Sunday School | Feminism Today

Glad to be with you today. Before we jump into our final class of the spring, I wanted to introduce you to Brian and to Alan. I've been telling you for the last month or so that I will not be teaching this class during the months of June, July, and August. I'll resume it back up in September. In the meantime, we're going to have all kinds of different fun things going on, opportunities for you guys to come in and learn.

One of those is something that Brian we had Andy Fetzer last week talk about what he's going to be doing—a class walking through the Gospels in some special ways. Alan and Brian are also going to be teaching something this summer, and they're going to give you a quick synopsis of what their plans are. So Brian, what have you got?

Good morning. How is everybody this morning? Alright? Good. What a great response. So Beth and I are doing a class on spiritual rhythms, spiritual practices. Raise your hand if you have a normal rhythm that you do in the morning—some type of normal rhythm. Okay. That's good. Hopefully it's brushing your teeth, but that's between you and, well, you know. So raise your hand if you have some type of rhythm at night before you go to bed. That's pretty normal.

God designed us to have a spiritual rhythm in our life. If you have one in the morning, great. Have one at night, fantastic. You probably have one for your finances, maybe for your yard, maybe exercise. God designed us to have a spiritual rhythm in our life. And if you look at the saints of old for thousands of years, they have these certain spiritual practices, spiritual rhythms that they've done, that they've passed down through the centuries to us.

So we're going to spend the next six weeks when this new class starts, and Beth and I are going to do it together. She's just not here right now. We're going to look at what are the spiritual practices, the spiritual rhythms that the church has been doing for three thousand years. One, what are they? Why do we do them? Why do we need them? And then, how much grace there is in some of these practices, some of these rhythms?

Raise your hand if you say, "Man, it's hard to get in a spiritual rhythm in my life." Okay. The rest of you are lying and that's fine. I mean, you're not in the sanctuary, you're in the fellowship hall, you're off there. But it is difficult to get a spiritual rhythm. Why do I know? Because I've had many conversations with most of you about not being able to quite figure out how to get a spiritual thing going in your life. That's what we're going to talk about. So we'd love to have you. Beth and I have taught the class before, so we're excited to have you.

Super good. Thank you, Brian and Beth. Alan, what you got, Bubba?

Here's what I got. I'm kind of fascinated by the showdown in the desert between Christ and the devil. You know, it's like all of history kind of hung in the balance. And what the devil came with were lies and half truths, and what Christ came with was the truth and honesty. And so I think if we take Christ seriously and the writers of the New Testament seriously, we're just lies are the oxygen that we breathe.

We're going to look at what Christ has to say about the devil because Christ talked about the devil like he knew him, like they went back, and it's not good. And what did he say about the devil? Because he talked about the devil a lot. What does he say about how to counteract that? What are we supposed to do about it because we are supposed to do something about it? And what this looks like in the movies, because we're going to look at a few movie clips. Because I think we're being lied to a lot in movies, and we don't always realize it. And that's just fun examples of what Christ says we can do about it, so we breathe in fewer lies and we live fewer lies.

Sounds good. And that's going to be second half of the summer. Right? I believe so. So like Fetzer's going first half, Alan's going second half. Brian's doing both halves. There's going to be some options. We'll have some print resources on that. There's nothing next week because it's Memorial Day. These will all be in the classrooms off to the side. Small groups, smaller rooms, multiple offerings. We'll have written details on all that for you very soon.

Okay. Enough of that. You ready? This is the last thing. Here's what we want to do. If you were here last week, you saw we looked at we watched clips from the movie Barbie. Barbie has a variety of takes on it. I like it. I think it's an insightful movie. I think it's a helpful movie. I think there's some really important messages that it shares. We kind of unpacked that last week. If you missed it, you can hear the tape or watch some of the clips. That would be great.

Today, I want to finish this very short, very mini series on feminism. Some of you might remember that about twenty-five years ago, a woman named Christina Hoff Somers wrote a book entitled The War on Boys. Anybody remember that book? It was kind of a big deal when it came out. It was pretty influential, somewhat controversial. I also think it was right. That war is still ongoing, but there is another war that I want to talk about this morning, namely the war on girls.

