Generation Awakened: An Eyewitness Account of the Powerful Outpouring of God at Asbury Sarah Thomas Baldwin. Invite Press, 2024. 208 pp., $19.99
Unless you were living under an unusually large rock in February 2023, you likely heard about the spontaneous revival that started at Asbury University in the tiny town of Wilmore, Kentucky, and then… kept going for over two weeks.
To be honest, I was at least a little skeptical about it all, as I generally tend to be about any possibility of the Holy Spirit getting a bit too wild and uncontrollable in the modern age. I’m an adult convert to evangelicalism, so I have personally experienced the Holy Spirit doing something unexplainable and extraordinary in my life. And yet, I’ve always worshiped at churches (and traditions) that are on the more reserved end of the spectrum. Yes, in theory, I believe that miracles still can and do happen—every conversion is such a miracle. Still, you won’t catch me revival hunting, as some people apparently do.
And so, like so many people, perhaps my biggest question about the revival last year was: was this real? Sarah Thomas Baldwin, Asbury University’s Vice President of Student Life, is used to fielding this question. She recounts one particularly amusing instance:
A few weeks after the outpouring, a BBC reporter came to campus and interviewed me.
“Now, what really happened?” he asked, sliding his glasses off his face and squinting at me. “Was the weather particularly nice that week? Were they serving something different in the dining hall? Was there something that got the students all excited out of the ordinary to explain this?”
In her new book, Baldwin set out to answer such questions for everyone who was wondering just what exactly happened in February 2023—perhaps, even, including herself in this group. In her heartfelt new book, she documents her first-hand experience of the revival—or, as she calls it, the outpouring. This is a fascinating account of the Holy Spirit’s work from up close, but it is hardly idealistic. It is refreshingly honest about both the joy and the equally real exhaustion of serving. This is the story of the Spirit’s work. But it is equally a tale of the difficulties of caring for the safety and basic needs of unexpected thousands of visitors suddenly showing up at a tiny college campus located in a town of just 6,000 at a dead-end meeting of two roads in rural Kentucky.
Be careful what you ask for. It is, it turns out, one thing to pray for revival for years, even decades, as so many do—including at Asbury, whose previous revival in 1970 was so memorable that it shaped the entire generation that experienced it. Baldwin’s mentors, she notes, were all shaped by it. It is something else, however, to actually experience such a revival firsthand—especially as someone whose role in the community carries much responsibility.
For that matter, it is one thing for the rest of us to follow the events of the excitement of revival from afar, or even to be a guest who comes to participate in something like this briefly. It is another to be right there all along, and to manage capacity of buildings, insure that there is enough bottled water and food, access to restrooms, and a lost-and-found table for the many misplaced jackets, coffee mugs, and keys—the invariable detritus that accompanies any gathering of immense crowds, whether Holy Spirit-facilitated or not.
Repeatedly during the revival, Baldwin reflects on the episode of Jesus feeding the 5,000—a more famous tale of revival that involved logistics no less complex than the ones she suddenly found herself managing around the clock. Well managed logistics that allow everyone to be cared for and not go hungry during a revival are, she finds, a miracle of divine provision and intervention. But the miracle is one that is wrought through community. And community, right along with the Holy Spirit, is the hero of this book.
Telling the events of the revival in order day by day, Baldwin begins on February 8th, when the morning chapel service didn’t end with dismissal, but worship simply continued. This wasn’t all that unusual, she noted, as sometimes students will just keep going for a couple of hours after chapel has concluded. But by nighttime, when worship was still going strong and students from neighboring colleges started showing up, she and her colleagues realized that maybe something different than anything they had seen was afoot.
Going along with the unexpected, they had to start figuring out logistics. If Hughes Auditorium was going to remain open overnight, at least some university staff had to remain there and serve. A quick text, and the night has been divided into shifts, each managed by someone. And that became the mantra for the duration of revival: new needs will arise each day, and each time, the university faculty and staff—and students, and alumni, and local community members, and local churches, and ministry friends from farther away, and various other volunteers—will hasten to meet these needs. The needs would be great yet the volunteers were so numerous that Baldwin and her colleagues would eventually have to start turning them away gently. That too, she realizes, was a gift.
