Patricia Bracken stood in the vocal studio frustrated. Eleven o’clock on a Tuesday in February 1970, and Asbury’s campus was eerily still. Her second student had missed their lesson, and the clock ticked well into the third’s 25-minute time slot. Across the hallway, the piano instruction room sat empty, so the two professors walked together toward the steps of Hughes to see what kept the rest of campus so hollow.
Around the same time, Professor Larry Bracken finished off his mug of tea and headed to his Spanish class, but he, too, found the sidewalks empty.
“It was like a ghost town,” my grandmother said. 53 years later, the Brackens reflected on the famous 1970s Revival that took place at what was then Asbury College, now University.
A year after the events of 1970, they had their daughter, Jana Bracken – my mother. Jana, too, attended Asbury, and during her time there, the campus had 127 hours of unbroken prayer and confession. Revival is quite the topic of conversation in my family.
Thirty one years after the 1992 revival, both my parents and grandparents watched the news as the campus they knew so well, the campus where their granddaughter was, overflowed with tens of thousands of strangers from all over the world.
The Friday after the 2023 events began, I received a text from my grandmother telling me how excited she was that I could have the experience that she and my grandfather had during their time at Asbury.
I didn’t know how to tell them that I hadn’t stepped foot in Hughes since it happened. I didn’t know how to break the news that instead of feeling the peace that they always described, I felt fear and unease. Along with the complicatedness of my own faith journey, there was a distinct sense of anxiety that hovered over Hughes and the things happening there.
The next year was a process of realizing that I was not alone in that feeling. While some had life- changing experiences within those walls, I and many other students were not amongst the crowds in Hughes – many of us still active in our faith. “I think of chaos during this last Revival… and we had peace. peace and calm.” My grandmother told me a year later. “And in that sense, there’s absolutely no way to compare the two. When you had thousands of people pouring in… I can’t identify with that because it was so different.” Even my grandmother’s feelings had become complicated as the revival became so public. Her gratitude at the shared experience gave way to confusion at the arrival of the 50,000 guests. For my grandparents, revival meant an empty campus. The news spread, but it spread through churches, inviting students to share about the events. My grandpa pointed out that weekends on campus were quiet for the next year because weekly witness teams went all over the country. They went to the world – the world did not come to them.
There is no way to isolate one factor as the difference between Asbury’s previous revivals and this one. There are many factors, but it is undeniable that social media and the constancy of news transformed these events from intimate and private to intensely public. This was a distinct factor in the University’s choice to stop broadcasting and their request that phones be put away within the walls of Hughes.
My grandfather described the Revival of the 1970s as having a sense of “timelessness.” For my grandmother the theme was peace. Among the many feelings branching through campus, there was one that came to mind first: surveillance.
Walking from class to class, I remember the crowd taking photos of us. It felt something like what I imagined it was like to be a zoo animal – look at the Asbury students in their natural habitat.
I remember leaving my sociology of religion class (ironically enough) to use the restroom and finding a line of 30 people waiting. Recognizing me as a student, they bumped me to the front of the line, where a woman said, “Wow – you’re a student! How are the students feeling about all this?” I didn’t know how to answer her. I couldn’t describe my own feelings, let alone those of over a 1000 students.
The 21st century brings a plethora of factors unseen in previous revivals. “We were raised in an era of not being afraid of people,” my grandmother said, highlighting the differences between 1970 and 2023. “I think many of us who have not grown up in the era of mass shooting and active shooter drills don’t immediately think of the anxiety created by having 1000s of strangers descend on your home,” my mother wrote in a post to the many Asbury alumni on her Facebook page. We really saw the differences between previous revivals and this one in a post-September 11th and post-Columbine world.
There was also the factor of the politicization of Christianity in media in the past 20 years. The arrival of news sources made many people squirm at the fear that the personal would suddenly become political. Asbury remains grateful that news sources were largely gracious when covering the events, but there was still a distinct unease.
While these other issues were evident, they all stemmed from the same root: social media and, eventually, other media sources broadcasting the events. Without this, the arrival of the masses with all its blessings and curses would not have been a possibility.
None of this is to discount any good that took place in Hughes. For many, February 2023 was life- changing, and there is room to celebrate this. Pastor- in residence Zach Meerkreebs put it well though, when he said, “I think it’s worth remembering and celebrating with an immense amount of grace and gentleness for those that don’t want to celebrate.”
I still find myself thinking about the woman’s question outside the bathroom in Hughes’s basement. The shifting variables of the events last year made feelings around the revival overwhelmingly convoluted. Trying to express the thoughts of every student and faculty member would be impossible. We’ve heard testimonies of the good, and those stories deserve their place. But with those stories comes the awareness of the eyes that turned to Asbury last year – and the overwhelming awareness that those eyes are still on us.
Featured image by Sam Reed.