And I think it has many fronts. I think in some ways, the war on girls is more insidious and in some ways more effective. It's in fact, it's so effective that it has recently—only recently—upended a very long standing reality in the church, which I think is shocking. I don't know if this is obvious to you or not, but if you were to go to a typical youth group, would you expect to find more girls or boys? Girls. Okay. If you were to drop by a campus ministry, go to a crew meeting or an InterVarsity meeting, more young men or more young women? Women. Okay. This is true. This has always been true. I've been in campus ministry and worked with these people my entire life. Every campus ministry has more women than men. More women go on summer mission. More women want to come on staff. It's always more women than men. And that's not necessarily a good thing, but that has been our reality for a very long time.

What is happening right now is that ratio is beginning to flip. And that's stunning. I came across an article by a man and a woman who wrote this essay in a substack that I was reading, and it talks about this change in demographics that was startling to me because the ratio of women to men, especially among the youth, is a very deeply entrenched reality. This is what they say in this article:

Over the last two decades, we have witnessed an explosion of religious disaffiliation. It was men more than women who were abandoning their faith commitments. And of course it is. That's just been the reality for quite some time. In fact, for older Americans who left their childhood religion, it included a greater share of men than women. In the baby boom generation, 57% of people who disaffiliated were men, while only 43% were women. Gen Z adults have seen this pattern flip. Fifty-four percent of Gen Z adults who left their formative religion are women, and 46% are men.

The data really shows this. They get younger as you go to the top. The baby boomers are the older people, Generation X is my generation, Millennials, and then Gen Z. And you can see that fifty-fifty line. It's always been majority men that were walking away from their faith upbringing, and now it's majority women. That's noteworthy—the thing is shifting.

If you're not clear on your generational breakdown, here's how that works. Right now, what we're calling Gen Z are the 12 to 27 year olds. Kids younger than that, we're just resetting the clock and rolling over to Gen Alpha. Like I said, I am Gen X. I was born in 1970. You can kind of find out where you're at.

So here's another way to look at it: Nearly four in ten Gen Z women are unaffiliated. Generation Z is the red one—men at 34% and for women at 39%. Somehow, the thing that the men have always been worse at than the women is beginning to shift. The women have not only caught up but are eclipsing and exceeding what the men have done.

Here's how the authors comment on this:

Even as the rates of religious disaffiliation have risen, conservative churches have been able to hold on to their members. But they're facing more of an uphill battle keeping this current generation of young women in the pews.

This is absolutely true. For a huge amount of people that have been walking away from the faith in which they were raised, it was in the more mainline and more liberal, theologically liberal churches. The more conservative evangelical churches have been far more successful in retaining people in faith communities. That kind of makes sense because in the more mainline, more liberal theological churches, they basically sold out on Christianity and it's not that compelling, it's not that interesting.

If you're going to believe these things that aren't really much of anything at all to believe in, just stay in bed. That's been happening. But what this is saying is now it's been eroding more and more into the evangelical, more theologically conservative, more Bible heterodox churches. That's now being eaten. And as that is being eaten, it's being more impacting young women than young men. Does this all make sense so far?

Now, as the authors go on to speculate on this, they kind of begin to offer some theories on why this would be. But I want to know—I'm curious, why do you think this might be? What would be happening in our broader culture? What's going on in the world that would cause this to impact more women than men and now eat more into the evangelical, biblically oriented churches?

Exploring Gender Roles in the Church

So there's a possibility here around the roles of men and women. There are a couple different perspectives on this. If you are more theologically liberal or more socially liberal, you might be more egalitarian—seeing that men and women are essentially interchangeable. In a conservative framework, that's going to be a harder fit.

The theory here is that if women perceive that in a Christian framework, some God-given role is subservient—if they have a lesser authority role—that's going to be unappealing and they're going to opt out of that setting.

Within Christianity, there are a couple different perspectives on this. We would call one egalitarian, which basically means equal—that men and women have equal authority and equal role. That men and women together with equality could lead a family, could lead a church. Then the alternative view is a complementarian role, where men and women have equal value but distinct roles. Particularly in the church, Christ has asked that men imitate Christ who loves and leads his bride, and women imitate the church who honors and respects and partners with Christ.

If that paradigm is unappealing to you, or even more stridently, if that paradigm in a church context where eldership—the primary leadership of a church—is reserved uniquely for men, if that feels like a glass ceiling you're going to hammer your head against, then maybe you're just going to opt out.

If you perceive that within a Christian context there is some diminishment of value because there is a distinction in role, then you may opt out. And we are seeing people make that exact choice.

