I get a lot of e-mails from people with names like Stacey Slaughter and Ernie Tension offering me products and services of dubious origin. So when I got an email from Rev. Dick Blank you'll understand that my right index finger was poised to send it into junk-mail purgatory. Thankfully I read it, kept it and have been thinking about the Rev's comments ever since.

Let me explain. My mystery e-mailer turned out to be a living, breathing human being who had studiously digested the September/October 2006 issue of Ministry Today. He had a question about a couple of the articles that he wanted to put to the authors. I had written a piece ("Fire Down Under") about a revival taking place among Aboriginal Christians in Northern Australia. Harry R. Jackson had written an excellent article ("Black/White Issue") about the need for the church to become a more effective agent of social change and racial unity. The question was this: Both pieces talked about poor black populations, one describing a spiritual revival and the social impact and the other calling Christians to a political action for social justice. How do these two fit together? Is there a connection between spiritual renewal and social transformation? Is one approach more Christian than the other?

From my point of view, the answer is clear. Sort of. Should true revival impact external social structures as well as internal church experiences? Of course it should. Does it? Not always. Let me explain.

Take a look at the great revivals of the past and social justice has played an integral part. Acts 2 describes an almost unimaginable state where "all the believers were selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as they had need" (Acts 2:44-5). Methodism has roots were bound up with the reversing of social decay and depravity while the birth of Pentecostalism in Los Angeles in 1906 was intricately connected to the breakdown of racial prejudice. When God moves oppression and injustice are challenged.

But while it is clear throughout the Bible and more recent history that God's Spirit urges us out from our well-defended ghettos, there are times when we simply refuse to budge. I remember hearing how Jackie Pullinger (founder of the St. Stephen's Society, a mission to homeless and prostitutes in Hong Kong) berated people like me for soaking up the Toronto Blessing without regard for God's bigger plan. As she put it, "When we heard that people were jumping on planes to go to the place where the laughing was we thought that it would not be long before they boarded planes to come to the places where the crying is. We waited. You never came."

The Old Testament prophets were familiar with our failings, none more so than Amos, whose critique of a self-obsessed, myopic, unjust and introverted "church" make for chilling reading today.

So here we are, back at the question again; is revival better than justice? It's a false opposition: justice and true revival cannot be seen as separate components. While are all aware that God's grace is more than enough for our failings we cannot take our inadequacies lightly. After all, do we really want to be responsible for holding back the Spirit of God? Do we really want to leave justice to groups other than the great body of Christ? Are we really ready to give up on the pursuit of selfless sacrifice in service of our King?

Listen carefully and you can hear the answer to this final question. It's whispered in quiet corners and witnessed in the shadows, but it's there all right. After too many decades where decadence and selfish religion have held too much power within the church, things are beginning to change. God's people are opening their eyes to their Lord and their arms to the world.

Craig Borlase is a London-based author of books including William Seymour: A Biography and God's Gravity: The Upside Down Life of Selfless Faith. You can read his blog at craigborlase.com.

# posted by Matt Green : 6:00 PM