The church is to make Jesus visible in and to the world.

Wilt thou not revive us again that thy people may rejoice in thee.—Psalm 85:6 KJV

As we get older, relationships need to be renewed. Just so in our experience of God we need the renewal of our love and joy in God’s grace. I find a danger of becoming routine, even becoming presumptuous in taking God for granted in life experience. The dynamic of radiant fellowship needs to be rekindled by the Spirit, and in writing this call I am affirming that it should begin with me. My friend Bishop Lloyd Weaver and I have covenanted together to pray for revival.

We Mennonites have a lot of great values incorporated in our concept of discipleship, but the danger is that we focus on those values rather than on the centrality of Jesus. Just as nonconformity became central in the past, ethical concerns become central today. With this we need to reaffirm this as a nonconformity that is larger than a few symbols.

Our witness is that one cannot be a disciple of Jesus and ignore his call to walk in holiness, in peace and in reconciliation. We need to be reminded that “he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:14). We also need to witness to the larger church that to walk with him is to walk in his peace. It is this common faith commitment to Jesus that makes us one, walking together in a ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:20). As our Anabaptist forebears discovered, Christian experience is relational, “not sacramental or theological but existential” (Robert Friedman), and this relational center is our focus.

Revival is not simply stirring emotions or a renewal of pietistic feelings but should be a call to a renewed holistic identification with Jesus as Lord, a renewed sense of personal relationship with him with a deep sense of the mutual openness of love. This is personal, yes, but not private. When we open our lives to Jesus we open them to all that Jesus is doing in our neighbor, our brothers and sisters, and this allows the Spirit to quicken a fellowship of grace as a “community in the Spirit.” This is a quality community created by the Spirit and not a mere social form of ethnicity or religious demands. Such a community will open itself to people who are different from us but who share the same commitment to Jesus.

In our day, the confrontation between various religions is a challenge for the Christian church to be clear about what it means for us to confess Jesus as Lord and Savior. Unfortunately, Christendom is so divided as to fail to give a clear witness of a common commitment to Jesus. We tend to elevate our various interpretations, and in so doing we minimize the quest to understand Jesus better.

One has said that in the Christian church we have dogma, doctrines and applications. Dogma is the universal expression of Jesus as Son of God, Savior (1 Corinthians 15:3-5), doctrines are the various interpretations of the dogma, and these interpretations account for denominations, and applications are the attempts of various groups to relate their faith to life practice. The danger is that groups elevate application to the level of dogma and in doing so eclipse the gospel by patterns of religious order and fail to witness to the person of Jesus. We should join Paul when he writes, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14).

The revival we need is a renewal of our faith commitment to Jesus and a celebration of his “finished work” in reconciling us to the Father. This renewal will be a spirit of rejoicing in the assurance of our salvation, that we are given a new birth “into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God” (1 Peter 1:3-5a).

Such joy will be contagious, and such common focus on Jesus will be an enriched community of the Spirit that reaches out to those around us. And such vitality in our commitment to Jesus will call the next generation to a meaningful faith and not merely to a religious tradition. Revival is a firsthand experience of relationship with the Lord.

Revival calls for a repentant spirit, repentance from sin as perversions of the good but above all repentance for failing to engage the fullness of Christ. Revival calls for a new obedience to the Word of God, and this means a renewed focus on biblical preaching and not simply essays on the psychology of religion and life. Revival calls for an authentic openness to the Spirit and to God’s work of disclosing Christ within and through us. And a genuine revival will express a spirit of love for others and be a witness to the assurance of his grace.

As Billy Graham commented, churches have become so institutional and defensive of their own programs that it has now become difficult to have a communitywide mission. I have found this to be the case and pray that we may become more interested in a strategy of communication that engages the larger community.

While much can be done by the congregation and by one-on-one sharing, I have found that often people not engaged in the church will come to a communitywide meeting either by the common interest or sometimes even because they can maintain a degree of anonymity while hearing the gospel. A genuine revival in a congregation can become contagious and spill over to friends and neighbors through the spirit of the members.

These are a few thoughts on revival, but the reality is more than I can verbalize. I have been blessed often by revival meetings, but at my age I must ask whether these memories mean that such an experience is a piety of the past more than a fresh moving of the Spirit. We don’t work up a revival; we rather pray it down. It is a gift of God, a sovereign moving of God’s Spirit.

I pray for such a revival and that it come in some contemporary form that honors Jesus, and I call on the extended membership of the church to join me. We together are God’s church, the body of Christ, and as such we are made alive in the Spirit.

Remember, just as the body makes one personality visible, so the church as the body of Christ means that we make Jesus visible in and to the world.

Myron S. Augsburger is an evangelist in Harrisonburg, Va.