Awakening is not a word we find in the Bible. It was nearly a century after the events of eighteenth-century New England before historians began to refer to them as the First Great Awakening. But while it is an old-fashioned term that can carry varied meanings in different groups, we like to use it simply as shorthand for Christianity at its best—what it looks like when God’s people begin to operate as the answer to the prayer of Jesus that the kingdom of God would come on earth as it is in heaven.

To us, awakening is code for honesty. We want to be a fellowship of thirsty, honest Christians who know we are desperate for what only God can do. We will not minimize or rationalize the hard fact that many hearts, homes, churches, and cities in this cultural moment are broken beyond human repair, past what our best whiteboarding and energies can remedy. We will neither cut a deal with the status quo nor naively charge into it with more strategy, self-studies, and restructuring thinking that somehow our next best idea is the solution. No, human excellence is too small a thing. The church can never program itself back into New Testament vitality. We are the best-resourced Christians who have ever lived, and look where we find ourselves.

What we need instead is a broad, personal movement of God’s grace that will lead to deep wholeness in people, renewal of the church, evangelization of a generation, and the transformation of society. That’s awakening. There can be outpourings of God’s presence that lead to revivals where churches are refreshed and many come to faith in Jesus. But awakening is the protracted culmination of these when a movement of God’s power and love extends far and long enough to spill over into the streets of life and the structures of the social order. This is the daring, audacious vision that has captured the New Room fellowship. We are those who will not wait any longer to begin framing reality and organizing our lives around the honest admission that awakening is truly what we need. Not just an uptick in numbers or a flash of greater zeal but an extended and far-reaching encounter with God resetting the trajectory of generations.

When the Spirit does this, we learn that there is more of a passionate, brokenhearted love among us for those who do not yet know the love of God in Christ. Awakening is marked by a great depth of lasting personal change in people’s lives, growing by the grace of God in wholeness and holy living. There is a quality of community so rich as to be almost unexplainable in human terms. Awakening is manifested in an overflow of love and power from the church that renews culture, checking, and even reversing trends of decay. It is so compelling that we yearn for it the more we experience it. Awakening is a work of the Holy Spirit as the supernatural becomes more natural to us, involving a rediscovery of the New Testament church and a fresh engagement of people with Jesus.

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