The following has been edited for length and clarity.

CURTIS CHANG: David, I believe we experienced something of an outpouring, a warming. The point at which something becomes a revival is sort of unclear, but when we were at Harvard together in the late ’80s, early ’90s, there was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on campus that revived things. So talk about your experience with that, and then I want to share about my experience.

DAVID FRENCH: I use the term revival to describe it. We were in different places –  I was in the law school, and the fellowship had been kind of struggling. Then we had an influx of Christian 1Ls, and we bonded very effectively as 1Ls. Then as 2Ls, we had a new influx, including some new students who were spirit-filled, charismatic, and they were extremely bold. 

A lot of Christian people at  Harvard were in a bit of a defensive crouch.  They weren’t ashamed of their faith, but it was not a hospitable environment. I’ve told some of the stories– booing, hissing, shouting down, all this stuff. So you felt embattled. 

And then these folks came in, with no sense of being embattled. They had absolute confidence in the gospel, in the power of the Holy Spirit. And it manifested itself first inwardly, then outwardly. So inwardly, we had a Pentecostal revival in the Harvard Law School Christian Fellowship in ’92, ’93. And the coals burned hot for a long time. 

I’ll give you an illustration. A few weeks ago, we had a reunion of Harvard Christian alumni and I went to the Law School Christian Fellowship gathering. I graduated in ’94. It’s been a minute — almost 29 years since I graduated. 

And within the Harvard Law School group, a heavily disproportionate number of people were there from the ’91 to ’94 spectrum. It stuck. It was not the sort of experience that was only great for a moment. And one of the leaders of the revival is now a tenured professor at Harvard Law School, Ruth Okediji. And she’s building an institution called the Center for Biblical Legal Studies.

You tell people there’s a Center for Biblical Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and they look at you like you’ve sprouted four eyes. Like, “What on Earth are you talking about?” But it’s part of the legacy of that revival, and Ruth was one of the leaders. She’s bold, and I’ve had very senior secular folks in the law school tell me that Ruth is adored. One of them even said, “She is the future of the law school.” That’s a big, big statement.

The revival was a transformative experience for me. I have never lost those relationships or the convictions I gained.

CURTIS CHANG: I have a similar story: While this is happening in the law school, a similar kind of growth is happening in other graduate school fellowships and at the undergraduate level. When I was a freshman at Harvard, fall of ’86, the undergraduate InterVarsity chapter was about 40 people. By the time I left after being on staff for a couple years, we had spun off into two fellowships –  an Asian American fellowship and the core multi-ethnic fellowship. The combined total of those students participating was around 400. So 10x growth. And the Cru chapter was going through similar growth.

DAVID FRENCH: Unreal.

CURTIS CHANG: And yet when I think about the lasting influence, it really was the feeling of being a part of something larger. And many of the friendships that formed from the experience stuck – my closest, deepest friends.

DAVID FRENCH: We really should double down in talking about friendship because it’s not only an aspect of the revivals that we experienced – it’s also a giant, yawning hole in people’s hearts right now. Sometimes you bond through shared adversity, but sometimes you can bond by experiencing something truly wonderful together. That was really the core of the bond for us at the Harvard revival. And the students at Asbury will never forget that moment. 

There’s both a positive and a negative to this. I just described the positive. The negative is that sometimes people chase experiences, thinking that Christianity is always supposed to be like that remarkable moment. And when life gets daily and hard and God feels distant, you think, “I need to replug into that revival-type experience.” 

CURTIS CHANG: This is why I so respect the way Kevin Brown, the president, and his team led the revival in Asbury. It could be easy for him to keep chasing and prolonging the big, ecstatic, high-profile experience. But they deliberately chose to close down the chapels because they realized it was not sustainable. They knew it was taxing both the institution and the students working together to keep it going.

They needed to shift the revival, in his words, into something that could sustain both the institution and the friendships. I think that’s so wise because the institution and the friendships produce the long-lasting heat that God wants to bring. 

I think this is another reminder for anyone in ministry or institutional leadership of how misguided it is to evaluate our ministries by the numbers – how many people are showing up. It should encourage us to pay attention to the relationships underneath. Is this church fostering relationships centered around Jesus, that will sustain each other over the long term? 

There are ways to structure a ministry to get the flash and there are ways to structure a ministry around nurturing those deep relationships. And this is a call for us to choose wisely how we define growth.

DAVID FRENCH: There’s another aspect to this which wasn’t really touched on in your conversation with Kevin Brown. Anytime something like this happens, there are also people on the periphery who don’t feel it in the moment. Does that make sense? 

In the moment, they’re not as struck by it as everyone else seems to be. And I think in a healthy ministry, a healthy approach is to intentionally care for the people on the periphery. 

That was one thing that my friend Ruth did very well. In her view, nobody was outside the fellowship. There was no periphery. We were all in it, but maybe we were experiencing it differently. And that’s another reason why you have to shut it down sometimes – to include people not caught up in the ecstasy or calm of the moment. Because the longer it goes, the more the people on the periphery wonder, “What’s wrong with me?”

CURTIS CHANG: That’s a great insight, and it connects to the conversation I had last week with Dan Koch about spiritual abuse. 

I talked about the experience of spiritual abuse in our own church’s youth ministry. One of the subtle dynamics of spiritual abuse involved very sharp, hard lines drawn between those on the inside and those on the outside. And that leaves some scars. 

And I think this is connected to how we think about revivals because it is possible to artificially turn up the bonfire by drawing very clear in-and-out boundaries. People have a natural human desire not to be left out. So if you’ve made it very clear that, in order to be on the inside, you need to act these ways or show up in this thing, and with enough charisma and other production values, you can generate a sort of artificial flame. But it ends up singeing people because it’s not the true thing.

DAVID FRENCH: And that reminds me of the quest for experience and the power of music. There’s a lot of debate about worship music, asking, “Is it manipulation or is it genuine?”

Well, yes to both. It can be one or the other, but even with the most genuine worship, there will always be people in the congregation who don’t feel it.

And I used to think you should judge a movement by the core, not by the periphery. Now I’ve flipped that around. Now I see how you can create a core around almost anything. But how do you treat people on the edge?

I wrote a piece this week about the Gothard experience and how I was told by a person I was dating, “Hey, if we want to keep going, you got to go to Gothard.” And I went to the basic seminar, and I could see that core-versus-periphery dynamic. The message to the periphery was, “You’re courting destruction. If you’re not all in, you’re all out.” That was a giant waving red flag to me. 

We’ve detoured from the core of the conversation a little bit, but I think that’s really important. And I had that in mind when I was listening to your conversation with Kevin Brown. Asbury seemed to have a total care approach.