Is revival movement sweeping Poconos?
There’s a Christian revival movement apparently spreading in the Poconos.
That’s what I’m told by church ministers over the past few weeks and it’s been a learning experience.
“The revival movement is happening everywhere,” said Blaine Silfies, a preacher who is head of the Light on the Mountain Ministries that includes seven churches, including The Reformed Church of Bushkill as well as Silfies’ New Covenant World Outreach Church of Brodheadsville, Pocono Mountain Bible Fellowship of Mount Pocono, Mount Eaton Church of Saylorsburg, East Stroudsburg United Methodist Church, Salem United Church of Christ of Gilbert and North Winds Church of Stroudsburg.
“It’s going to happen in a big way shortly,” said Silfies. “You’ll see great power rise up in a lot of churches. As the revival happens, as it is starting to happen, we’ll see it more in the world. So many people are getting ‘saved’ in other countries that is not getting published in the media, which is absolutely disgusting,”
It might sound evangelical in tone, but Silfies said the revival movement is unrelated to that idea.
The issue came up after my family recently attended the “Light in the Park” event held at the West End Fairgrounds. In its fourth year , it was moved last year from Dansbury Park in East Stroudsburg. It offers free food, live “Christian music” entertainment and fun activities for kids from amusements to free pony rides.
What was interesting was the number of major companies that either donated or reduced prices significantly on items there. Herr’s gave bagged pretzels, Crayola donated boxes of crayons and many other materials for kids’ games, Pepsi left soda from the recently ended West End Fair. Other companies offered “good deals.”
But Silfies zeroed in on a bigger issue. “We ‘saved’ seven people that day,” said Silfies. “That’s what I was told but it might be more.”
What does that mean?
“They recognize Jesus Christ as their lord and savior,” said Silfies.
The Rev. Steve Sayer of the Reformed Church of Bushkill that participated in the event agreed with Silfies.
“A lot of churches are now beginning to realize that they can no longer be social clubs for the saints,” said Sayer, whose 120 to 150 congregants typifies assemblages of 100 to 150 in the other Light on the Mountain churches.
“They are starting to take the essential task of mission to our culture very seriously again. At the same time, I think people have started to realize they have missed out on the truth of Christ’s Good News. Secularism is starting to wear thin.
“All of that is a long way of saying, I believe we’re going to see a period of significant Christian revival in our country,” Sayer said. “I don’t know that it’s going to happen next year; it might be five years away, or 10. However, I think we’re already starting to see its beginnings in events like Light in the Park, and in the development of many new and different forms of the church: large, media-savvy, small-group-oriented churches across our country; small, intimate house churches; churches that are oriented toward twenty-somethings and have a much more mystical yet edgy feel. Something is starting to happen, but hasn’t fully bloomed yet.”
The Rev. Paul Miller of Bushkill Community Church feels differently.
“If by ‘revival’ he means the church making a positive impact upon our culture and community by intentionally demonstrating the love of God, then I’m all for it,” Miller said. We are living in a post-Christian era in America. The days of the majority of Americans going to church weekly and having faith as a focal point of their lives is long gone. I don’t think that resurrecting old time methods and old time religion is going to reach people in this post-modern world.
“I’ve never really liked the word “revival” because it’s not forward thinking. (It’s worth noting that you won’t even find that word anywhere in the New Testament.) The problem with claiming that a “revival” is coming today is that there’s very little to ‘revive.’ Wouldn’t you have to have been ‘vived’ at one time in order to be ‘revived?’ You can’t stir up old dormant faith in a culture in which the majority of the people have never practiced faith to begin with.”
Some volunteers at this event told this columnist “it’s really something to have seven churches agree” and they certainly do not always agree, which is why some other churches chose not to join the ministry group. “Those churches are on an island and some are treating it as a business because they’re only concerned with their own numbers (of congregants),” said Silfies.
Again, Sayer agreed and lightly called it “inwardly-focused naval gazing.”
“He is exactly right,” Sayer said. “Some of that comes from practical concerns: they think, ‘We’re so small we can barely get done what needs to be done here.’ So, they neglect larger Kingdom work. But the transitions we’ve been talking about are also largely incomplete; in fact, they’ve barely begun.
“So Christians aren’t completely focused yet on being citizens of the Kingdom of God. They’re still used to being good church people who think about budgets, declining giving, broken church boilers, the two Sunday School teachers we still need to find, and hoping to sit next to good friends in the fellowship hour after worship. … It’s fair to say though, that the church has a lot of learning to do about what it means to be the church.”
What has happened, and this affects many congregants around the eastern Poconos, is that larger churches there of different denominations recently have banded together to profess faith and possibly organize an increasing number of promotional events like the “Light in the Park” to get the general public to think of these ideas.
“The thing I see is a lot of churches individually trying to pull things like this off on a small scale,” said Silfies who said Light on the Mountain Ministries is planning another event to complement this one.
Sayer said a “new ecumenism is developing about relationships between congregations of different denominations.
“The Middle Smithfield Presbyterian Church, Bushkill Community Church and The Reformed Church of Bushkill have just begun CUDA, (Christian United Discipleship Academy),” Sayer said. “The three churches, and any other churches or individuals who would like to join in, have developed a process to foster spiritual maturity in their people. They’ve identified a bunch of issues that Christians have to be conversant with, knowledge of the Bible they need, ways of living they ought to engage in, ways of understanding the faith that are crucial, and knowledge of God.”
The union was in the works.
“Each of these churches wanted to nurture maturity in their members but all of them realized they weren’t doing it in a systematic way,” Sayer said.
“They also understood that none of them had the resources, mostly in terms of teachers, to effectively delve into all of these different topics. So they have been working together for the last six months in order to make this happen.”
One thing is certain: Anyone who has not stepped into a church for a while could find it a much different place these days and in the future.
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