Some excerpts;""It is at the local church level," says Martin Marty in his book The New Shape of American Religion, "where the church's encounter with the world can be most violent, and most productive -- and where opposition from worldly Christians can become most intense ... [And while] the church revival, being on a more personal basis and challenge, does affect the morality and attitudes of fewer people, [it] affects them at greater depth."And Marty continues with this analysis: "The local church is the front line. It is the cutting edge against the world. If that cutting edge is thought of as an institution that circles the globe, it will be impossible to hone or sharpen. But a local church can be honed, it can be sharpened, it can become more effective -- and if enough local churches are honed, or revived, then it will make a more effective contribution to the total task by being more effective in its local task.""""It is real revival that we need if our evangelism is to be meaningful and the fruits of it conserved. It is when Zion travails that souls are born. And travail can't be turned on and off like a spigot. Real spiritual births are a result of this travail. We can have religious "abortions" without it, but there can be no spiritual birth without it. The conversion of sinners -- not just people in the altar, but genuine conversion of sinners -- is a result of the revived condition of the church. It is precisely because we do not go in for real revival as often as we should that we have so much frustration and sense of futility in much of our evangelistic activities.""""Dr. Chapman once said that if Finney were alive very few Nazarene pastors would call him for meetings, because he didn't go in for quick results. It was a fundamental conviction with Finney that the church first had to be revived before there could be any worthwhile evangelistic results. He would labor for days to produce a revival in the church, and when the church was revived then sinners would come crying, "What must I do to be saved?"But we want quick results. Let's see something happen quickly -- no matter whether it lasts; let's get action. Our insistence on something happening quickly might be because we are afraid that if we tarried beyond the frenzy and the hubbub we might get down to our real needs and have our real shams exposed and be confronted with our real selves. And when that began to happen, we might lose part of our crowd. But would that be a tragedy?In those ten days preceding Pentecost, the disciples began to lose their crowd until it got down to 120. Think of it -- three-fourths of the crowd had left! If some of us had been there we would have said, "Let's get a quartet in here, or a Hollywood singer -- we're losing our crowd. Let's at least get somebody in here to crack a few jokes and liven things up a bit. Let's get this show on the road."But the 120, renewed and filled, did more in one day than they had done before in three years. And it is conceivable that one-fourth of our church members, if truly revived and filled, would accomplish far more than the over four hundred thousand Nazarenes we have on the rolls.""""General Superintendent Walker said once that it was "possible to have a revival of God's work and have fewer in the church when the revival was over than when it began," and then he quoted John Wesley as saying, when he visited a society and found it "not strong": "We dismissed thirty members. Glory be to God."Martin Marty suggests that "a willingness to step off the statistical treadmill for a moment, to lose status among the families of competing denominations, may be the better mark of stewardship and evangelism in the present moment.""""There is no such thing as instant revival. And there is no such thing as instant evangelism. Revival is hard, sweaty business. And those who are interested in quick results are never interested in paying that kind of price. It is so much easier, and more sophisticated, to go around asking, "Do revivals pay?" or, "What's wrong with our evangelism?" than it is to get down on our knees before God and pray and agonize and cry and fast until revival comes.""""The last trend I will mention is not as widespread as yet, but if resorted to exclusively, or as a substitute for revival, is definitely a step down -- and that is the substitution of visitation or personal evangelism for revivals.But one is never a substitute for the other. Genuine revival, in fact, will make personal evangelism far more productive and necessary than any talk or series of talks about the advantages or methods of personal evangelism. Our people need not only the know-how; they need the wherewithal -- and revival can be the time of that motivation and dynamic.We can, of course, knock on doors and invite to Sunday school and church without that renewing and refreshing from the Lord. And it is better to do that than to do nothing. But Fuller Brush salesmen or Avon callers can, and do, knock on doors and "witness" to the desirability of their product. And if we are to be anything more than religious peddlers we must have our hearts warmed and stirred and refreshed and filled periodically -- if our witness is to be spiritually productive. "Ye shall receive power" -- when? -- when we knock on doors? When we hand out Heralds? When we invite our friends? No. "Ye shall receive power" when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. Then whatever form your witnessing takes, God will make it spiritually meaningful and your evangelistic activity will advance His cause."Ye shall receive power ... and ye shall be witnesses unto me" everywhere you go. We can be witnesses without that power. We can be witnesses to a certain doctrine or a certain standard or to a certain church or to a certain preacher or teacher, or to the beauty or adequacy of a church plant -- we can be witnesses to all of these without any help at all from God. But if our witnessing does not find its center in Christ, we are off center. And to be an effective witness unto Christ takes more than knowledge, takes more than signing a calling pledge, takes more than human enthusiasm; it takes warm and full hearts -- warmed and filled by the fresh movement of His presence and power.""""But I am more convinced now than I was then that we must have revival, real revival, if all our witnessing and going is to be meaningful and spiritually productive. Every book that I have tried to write except one has emphasized this truth, and three of them have been exclusively about personal involvement in soul winning.Each of these evangelistic emphases can be profitable in its place, but whenever any one of them is promoted as a substitute for genuine revival it is a step down and away from that revival emphasis which has been the central agency of our most effective evangelism from the very beginning of our church. And if we fail to recognize the danger and insist on taking those steps down, then we will be led down that well-travelled road that leads to an evangelism wherein, as one put it, "the conference table replaces the mourners' bench, the planning session replaces the prayer meeting, the organizers replace the agonizers, and the promoters replace the passion-filled."That may be evangelism, but that is a juiceless, tearless, powerless, emasculated evangelism that is a mockery and a denial of that vigorous and effective evangelism the church engaged in when the tides of revival were running strong."" C. William Fisher
