Stop Trying to Revive Your Church

By Caleb Cooke

“It’s great that we have all these children at our community Easter event, Pastor, But…”

Oh, no, I thought. Is she going to say it?

“But we really need to get them in the church. That’s why we should bring back Vacation Bible School.”

This was a conversation I had with a well-intentioned lay leader after our 2nd Annual Easter Eggstravaganza, an event that brought over 100 children to our campus for an egg hunt, bouncy house, and free food. From what I saw, by all measures, the day was a great success. But not for this specific lay leader, whose mind went immediately to what the event wasn’t instead of what it was.

The problem here isn’t about VBS—it’s about the assumption underneath it, namely, that by reviving VBS we’ll re-enter the glory days of young families prioritizing Sunday School and worship service attendance; that the only measure of a thriving church is butts in pews and

dollars in the general offering; that if we could just fill the nursery, then all would be right once again.

Another way to put it is this: many churches are having difficulty seeing their ministries as successful unless they and their results fit neatly into the shape of ministries past.

At the heart of this issue, I believe, is a confusion of revival and resurrection. Growing up in the rural South, I experienced my fair share of revivals, whether at my own church or at arm’s length. Usually, for a week, churches will worship every night for hours upon hours to “revive” a church on the brink of falling asleep or death.

And for the most part, they worked! If a church staff and lay leadership tries hard enough, it’s possible to spark movement and action into a church veering into comatose inertia. Maybe attendance bumps, and giving bumps, and maybe the non-Sunday morning ministries get a bump, too—fellowship dinners, Wednesday night service, who knows!

But, every time, revived churches almost always discover the same thing: pour new energy into the same old body, and eventually that body drifts back toward sleep. Why is this?

I find a useful biblical parallel in the story of Lazarus in John 11. Many people call this the resurrection of Lazarus, and there's a good reason why. After Jesus hears Lazarus has been dead for four days, Jesus comes to Bethany to raise Lazarus, who, after Jesus’s command to “Come out!”, exits his tomb as alive as anyone watching. Jesus resurrected Lazarus!

Or did he? Upon closer reading, the word resurrection (Greek anastasis) is not used to describe what Jesus does to Lazarus. After clarifying Lazarus is dead (11:14), Jesus frames what he’s about to do as “wak[ing] him up” (exhupniso; John 11:11). To me, this more likely suggests that Jesus revived Lazarus, which is an important distinction. While we do not hear about Lazarus after this episode in John, church tradition agrees that Lazarus died again.

The truth is, revival is a temporary measure that leads to more of the same life. This shouldn’t downplay what Jesus did to Lazarus (if it’s so easy, try it yourself). But it does bear clarification that this revival does not change Lazarus’s ultimate fate—he still dies. Because of this, it’s more accurate to say that Lazarus was revived, because resurrection begins new life unbound by death.

The central claim of Christianity has to do with resurrection and a resurrected Jesus Christ. When Jesus was resurrected, it’s obvious that while he’s the same Jesus, he’s not entirely the same. Jesus doesn’t look the same—Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize Jesus in John 20:14—and he doesn’t move the same—he enters a locked room in John 20:19. But he clearly has the same body he was crucified in (John 20:27) and eats as if he’s in a normal body (Luke 24:42–43). There are attributes of resurrection that we cannot make sense of until it happens, so

perhaps the best way to put it is this: same Jesus, new life.

To clarify, revival does not defeat death, but resurrection does. It is, in every sense, an act of God. In our earthly bodies with earthly limits bound by death, we cannot bring the new life of resurrection, no matter how hard we try.

The tough part about resurrection is this: it can’t be quantified. Before Jesus’s death, there was one living Jesus, and three days later, there was still one living Jesus. By the numbers, Easter was a flat quarter with no growth, and if anything, the disciples were down a member! But we know much happened that we can’t quantify: death was defeated, fear was undone, and a new creation had begun.

And maybe that’s why we’re so drawn to revival. Revival can be counted, and it gives us back what we lost. If we don’t have a VBS now, but then we have one, haven’t we gained something? Grief is real, especially for churches, and revival offers a shortcut around it: we get back what we miss, even if we’ll eventually lose it again.

If our belief is that God is calling us to revive the past, though, we may walk right past the resurrection God is already working in front of us. If the gospels tell us anything, it’s that resurrection rarely looks the way we expect. Mary Magdalene stood face to face with the risen Jesus and thought he was the gardener.

I wonder if that’s what happened after our Eggstravaganza. A hundred kids ran across our lawn, ate our food, and laughed in our bouncy house, and it was tempting to see it only as a warm-up for the “real” ministry that would get them back in church. But what if it wasn’t a means to an end? What if it was new life, and we mistook it for something else entirely?

The urgent question every church must answer is whether we actually believe in

resurrection. Jesus says to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life,” (John 11:25) not “I am the revival.” If we believe him, then we have to accept that resurrection is something we receive, not manufacture. And, unfortunately, resurrection always starts in the same place—a grave.

Something has to die in order for God to raise it, and perhaps the best candidate is the revival mindset itself, the one captured in what’s been called the seven last words of a dying church:

We've never done it that way before.

Maybe we haven’t. But God had never raised God’s son from the dead before, either.

Until God did.

Caleb Cooke is the Pastor of Village Baptist Church in Bowie, MD