The Art of Revival

some notes on the "Quiet Revival" at Asbury & Wheaton and its relation to art... and everything else

I don’t want to be the weird guy taking photos of people worshiping, so we’ll go with this stock shot instead (photo credit)

This August my colleague Tim Taylor and I walked into an evening worship service at Wheaton College’s campus in northern Wisconsin. It was part of our new student orientation retreat, and on the surface there was not much to comment on: just a room packed full of students praising God together, expounding the Bible and praying—pretty standard around here. What was not standard though was that it was completely unscheduled in the formal program, and entirely student organized and led. A freshman woman looked at the two of us as we entered and said, “The class of ‘29 has a real heart for the Lord.”

Now well into the semester, this “Quiet Revival” of sorts continues, in step with similar happenings around the globe. Events have taken place on campus and in dormitories, as reported by The Wheaton Record. There was a scheduled service of all-night prayer, confession and worship just this homecoming weekend as well from 10pm-6:30am. Perhaps it’s enough to wonder if critics of Wheaton earlier this year who declared the “Shekhinah has departed” from our college will find themselves asking, “Has the Shekhinah returned?”

An Italian reformer (not Savonarola in this case but Bernardino of Siena) cooking up a bonfire of the vanities from a mid-fifteenth century Perugian frieze

I remember well Wheaton’s oft-commented upon 1995 revival, which events such as these are often measured against. When I lecture about Savonarola and the bonfire of the vanities in fifteenth-century Florence, I always tell the ‘95 revival story of a massive bag full of repentance contraband (porn, explicit CDs, drugs) that were piled into a pick-up truck and brought to a nearby dumpster with the driver praying he would not get pulled over as there would be a lot of explaining to do. I also remember some fellow students deciding that because of that revival, their studies could be sidelined. Why should one bother studying chemistry or studio art, for example, when one could, inspired by the revival, cast down your nets to pursue full time missionary work instead?

As it happens, just a few hours before this weekend’s all-night prayer service took place came a wonderful answer to that question. Two Wheaton alums from back in the ‘95 revival days, who now teach at Asbury (Josh Smith and Margaret Park Smith of Dovetail Practice), gave a talk for their current show Attention Bridge that beautifully exemplified how serious art can in fact contribute to and honor such happenings. During the Asbury Outpouring in February of 2023, these professors fired and glazed gorgeous urns, took them to the revival services to absorb the atmosphere (depicted below), and then reverently sealed the vessels.

Detailed photo of one of Dovetail Practice’s urns at the Asbury outpouring

There is no superstitious silliness at work here, but a conceptually sophisticated and even playful “containment” of the Spirit who, these believing artists very much know, can never be contained. These artists spoke of God’s presence not just in dramatic worship experiences (important as those may be), but in snail-pace, everyday quotidian silence as well. “In quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). As these skilled and highly trained makers spoke about their efforts to avoid commodification while retaining intellectual rigor and humility, there was a joyful sense of their passing on the beauty of what happened at Asbury to Wheaton. Shortly thereafter, this weekend’s all-night prayer vigil commenced.

Questioning how the liberal arts integrates with Christianity, Tertullian famously asked “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Dovetail Practice asked, “What does art have to do with revival?” The answer to both questions is… a lot. For like those urns, we too are earthen ware!

Opening for “Attention Bridge” at the Art Department in Wheaton on September 27, 2025

Whatever is going on at Wheaton (and as my colleague Dan Haase says, it might be best not to label it), it is too early to tell what will come of it. As a wise carpenter once said, you will know them by their fruits. But integration is everything. I wish they had pasted a massive sign with those words in the back of Pierce Chapel where the revival took place back in 1995. Confession and adoration are abundantly necessary, but folding such elements into everyday life is equally indispensable, helping us realize that all vocations can be properly “spiritual.” I am grateful that the artists of Dovetail Practice, drawing from revival experiences at Wheaton and Asbury, made that so clear this weekend. Which is to say, we’ve learned a lot about revival since the Nineties. I even wonder if this show marks a new maturity in Christian colleges and Art departments within them.

One of the sealed urns “containing” the Spirit of the Asbury outpouring

Back in ‘95, I wish I had known more about the ancient desert fathers and mothers, the Abbas and the Ammas, who also knew how to integrate laudable spiritual ambitions. They too had their all-night prayer vigils. But when faced with a monk who went beyond even that, who was so “spiritual” that he desired to wear a scratchy, straw mat in perpetual penitence, Abba Ammonas told him, in effect, he didn’t need to. The zealous monk responded by tripling down, going even further, saying to Ammonas:

“Three thoughts occupy me, either, should I wander in the deserts, or should I go to a foreign land where no-one knows me, or should I shut myself up in a cell without opening the door to anyone, eating only every second day.” Abba Ammonas replied, “It is not right for you to do any of these three things. Rather, sit in your cell and eat a little every day, keeping the word of the publican [i.e. the Jesus Prayer] always in your heart, and you may be saved” (Ammonas 4, p. 26, italics added).

With Ammonas’ counsel to integration and moderation in mind, I hope our prayed up students get some good rest. We’ll see them on Monday in the Art Department where they’ll be making art, where we’ll keep up our study of (among other things) the Virgin Mary in Scripture and tradition and the mosaics and icons of the Early Church. We’ll be doing all this just a few floors above the gallery exhibition where the Spirit is reverently sealed in an urn—the Spirit who, I am happy to report, keeps on getting out.

Prints by Dovetail Practice that accompanied the urns