Each day, Baldwin describes, the crowds would grow, eventually necessitating long lines outside of Hughes, because a building filled over capacity was unsafe. Overflow simulcast locations opened—such as Estes Chapel at Asbury Seminary. More and more people kept arriving—from other colleges and universities, from all over the United States, and eventually also from countries all over the world, including (among others) Mexico, Brazil, Canada, UK, South Korea, and Ukraine. Baldwin and her staff had to gently yet firmly steward the preciousness and safety and sacredness of the space—for instance, turning away controversial public figures of various sorts who showed up hoping to hijack the event for their own platforms, praying over anyone in distress, trying (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) to prevent broadcasting of the worship online.
Indeed, how did everyone find out about the revival so fast? In the age of social media, news travels faster than ever. Even though Asbury tried to keep news of the event away from the media (not successfully, obviously), the news kept spreading. But, Baldwin notes, this wasn’t all bad:
Could Instagram and TikTok be the 2023 version of the woman at the well? [who left her water jar at the well in John 4:28-30 to go call everyone in her town to come see Jesus] The viral posts about the outpouring are of the same heart as the woman at the well.
“Come and see. Could this be Jesus?” In this time of hyperconnectivity, social media is our modern “went back to town and said to the people, ‘Come, see’”!
The whole world echoes the question: Is this actually Jesus?
Baldwin is firmly convinced that yes, this was. She describes several healing miracles that sound downright unbelievable. But healings or no, the work of the spirit was a joy to see. But again, also, stewarding this revival day after day took its toll. She describes staying in Hughes until 2:00 am some days, serving a shift at 4:00 am on others. Her husband took over all childcare-related duties, as she spent most of the day and much of the night away from home. And part of the exhaustion after the first couple of days, as the revival showed no sign of slowing down but only kept growing, was the stress of having no endpoint in sight.
Perhaps this could have indeed kept going indefinitely, but with an eye towards stewarding his community, Kevin Brown, Asbury’s President, ultimately announced that endpoint: February 23rd, which was already scheduled as the National Collegiate Day of Prayer. The students, faculty, and staff of the university needed to get back to their tasks as a university community, first and foremost—one grounded in Christ, of course, but an educational establishment nevertheless.
Indeed, people are not just spirit. We are embodied, and our bodies and resources need stewarding too to keep the work of the kingdom going. Showing the remarkable toll that working around the clock for over two weeks took on her body and spirit, Baldwin spent the concluding day of the revival at home, sick.
Feeling the overwhelming exhaustion and the weight of responsibility over these two weeks, Baldwin and her colleagues seemed to appreciate that Brown stepped in and named a closing date—something that no one had wanted to do earlier on in the revival. But the point that Brown and Baldwin and others kept emphasizing, however, was that this was not the end of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. This was merely the end of its work specifically in Hughes Auditorium. God’s presence, Baldwin repeats several times over the course of the book, is not limited to Hughes or to Asbury. It never was. Gen Z is spiritually hungry, she is sure. Other data exists to back this up.
So what does this all mean a little over a year later? For Asbury, this meant an enrollment spike in Fall 2023: a record increase of 300, or nearly 20% of the student body the previous fall. It is an encouraging trend in an era where Christian colleges, just like their secular counterparts, seem to rely mainly on athletics for recruitment. But it turns out that revival is more effective for recruiting new students than a football team. And that is a good thing.
Baldwin found that she herself is changed—less anxious, more buoyant even in the midst of the stressful everyday routine she juggles. In the afterword, added in Winter 2024, she reflects on the intervening year:
I am different. My spiritual temperature is raised. My sense of calling is deeper; my urgency to the gospel is quicker. The Gospels came to life before my eyes, and I got a front row seat. How could I not be changed? … What God has done; God will do again. I want to be ready.
In our post-Covid age of anxieties multiplied, this message resonates.