This Quiet Revival thing is real you know. At least, it feels real around here.
For a number of years, I’ve been aware that young adults now seem to have different attitudes to religion to young adults of perhaps 20 years ago. Specifically, young adults of today do not seem as negative towards religion, and particularly organised religion, as their predecessors did. It has always been the case that there has been a minority of people interested in churchy things and a larger minority of people who would be prepared to acknowledge that they were interested in things that might broadly be termed spirituality. However there seems to me to be more younger people around these days who are explicitly looking for a different narrative to live by. And they are asking big questions.
I think there have been signs of the Quiet Revival for a while – quite a while actually. But it is getting more obvious to more people and showing up now in significant pieces of research.
I think about my ministry not so much in terms of the number of years that I’ve been in the job that I’m currently in but in terms of the colleagues that I have worked with.
About 10 years ago, I worked with a Vice Provost, who devised a programme for those enquiring about the faith which was called The God Factor. The fundamental, core feature of the programme was the first meeting of the group, which was a gathering of the questions that the group most wanted answers to. Again and again we ran the programme and again and again we found that people wanted to talk about big themes. They wanted to talk about God. They wanted to talk about salvation. They wanted to talk about theology. And we worked out a number of set piece sessions where we could explore some of these big questions in fun ways in a series of group sessions.
More recently, I worked with a different Vice Provost. Together, he and I were appointed as the Episcopal Chaplains at the University of Glasgow. The pandemic was upon us but still we tried to work out what we might do with higher education students when it was possible to gather together again.
“Oh, it is easy,” I said, “I’ll just get out my guitar again and we’ll order in some pizza and try to gather a wee group”.
You see, I’d done University Chaplaincy twice before in times when it seemed to me that it was difficult to get anyone interested in the church. There always had to be a lot of coffee or a lot of pizza to get anyone to come near.
I could see my colleague’s face fall at my talk of guitars and pizza. He was, after all, so hip that he’d just written a dissertation about hipster religion and he proceeded to tell me the several different ways that I was wrong. He was gentle but determined. I never heard him shout but he may be the only person I know who can speak in capital letters quietly.
“THEY ARE NOT LOOKING FOR THAT ANY MORE” he said.
And I grew to understand from working with him that there was a new interest in the transcendent – the glory and the wonder of worship was suddenly something that people might be curious about.
“So what are we going to do then? High Mass and Evensong?”
“EXACTLY!”
And thus began an interesting and creative period of University Chaplaincy work quite unlike anything I’d done before.
And instead of the half a dozen people I thought we might gather, we found ourselves with a congregation of 40, 60 or even for Ashes and Allegri, a hundred and twentyfold.
Now, I’m working with a new colleague. And the thing that we’re talking about is that younger adults are turning up in greater numbers than they were. We put on a programme for people finding a way into the congregation called A Rough Guide to St Mary’s. We usually put it on a couple of times a year. We’ve just had to run an extra one much sooner than we usually would at this time of year simply because there were people about who needed it. Each time we do it, we get 10 or a dozen folk whose age range is varied, but most will be under thirty and most will not be Anglicans or Episcopalians by tradition. Some will have come from other church backgrounds but some will have come from no obvious church connection previously. And some will come clutching philosophy books that they’ve been reading. Plato and Simone Weil somehow send them here.
Now, I’m long in the tooth and grey of the head so I can’t speak directly for what this feels like to be a young adult. But young adults can’t speak about how young adults have changed either because they were not around before. The truth is, something seems to have been changing over those years.
Yes, we are seeing more young men than we used to. Yes, we are seeing people attracted to quite structured forms of worship. Yes, it feels as though this is growing somehow.
Last year for the first time in our history, St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow baptised more adults that children. We’re likely to do the same this year too.
I’m hearing stories like this from other Episcopal churches in the city. I know of one which is putting on unexpected Discovery groups to allow people to talk about the faith. I’m intrigued by this, not least because I’m fairly convinced that the phenomenon that we are seeing has little to do with Diocesan Mission Strategies or Whole Church Mission and Ministry policies or anything like that.
I don’t seem to be hearing about this happening in the Church of Scotland but that may simply be because of the circles that I move in. Whether happening or not, the recent listing for sale, of Culross Abbey, a thirteenth century monastic church that is literally at the start of an up and coming pilgrimage route seems incredible. It seems extraordinarily tone deaf to do this in a world where people are looking for deeply rooted faith connections and where younger Christians are longing for the transcendent.
Based on what I’m listening to though, the wind seems to have changed spiritually, and I’m not surprised at all that this is starting to show up in statistical surveys. The biggest of these is a large piece of work that the Bible Society commissioned about which there has been a lot of online chatter. It is in connection with its findings that the term The Quiet Revival has been used.
I suspect that it will be a while yet before this shows up in denominational statistics – not least because published church stats are often a little out of date by the time they are published and it is hard to see what it going on when some congregations are experiencing a gentle revival and some are still experiencing gentle (and not so gentle) decline.
Round here, the Quiet Revival doesn’t seem to be quite the great resurgence of traditionalism that some conservative voices seem to be excited about – it is happening in churches which are consciously liberal. There does seem to be an attraction to fairly structured worship and carefully thought through philosophy. This simply seems to be a new season where younger people are looking very seriously at faith and making deep commitments. Belief is being taken very seriously indeed. So is religious practice. (And as I’ve said for years, we need to talk more about practice).
The simple reality, is that liturgy is back.
I have a number of questions about the Quiet Revival that I’m trying to think through at the moment and I’d be interested in comments from others.
- Are other faiths experiencing something similar – it wouldn’t particularly surprise me if that was true?
- If other faiths are experiencing it, which ones are experiencing it? Specifically, is the current yearning for something to live by bringing people more to organised forms of religion, which each have their systems, narratives and beliefs, rather than more do-it-yourself forms of faith which are more about picking what you need from a set of spiritual practices?
- Is this longterm, or is it just a flash in the post-pandemic pan?
- I see this happening in urban liberal, liturgical churches. But that’s because I’m the Provost of St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow. Where else is it happening and what are the common themes?
- What new resources do we need to help people to find a Christian way of living in a world which seems so angry, violent and out of control?
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