Bishop Ruth Bushyager of Horsham in southern England told a Christians in Media conference something I’ve been sensing for a while: there’s a new spiritual awakening, and most seekers are finding it through media before they ever find a pulpit.
What she said
“It has felt like a drought that we’ve had for a few decades,” she said, with “aggressive secularism” as the dominant story. Now she sees a shift, especially among the young: “The rising generation is saying ‘I have feasted on the secularism that you have fed me, and it has made me sick. Where can I go to find people who will tell me the truth about who I am and how I can find hope and healing?'”
Churches are welcoming “lapsed atheists,” she said, and the hunger is real. But the first contact is usually not a sermon: “They are hearing it on a podcast, in a documentary, in a column, in a 30-second clip on their phone at one o’clock in the morning.”
My take
That 1 a.m. clip is where the Holy Spirit is meeting people right now. Romans 10 asks how they’ll hear without a preacher. Today the preacher might be a podcast host or a short video, and God isn’t limited by the format. If you post anything about Jesus online, it matters more than you think.
