fall again, not just in Logan County, Kentucky, but on the country as a whole.  And I am glad to see it.  The group included people from Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, and maybe some from farther away at times.  And a number of Christian groups were represented as well.

The culmination came on Saturday evening, at the end of the night's service.  The message was from one of the campers, not a professional preacher.  At the end there was an invitation to pray for the needs of some of the attendees.  This went on for a while (some in the area have been hard hit by the economic conditions the last few years).  Then it shifted into prayer for our country and for a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit--not just in this place, but all over our land.

There had been some recounting of the history of this place earlier in the evening.  People in the area back then had seen the need in their locality, and had made a covenant to pray at sunrise and sunset for a year for their neighborhood.  As it turned out, they prayed for three years.  And then, at a scheduled communion service, with no special emphasis and no big-name outside speaker brought in, the fire of revival fell.  And lives, and the region, were changed.  As the Book says, "This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes."

And historically, this is how revival happens.  Major outpourings are not led by popes, archbishops, and denominational executives.  They are sparked by little people that nobody had heard of before.  The "Big Men in the Brotherhood" are always so busy doing BMITB-type things that they don't respond when God wants to do something, so He uses nobodies who are available.  And when empowered by Him, they change the world, not because of who they are, but because of Who is with them.

There was some talk that Saturday night of "organizing" the feelings present, of making lists and signing papers, of "accountability" and so on, but it did not go far.  And I'm glad it didn't.  The important thing is not creating some kind of organization to pray for revival, but to just pray for revival!  It is good to know that there are others out there who also care and are praying; but trying to organize it will just turn into a substitute for praying.  We need real prayer and real revival, not some organizational substitute (remember, a substitute is something they try to give you in place of the real thing!).

So, I'm praying, and I know there are others doing so as well.  All who want to join in are welcome.  If anyone wants to tell us they're joining us in this, that's okay; if you pray without telling us, that's okay too; because the real point is the praying, not telling other people what we're doing.

Some Bitter Fruit

The issue has faded off the front pages and slogged into the courtrooms now--the Obama administration's attempt to force religious employers to pay for medical insurance for their employees that includes contraception and abortion coverage.  The only "religious exemption" to be allowed was for actual houses of worship themselves; if a religious group has hospitals, schools, universities or other charitable activities, they were to be outside the exemption.  There was a lot of uproar, and the spectacle of the Southern Baptist Convention siding with the Roman Catholic Church against the Federal Government.  The uproar has quieted down, but the lawsuits have been filed.  One small business even persuaded a judge to grant an injunction against the rule being applied to their operation--something that usually only happens if the judge thinks the plaintiff has a chance of winning his case.

But over time, this to-do reminded me of something I wrote almost exactly five years ago.  It started as a comment on my online friend Steve Sensenig's "Theological Musings" blog.  Steve thought enough of my comment to re-post it as a guest post.  I re-copied it to my own blog as well:  http://postmodernredneck.blogspot.com/2007/09/basic-question.html   For those who might want to see the original extensive discussion, it's here:  http://www.theologicalmusingsblog.com/2007/08/27/how-not-to-judge-someones-orthodoxy/

For those who would prefer the quick version, I was pointing out a dichotomy that has existed in Christianity for most of its history.  Is Christianity (a) a set of activities engaged in on Sunday morning, led by official staff with a set of tenets enforced by the staff, or it is (b) a way of living, 24/7/365, in relationship with God and with each other.  Some might say it is both, but I pointed out five years ago that it is not a stable symbiosis--over time, (a) crowds out (b).  In fact, thinking about it now, I would add that in times when (a) dominates, the church is dull, boring, and what we might call "dead"--as well as having problems with internal corruption (pastoral adultery scandals among the Pentacostals and charismatics, a la Bakker, Swaggert, et al., pedophilia scandals in the Roman Catholic church, financial scandals among the Eastern Orthodox--and that's just the modern stuff, history is full of it!).  And in times of renewal and revival, (b) comes to the fore:  people begin to focus on applying Christianity to their daily lives and to the society they live in.  The abolition of slavery in Great Britain and its possessions was one result of this; the growth of abolitionist sentiment in the United States was likewise a result of the early 19th century revivals, and the failure of those revivals to penetrate as far in the Deep South as they did in the North and Midwest was a major cause of the Civil War.  (At Red River Meeting House, the beginning of the Second Great Awakening and the Camp Meeting movement in 1800, attendees saw the Holy Spirit falling on blacks as well as whites and concluded that black people did have souls--contrary to what some southern preachers were teaching--and that slavery was wrong.  That area, on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, became an anti-slavery stronghold, and may well have been a factor in Kentucky not joining the Confederacy.  If that revival had spread farther south as well as to the north, the Civil War might have been avoidable.)

