Noise or Stillness?

What comes to your mind when you imagine the sound of a revival of religion? For many, it’s the noise of impassioned preaching, the sobs of the repentant, or even the convulsions of those under a deep conviction of sin.

While it’s true that these kinds of loud stirrings have happened during America’s revivals, noise is not an indispensable feature of a true revival.

This struck me in a fresh way when reading Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism 1750-1858 by Iain Murray. One of Murray’s aims throughout this work is to distinguish between revivals and revivalism. Revivals are seasons when God’s Spirit works through the ordinary means of grace with unusually swift and widespread effect. To quote Jonathan Edwards, “The work of God is carried on with greater speed and swiftness, and there are often instances of sudden conversions at such a time.” Revivalism, on the other hand, leverages psychological and social pressures to produce what looks like, on the surface, to be a revival. Along the way, Murray quotes from numerous eyewitness accounts, giving an up-close view of what it was like to be present during these times of unusual revitalization.

One recurring theme of these eyewitnesses was the solemn stillness that pervaded the church and college gatherings during the Second Great Awakening (roughly 1795 to 1835).*

Reporting on events in West Simsbury, Connecticut in 1798-9, pastor Jeremiah Halleck writes:

The solemnity of this season cannot be communicated. It can only be known by experience . . . The work was by no means noisy, but rational, deep, and still. . . . The first you would know of persons under awakening was, that they would be at all the religious meetings, and manifest a silent and eager attention.

In a similar vein, another pastor (this one in Rupert, Vermont) recalls:

No emotions more violent than the shedding of tears, and no appearance of a wildness and disorder occurred. Nothing appeared but a silent, fixed attention, and profound solemnity, the most resembling my idea of the day of judgment of any scene I ever witnessed.

Then, reporting on the situation at Farmington, Connecticut, Dr. Noah Porter writes:

There was no commotion; but a stillness, in our very streets; a serenity in the aspect of the pious; and a solemnity apparent in almost all, which forcibly impressed us with the convection, that, in very deed, God was in this place.

This profound, mouth-stopping, awareness of God’s presence spread to colleges as well. A young student at Amherst College in Massachusetts recalls his “wicked habit” of sleeping through sermons. One Sunday, he was in the middle of his regular Sunday afternoon coma, completely unaware, as usual, of the preacher’s theme or text. However, near the end of the sermon, he woke up.

I seemed to be awakened by a silence, which pervaded the room; a deep and solemn attention which seems to spread over an assembly when all are completely engrossed in some absorbing theme.

The student went on to describe the life-changing impact that sermon had on his life.

Many of us carried away the arrow in our hearts. The gayest and the hardiest trembled at the manifest approach of a sublime and unwonted [unusual] influence . . . which forcibly impressed us with the conviction, that, in very deed, God was in this place.

Murray adds several other testimonies corroborating this solemn stillness, but the point is sufficiently made: sometimes a feature of God’s unusual work of revival is a heightened awareness of his presence, leading to a solemn, though intense, stillness.

A Quiet Revival Today?

Yesterday, in a texting conversation, a pastor friend of mine in New Hampshire told me that he believes we are experiencing a “quiet revival.” By “quiet” he meant not the absence of noise, but the absence of publicity. It’s happening, but it’s not hitting the headlines. I hope this is the case, and I’ve seen some evidence of this as well.

But I also think that a “quiet revival” could be “quiet” in the way described above—an intense awareness of God’s presence that produces less noise and more awe. We live in a distraction-saturated world, where noise has crowded out our ability to think, to wonder, to “be still and know” that he is God. It’s not a drowsy quietness that we need, but an awakening that produces a deep stillness of soul that comes from knowing God through his Son Jesus Christ (Matthew 11:27-28).

I have a faith-filled optimism that such an awakening can happen. And if it does, it will not be the result of anyone’s calculated efforts to produce it; rather, it will be God’s sovereign choice to bless the ordinary means of grace: the teaching of the Bible, the plain preaching of the gospel, the faithful observance of the ordinances, and prayer.

I’ll offer a final testimony about the solemn awareness of God’s presence during the Second Great Awakening. This one comes from Charles Pettit McIlvaine, who was a student at Princeton College in 1815. He recalls that

it was quiet, unexcited, and entirely free from all devices or means beyond the few and simple which God has appointed, namely, “prayer and the ministry of the word.” In that precious season of the power of God, my religious life began. I had heard before; I began then to know.”

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*All quotations are taken from Iain Murray, Revival and Revivalism, 138-41.
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