Bring Back! Come Back!

Bring Back! Come Back!
Psalm 80

It’s nearly three hundred years since the First Great Awakening, a revival of religious life in Britain and even more in the British colonies in America a few decades before the War of Independence. This First Great Awakening was mostly a movement within the church. The Second Great Awakening in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century took the form of successful evangelistic efforts to bring people to faith in Christ, and, as a result, in American English the word revival came to denote an evangelistic campaign. But the original meaning of the word suggests a renewing of religious life like the First Great Awakening rather than the finding of religious life for the first time...