The Agreeableness Factor

There's another theory worth considering around aggression and personality traits. Men do more extreme violence as part of humanity, so it might make sense that men are more likely to jump out of the church because that's a more drastic, dramatic thing to do, especially if your whole community is in a church. Whereas now, the more dramatic thing potentially could be to stay with the church since everyone is leaving—to be countercultural.

Women, on the other hand, might be more comfortable just going along with what everyone else is doing. That's fascinating, because if men are more comfortable being disagreeable, if men are more comfortable going rogue and being alternative to whatever the culture is, then in a time when it was rebellious to not go to church, that's how rebellion played itself out. But now going to church itself is countercultural.

Maybe that becomes more appealing. It's a fascinating idea.

I think that the key issues are biology and women's reproductive rights. One of the things is the split between egalitarianism and complementarianism. Another thing is the role of perspective on abortion. Here's what the research says: Since 2015, the number of young women who identify as liberal has rapidly increased, and they are unequivocally pro-choice. Fifty-four percent of young women believe that abortion should be available without any restriction in the 2022 General Social Survey. That's a rather extreme view to say there's absolutely no restrictions. A majority take what you might consider to be a very strong view. And so what are the numbers that take a softer but still pro-choice view? And if you perceive that this community here is a place that a pro-choice view or view in support of abortion is not going to be welcomed, then again, you might just say, well, I'm going to say I don't want that. I don't want to be part of this.

Michael makes a great point. Given the fact that you have three generations of men turning away from the church, could it be a trickle-down effect? These are the fathers of those young women. So the women are the ones that are turning away, but we still need to lay an awful lot of blame on the men. For as the father goes, so goes the family. What fathers have led in, I would suggest, poorly or at least very unfortunately—doesn't that trickle down to all of their children, including their sons and their daughters? I think there's something to that.

The Changed Role of Women in Society

Kelly Sue raises another important point. It's not just that women want to have a voice at the table, at our table. It is certainly the case that the number of women working full-time is dramatically higher than it was fifty years ago. Did your mom work when you were a kid? That world has changed.

If you want to see something fascinating, there's a website—WTFhappenedin1971.com, I think is the address. What happened in 1971 is that the cultural changes are significant. Very, very significant. And so one of the ways that has played out is not just that women want to have leadership or equal leadership, but the interests of women have changed dramatically.

Look at this data. Today's young adults are far less likely than young adults in the early nineties to be married or have kids. The green line is as of 2023. The yellow line is as of 1993. Thirty years ago, eighteen percent of people ages 18 to 24 were married. Now it's seven percent. That's dramatic.

Look at this one—the percentage of young adults with at least one child in the household. In 1993, sixty percent of people ages 30 to 34 had a kid. Today, twenty-seven percent of people ages 30 to 34 have a kid. That is a massive change. People's interest in number one, getting married, and number two, having children has fallen off a cliff. Isn't that startling?

This is from Pew, one of the most respected voices on these things. Even as young adults delay marriage and parenthood, most young adults who have never been married—sixty-nine percent—say they want to get married. But they want to get married, just not yet. And then a smaller share, fifty-one percent, say that they would like to have children someday among those who don't have children.

A smaller share, only 51% say that they want to have kids someday. That's very different. And then here's maybe most stunningly: young men are more likely than young women to say they want to have children. 57% of young men want to have children, and only 45% of young women want to have children. Isn't that stunning? Doesn't that all add up to a stunning picture? The world is changing. And in particular, women's perspectives on these things are changing much more quickly and in more impactful ways than the views of men.

You guys have done a fantastic job identifying two of the three big things. Those are the two that I thought you would get. The third one—anybody want to take a stab at what is the third thing they identified that might be making participation in a Christian community less attractive to women than in any prior generation?

Don, what you described is something that's happened over the course of the last two or three generations. So we have to look at things that have changed over the last two or three generations. Social media may give an advantage to one segment of the population than the other. It's certainly the case that you're going to have more women on Facebook, more women on Instagram, and there's going to be a disproportionate share there. You probably have, I would guess, more men on Twitter. I don't know if that's the case or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is the case. But certainly social contagions definitely spread faster among women via social media.

So what in particular is the social phenomena that's going on?