Back to the present day:  It came to me that the administration's mandate does make some sense if religion is limited to what you do inside a building on Sunday morning or some other specified time, and is not expected to have any real influence on what you do the rest of the week.  So it is a result of, a "fruit" to use a Biblical term, of the (a) view of Christianity.  But the mandate is a total rejection of (b), claiming to override any place for Christian principles in the workplace or the health insurance market.  So this mandate controversy is a debate over the real nature of Christianity, not just what some in the government think it is, but what it ought to be, and to some extent, who gets to decide?   The fate of real religious freedom in this country hangs in the balance.

Monuments

Some years ago I came up with what I call the "Monument Theory of Church History." It works like this: In every generation, God is doing something; people are drawn to it, and after some years, most sit down at that spot and build a monument to what God did. One result of this is that the landscape is littered with Christian monuments to God's past activity--Lutheran monuments, Presbyterian monuments, Methodist monuments, Christian Church/Church of Christ monuments (the one I grew up in), Pentacostal monuments...all over the map. Even the Jesus Movement of the early 1970s produced a few. The Vineyard churches grew out of that time, and while John Wimber, their most prominent leader, lived they stayed vital. But he died in 1997, and five or six years after that I began to see signs that the concrete was starting to set. (We spent about 10 years in Vineyard churches in Cincinnati and in Batesville, In.)

The trouble is, while people are building monuments, God moves on and does something else, usually in a different spot, with different leaders, different focus, different aspect of truth He wants to highlight. And I came to the conclusion a long time ago that I don't want to spend the rest of my life polishing some monument; I'd rather be part of what God is doing now. Yes, it is great that God did something in this spot maybe 20 years ago; but the monument that's been erected here, while very nice, is not Him--and I want to be where He is now.

There's a place in south-central Kentucky, about 10 miles or so from the Tennessee line, called Red River Meeting House. Around 1787 a log Presbyterian church was built there. The region was known as "Rogues' Harbor" for the lawlessness of its inhabitants (travelers often disappeared while passing through). After several years of prayer by the small group of faithful Christians in the area, a Communion service in 1800 set off a major revival, the first of the frontier camp meetings. A visiting clergyman hosted another event at his church at Cane Ridge in northern Kentucky, and what the historians call the Second Great Awakening was well under way (the first was in the mid-1700s, involving John Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and others.). "Rogues' Harbor" changed its character and lost the name, and became known for hospitality to strangers. It also became a center of anti-slavery activity--slave owners who had believed Negroes to be not fully human and without souls saw the Holy Spirit falling on whites and blacks alike and were convinced that they had been wrong about slavery.

The Cumberland Presbyterian Church, a small denomination that formed out of the camp meetings, still owns the property. The original log church was followed by several buildings (the original log building's site is now part of the cemetery). When the last of them was disintegrating in the 1950s, and the congregation no longer existed, a group of local people partnered with the Cumberland P.C. to preserve it as a historic site. A replica of the log church was built on part of the remaining open land (and replaced in the 1970s after vandals burned the first one). In October each year a weekend commorative gathering in honor of the original camp meeting is held by a mixed group of local people and historical reenactors. There is still a feeling of peace that hangs over the grounds.

We (me, my wife Miriam, and my younger son Caleb) were part of the commemorative gatherings for several years. Caleb and I were part of the impromptu band that played for the services, we camped with the reenactors, we enjoyed ourselves there. But there came a time when we concluded that it was time to put our energy into what God is doing now. It isn't that monuments are wrong; but sometimes a good thing crowds out better things. We need to learn from the past, but we must live in the present, and if possible build for the future.

I once read an interview with Carol Wimber, John Wimber's widow. She said he was never that worried about the future of the Vineyard, but that his hope was that their kids would find what God was doing next and go be part of it. I think he was right.