What Is Revival? A Plain Definition
By Daniel Ziedins · · 7 min read
Ask ten Christians what revival means and you will get ten answers. Some mean a week of scheduled meetings. Some mean an emotional experience. Some mean church growth. Some mean a feeling they had once and want back. The word does an enormous amount of work in our vocabulary while meaning almost nothing precise, and vague words make for vague prayers.
So here is a plain definition, and then the distinctions that make it useful.
The short definition
Revival is God restoring spiritual life to people who already have it but have lost it — beginning with His own Church, and usually spilling out into the surrounding society.
The word itself gives the game away. To re-vive is to live again. You cannot revive what was never alive. That single point of grammar settles most of the confusion around the term, because it tells you exactly who revival is aimed at: not the unbelieving world, but the sleeping Church inside it.
This is why 2 Chronicles 7:14 addresses “my people, who are called by my name” rather than the surrounding nation. The conditions — humility, prayer, seeking God's face, turning from sin — are given to those who already belong to Him. The healing of the land follows the revival of the people, in that order, every time.
Revival is not evangelism, though it produces it
Evangelism is the Church going to those who do not yet believe. Revival is God coming to those who already do. They are different movements in different directions, and confusing them is why some prayer meetings go nowhere.
In practice they are almost always sequential. A revived Church evangelises without being nagged into it, because people who have just been undone by God are very hard to keep quiet. Historically, the great harvests followed the great awakenings rather than causing them. If you want a country reached, praying for the Church to wake up is not a detour from that goal. It is the shortest route to it.
Revival is not a meeting
In North America we started calling a scheduled series of evangelistic services “a revival” sometime in the nineteenth century, and the language never recovered. You can book a venue, a speaker, and a set of dates. You cannot book revival.
Look at the actual events. A crusade at Ebenezer Baptist in Saskatoon was scheduled for a little over a week in October 1971. It ran for seven weeks, outgrew two buildings, and spread across four provinces. Randy Clark was booked into a small Toronto church for four days in January 1994 and stayed more than six. Henry Alline started preaching in Nova Scotia in 1776 and did not stop for eight years.
In every case human beings set the start date and God set the end date. That is close to a diagnostic test: if you know exactly when it will finish, it is a meeting.
Revival is not the same as a feeling
Revivals are emotional, and there is nothing suspect about that — people meeting God have always wept, laughed, trembled, and fallen silent. But emotion is a symptom, not the substance, and the two are easy to mistake for one another.
The oldest test is the plainest one: what is different a year later? Jonathan Edwards, writing about the awakening he actually lived through, argued that the reliable evidence was not intensity of experience but lasting change in affection and conduct. Restored marriages. Repaid debts. Confessed sin. Enemies reconciled. Churches that stopped competing. If those follow, something happened. If nothing follows, something was felt.
What revival has actually looked like
Across very different centuries and theological streams, the same marks keep appearing:
- Unusual conviction of sin among people who were already Christians — often about things they had comfortably tolerated for years.
- Prayer that becomes compelling rather than dutiful. Meetings that people cannot stay away from.
- Unity that crosses lines which normally divide. Around twenty denominations gathered in one Saskatoon auditorium in 1971.
- Restitution and reconciliation — the unglamorous, expensive evidence that conviction was real.
- A harvest of people who were not previously believers, arriving faster than anyone planned for.
- Visible change in the surrounding community, which is the “healing of the land” the verse promises.
Can revival be organised?
No — and this is where two opposite errors live.
The first says revival can be engineered: the right worship, the right speaker, the right atmosphere, and it will come. That is closer to technique than to prayer, and it always ends in disappointment or in pretending.
The second says that because revival is sovereign, there is nothing to do but wait. But that is not what the historical record shows, and it is not what 2 Chronicles 7:14 says. The verse attaches conditions. Ebenezer Baptist prayed for nine years before 1971. The praying did not manufacture the revival; it was the ground the revival landed on.
The honest position sits between them. We cannot cause it. We are told exactly what to do while we wait for it. Those two sentences are both true, and holding both is most of the Christian life.
How to pray for revival without being vague
If revival is God restoring life to His own people, then praying for it specifically means praying about the Church before the culture, and about yourself before the Church.
- Pray for conviction, not just blessing. Ask God to show His people one thing each, not everything at once.
- Pray for unity across churches in your own city by name — it is the most visible mark in every documented awakening.
- Pray with history in your mouth. Habakkuk did not ask for something new; he asked God to repeat what He had already done.
- Pray consistently rather than intensely. Nine years of Wednesdays beat a fortnight of everything.
“Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?”
— Psalm 85:6
Again. The psalmist is asking for a repeat too. It has happened before in this land, and the people it happened to were ordinary and were already praying when it came.