Zach, the ability that social media provides of sharing traumas and things that befall us, even in relationships. Yes, okay. So Zach's talking about social media. We're absolutely seeing social contagion spread. This is kind of the Abigail Shrier theory of transgenderism. Why is transgenderism doing to this generation, particularly of girls, what eating disorders did in a prior generation? Social media is a huge factor. But there's a big thing we could enable with just a handful of letters and you'd know what we were talking about. That was a clue.

LGBTQ. LGBTQ. Listen to this. This is going to be stunning, I think. This has coincided with the rise in LGBTQ identity among young women. Listen to this: nearly three in ten women under the age of 30 now identify as something other than straight. 30%. It may explain why more Americans cite this as a reason for leaving. A new PRRI poll found that sixty percent of young people who left their childhood religion said that negative treatment of gay and lesbian people was an important reason.

Now, there's a number of ways I've seen this study presented with different particulars, and it's hard to know what's ultimately true. My fellows—I spend all my time with these people—they would tell me that probably not permanent lesbianism, but rather experimental bisexuality absolutely is dominant on the college campus. Dominant.

So we've got three things going on: the egalitarian and complementarian debate, the pro-life and pro-choice debate, and LGBTQ issues have had such a massive impact on the whole culture, but in particular upon women, that it is causing our message and our community to be less appealing than it has ever been before. Is this making sense?

Al, what does the feminization of men have to do with it? Great question. How about the feminine—now, this article doesn't mention the feminization of men. That actually goes back to the first sentence of "The War on Boys." We have masculinity better known as toxic masculinity, right? So there's a sense of, what is masculinity? What is toxic? And there's such a thing as toxic masculinity, but it's not all masculinity. How does all those things impact everything? I'm not sure how that lands in all of this, but there are nuances and things that we really have to think well about.

Are the women trying to fill the role that men should have filled? Yeah, so certainly, I would say without the LGBTQ culture, you see women stepping into leadership where men have abdicated leadership. Way more children are raised by single moms than by single dads, which clearly goes back to what was the Dan Quayle argument about Murphy Brown? And there was this sense that these single moms at that moment were feeling attacked.

And the answer was like, how do you get to be a single mom? It's because the dude took off. Right? And so there's lots of places where I think women are stepping into roles that perhaps should be filled by men. But whose fault is that? Right? So there's again, there's lots of complexity, lots of things we want to look at with this.

Okay. Couple more thoughts. I know there's a million ideas and I got a few more things I want to share with you. I think what this has to do with is this confusion around identity. There is not a role model with these changing cultures. Like, I'm a full time working mom. Right? And where is the role model to say, "This is a faithful woman who can have strong male characteristics—drive, logical, analytical, direct." And so if those are the strong male characteristics that have always been perceived to be male characteristics, and yet in the world that I have grown up in, I have to adopt those to be successful in business—how can that work? What is the role model picture to be a woman that has those characteristics and still be feminine and still be faithful? Yes.

Okay, Bianca. Missing that role model piece because of conversations I've had with my daughter. She's like, "Well, I have a protective nature." That doesn't mean that just because you have a protective nature over a friend of yours that's a girl, that doesn't mean you have romantic tendencies towards her. It just means you have a characteristic that women have—you're protective. But that's not shown in the world as the old narrative of a mom that's at home and takes care of the family. Yes. The new narrative of who we are today in today's culture. So it's very hard for young women to say, "I can have these male characteristics and it's not romantic. Right. It's just that."

That's partially why they flip flop. They're like, "Well, I have these tendencies, so I must be wanting a woman by my side as a romantic partner because I have these male characteristics. No. You're just a woman that's been designed by God with unique strengths that can now be still faithful and walk in the world as a woman and have male strengths." You see why? For sure.

Don't understand that the strength that they have in them is in the woman, the female characteristic. They only perceive it from generations past—that's male. Yes.

Okay. Now I've got to try to recreate that for these people in the back. So bear with me here. Okay. So Bianca is observing that we lack in our culture, perhaps, role models for women to say, "This is how I'm built, this is how I'm wired. How do I live this out in a way that honors femininity, that honors who I am, that doesn't get confused into—if you have anything that has ever been characterized stereotypically male, well, that must mean you're transgender, or that must mean you're lesbian, or that must mean you're this." No, no, no. There's a breadth and diversity of how a woman can reasonably and appropriately and righteously behave that may not fit the exact June Cleaver model that somebody got stuck on.

