Why I can't pray for revival!

Yesterday I re-tweeted this. It was a vague attempt at humor, probably not as clever or funny as I like to think it is:

But there is a seriousness about my point. I have blogged before about my issues with Revival, so while I do not want to go over old ground, I want to explain why I can't pray for Revival.

I can't pray for a Revival of the church that we have, because I believe Revival will confirm to the church that it is doing okay. It will tell the church that all the stuff that it has got wrong doesn't matter:

• we have Worship without Justice
• we have worshiped the gods of mammon, celebrity and greed
• we have put ethics above love
• we have reduced Salvation to the personal and the spiritual
• we have been responsible for some of the most heinous acts in history
• we have raised up the rich and sent the poor away empty handed
• we have limited Jesus to the divine (ignoring the role of the incarnation in salvation)
• we place the words of Jesus into a book to be studied but not lived out

All done in the name of Jesus, and this is why THIS church does not deserve a Revival. THIS church does not need to have it's failures affirmed.

As Richard Rohr writes:

Organized religion has paid more attention to some things that Jesus never once mentioned (birth control, abortion, and homosexuality) and rather totally ignores other things that he stated with utter clarity ("Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor [Matthew 19:21]). I am not trying to be rebellious, or clever, but just trying to name the elephant in the living room that we all agree not to notice 

What we do not need is a Revival - we need a Renewal, we need to go back to the very heart of the message of Jesus, one that takes his words and lives them out, rather than trying to make theological excuses as to why we don't have to really do that "do we"?

So I shall not pray for Revival, but Renewal which is defined as "an instance of resuming something after an interruption", Christendom has been an interruption, once we have finally shaken off it's vestiges, then we can get back to being the Church of Jesus Christ and living out the Kingdom of God.