But how do we do that? How do we model for them biblical femininity in its many facets? And if we're failing to do that, then maybe we shouldn't be that surprised if they are misunderstanding themselves. Was that a fair recap? Is that okay?

Alright. Now Bianca's beginning to move us into like, "Okay, what do we do? What's the solution?" And today's not so much about a solution. Although I have a little bit of thoughts I want to share with you. We've only got a couple minutes. I want to share with you what the authors say at the conclusion of their article, and then a response to that conclusion, and then an alternative response.

The Church's Stewardship

So a couple of things we still have to do. Here is how the authors respond to what I would say are genuinely very serious headwinds. Every generation of the church has to think, "How do I represent the beauty, the splendor, the majesty of Christ, not to that generation, but to this one." This is our stewardship. How do we love and persuade and welcome? How do we frame the gospel so that people can see how beautiful Jesus is, how deeply he meets their needs? And how do we do that without capitulating? How do we courageously uphold what he has revealed? How do we live out the way that he wants us to? Right?

And every generation, every single generation, has to struggle through this, including ours right now. I think what might be unique right now is that a generation is about a three year window now. I mean, it just changes and it changes and it changes and it changes. And we have to be agile. Christians, I think, have been fighting the twenty-year-ago battle. We tend to be late to the party. Right? So we've got to be a little more fleet.

But here's what the author said. They say, "It's a man and a woman. None of this is good news for America's places of worship."

Many of these young women are gone for good. Studies consistently show that people who leave religion rarely come back even if they held on to some of their formative beliefs and practices. The decline in religious participation and membership has provoked a good deal of concern and consternation. But these latest trends represent a four alarm warning. Here's the last sentence of the entire article: "I'm not sure there will be any answer."

Now, a couple of thoughts. First of all, the conclusion begins, "none of this is good news for America's places of worship." To which I say, who cares about that? It's not about America's places of worship. That's a very selfish framing. Hey, our attendance is going to drop, our income is going to drop—so what about that? We don't exist for ourselves. We exist for the world. Right? We are blessed by God to be a community. We should be asking the question: none of this is good for us because it's not about us. None of this is good for them. How do we love them and serve them and think well about how to persuade and welcome?

Nevertheless, here's my friend's reply to this. I sent this to a friend who I love and just admire so much, and he basically shrugged at the whole thing. And then he said this: "Well, I'm worried and I was already worried. I'm just not more worried than I was."

What did add to my worries was the Substack author's conclusion: "I'm not sure there will be any answer." Maybe he meant, "I'm not sure the churches in their current state will be able to muster an answer." I hope so. But if he meant, "I'm not sure that there is a way to respond to this trend that will reverse it," then that is garbage. The answer is the Gospel. It's love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Any answer other than that is why churches are faltering in the first place, because men don't believe that it's what Christ did and is doing that transforms. Rather, they think it's something that they did or didn't do. Yes, we must participate, but it is and ever only will be divine grace that will convert the hearts of men. All other so-called methods and remedies be damned.

No answer? No answer because of a little report? I'm reminded of a recent op-ed in Touchstone magazine, "The Fall of Rome." The author basically said, "All is lost." No. No, it's not. Christians need to wake up. This isn't even the end of the beginning. These people have not begun to take full measure of how much can be lost.

So then, we are like oarsmen in a galley headed into battle, and the sail is shot away, and the boat is on fire, and we are wounded, and there is water pouring in, and we are shouting, "Shouldn't we be doing something else? Something to win? What are we supposed to do?" And the captain answers: "What do you know of victory in war? You, the chief aide to the enemy. You, whom I have snatched repeatedly from his maw. Row your oar. Drown in service of my glory. Trust the king. The victory is mine."

That's his response to this article. He goes to your church. He's currently reading a book called Dynamics of Spiritual Life by Richard Lovelace. Tim Keller would put it in the top two—the two books that he would recommend that any pastor would read to understand what is your job as the man in charge of a church in any given community. Dynamics of Spiritual Life is written in the seventies. It's fantastic, and it's essentially a study of revival. It explores the question: How does God bring renewal?

I want you to hear this. This is Lovelace's description of the goal:

True spirituality is not superhuman religiosity. It is simply true humanity released from the bondage of sin and renewed by the Holy Spirit. This is given to us as we grasp by faith the full content of Christ's redemptive work—freedom from the guilt and power of sin and newness of life through the indwelling and outpouring of his spirit.

That's it. That's the entire game. That is what we do. That is what we do in every generation, in every culture, under every unique set of difficult circumstances. This is who we are. This is what we do.

And then Lovelace goes on to describe how it comes about. Right? How does this work itself out in human history? How will it work itself out in this time, in this place, right now? Here's what he says. He's talking about Jonathan Edwards:

Revival, in Jonathan Edwards' understanding, is not a special season of extraordinary religious excitement as in many forms of later American revivalism. Rather, it is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit which restores the people of God to normal spiritual life after a period of corporate declension.

Periods of spiritual decline occur in history because of the gravity of indwelling sin. Because the gravity of indwelling sin keeps pulling believers first into formal religion and then into open apostasy.

Periods of awakening alternate with these as God graciously breathes new life into his people. You guys, this right there, always and only is what brings change. Our task right here, right now, whatever the culture offers up on the plate, is to consider how do we faithfully live this, and how do we graciously offer it to these dear women whom Satan would love to keep as far from Jesus as possible. Our great hope at all times is renewal by the Holy Spirit.

It starts with me. You can fill that in. It starts with you. It starts with you. It starts with you. You alone in your personal time with the Lord. You gathering with a group of friends. You confessing your sins. You spending time in the word. You making the decision to be a man or a woman of prayer. You calling others to join you to seek his face, to humble yourself, what happens is somebody, somewhere, is serious enough to make him their increasing priority, and then it spills from them to a small group, then it floods the church, and then it spills outside of the sanctuary into the streets, and God renews his people. Literally, this is all that ever happens. This is how the game is played.

As I'm reading through this book right now, and I really encourage you to pick it up, Richard Lovelace—it's a tome, like 500 pages long, a big book—he's walking through the history of the revivals. The thing that's so stunning to me is this line that has gripped me over and over again throughout this book.

Listen to this: "Generation by generation by generation." The beginnings of this awakening can be traced to a decade of the seventeen twenties, a time when the interests of Puritanism had reached a low point both in England and America after decades of steady decline. In America, Christians had been praying since the late seventeenth century for an effusion of the Holy Spirit on the rising generations of their listless and unconverted children.

Further on, he says: "The generation gap between a powerless orthodoxy and its apostate children was reversed in 1737 as the outpouring of the Holy Spirit began to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of their children to their fathers." Edwards describes the ensuing revival in his faithful narrative, A Surprising Work of God.

Come forward another generation. He says: "The dynamic of prayerful concern for God's kingdom, which would characterize the earlier evangelicals, was replaced by religious forms and moralism camouflaging their ultimate concern for the feathering of their own nests rather than for the enjoyment of God and the advancement of his glory."

Can you imagine a bunch of Christians just wanting to collect their money and not be concerned with the purposes of God? What ends up happening is evangelicals were not reproducing themselves in sufficient strength and their children were deserting them for seemingly more plausible theologies.

And then finally, in the nineteen sixties, as in the period just before the second awakening, Americans felt themselves threatened by foreign currents of revolution lapping at their doors and also by the barbarous frontier wildly mutating youth culture. Christian families everywhere agonized as they saw their children ripped away by the gravitational field of a subversive Sodom developing within the American culture.

We are not the first generation of Christians to be concerned that our children were falling away. It's happened over and over and over again. But eventually, it gets so bad that you abandon all hope and whatever strategies you've employed, and you spend more time on your knees crying out for the spirit of God to do what he and only he can do. And when there are enough of us doing that, it seems that the Holy Spirit is pleased to come in power and to flood the world. He's done it over and over and over again.

But we are overdue. We're overdue. So will it happen on our watch? Will we be the ones that say, "Lord, I will seek your face"? And if it never works, maybe I'll be laying the foundation for what you're going to do in eighty years when I'm gone. But I will give my life to seeking you and begging the Spirit to come into our newest church. That is what works, whatever the particulars are. Make sense?

May God be pleased to raise up in this body a group that will seek his face, cry out for revival, and maybe even some of us that get to watch it when it happens.

Lord Jesus, we love you. We honor you. We need you. We need you now more than ever. Would you come? We are overdue.

Holy Spirit, come. Flood us. Rip away from us all these petty things that please us, and let us be malcontented to not spend time in your presence, time in your word, in personal evangelism, confessing sin.

Would you come? Would you come in power even now on Pentecost?

We love you. Amen.