“Reading For Renewal” Revisited
Photo by Rob Birkbeck
An address given at the commencement ceremony of United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio, May 17, 2025.
For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Colossians 1:9-14).
The last time I gave the commencement address was in 2011 after I received tenure. The title of that address was “Reading for Renewal.” At that point in the U.S. we had seen around 40 years of unmitigated church decline, primarily within the mainline denominations. The church was in desperate need of renewal, and thus, as a seminary, we dedicated ourselves to working toward that end. The idea was not to sell some church-growth program that churches might replicate. Rather, our commitment to church renewal was rooted in the idea of divine agency. In other words, we don’t renew the church; God does. All renewal, whether of individuals, churches, or the church universal, is the work of the Holy Spirit. Our job, then, is to discern what the Spirit is doing and cooperate with that work.
Fourteen years ago, to base your institutional identity on church renewal was an act of faith. To many it must have seemed like naïve optimism. Prognosticators envisioned the church in the U.S. heading full steam toward the dismal numbers that characterized the church in Western Europe. The New Atheism, which was not all that different from the old atheism, was in full swing. The number of people who claimed to have no religion was on the rise. To dedicate your life and vocation to the service of the church was tantamount to buying a Blockbuster Video franchise.
Rooting one’s program for church renewal, moreover, not in programmatic initiatives but in the power of the living God was like speaking a foreign language in mainline Protestantism. A century of liberal theology had reduced our understanding of God to little more than a construct. This was the theology shaped by two world wars and the Holocaust. The problem of evil loomed large. Theodicy—the question of God’s justice in a world filled with senseless tragedy—churned constantly in the background. God became to us like an idea that gave heft to our principles around social justice and works of mercy. Notions of direct divine action—or the idea that God might actually do something within the cause-and-effect nexus of history—were viewed as holdovers from an ancient worldview, no longer relevant or believable to those with a mature Christian faith.
Changing Narratives
The dramatic rise of Christianity in the Global South, however, problematized the narrative of the death of God and the decline of the church considerably. And, wouldn’t you know it, Global South Christianity has often been characterized by powerful gifts of the Spirit. Philip Jenkins was among the first to call attention to this phenomenon in The Next Christendom. Among people in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—many of whom were far better acquainted with hardship and suffering than the middle-class denizens of the Western mainline—the church was experiencing explosive growth. The experience of the Western world was not the normative experience for the rest of the world.
Apparently, God was not dead yet. It was a fascinating change in the narrative about the future of Christianity. The Western church might fade into oblivion, but God would not be without a witness. For Western Christians with eyes to see, it was also humbling. We were used to being the head, not the tail. Yet as we read in 1 Peter 5:5, “God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble.”
Now the narrative is changing once again. The Pew Research Center findings from the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study show that, after decades of church decline in the U.S., between 2019 and 2024 “the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable,” hovering somewhere around 62%.
Ryan Burge is a political scientist who has documented the rise of religious “nones,” or people who claim to have no religion. That trend, according to Burge, has leveled off in the U.S. at about 35% of the population. But here’s the more surprising data point. Among the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers, the number of non-religious people continues to rise. Among Gen-Xers and Millennials, it has remained stable. But among Generation Z, people the age of my kids, the percentage of non-religious people is declining. The oldest Americans are becoming less religious. Younger Americans are showing the opposite trend.
The American Bible Society reported this year an increase of about 10 million people in the U.S. reading the Bible outside of church. Bible engagement among both Millennials and Gen Z is up.
One also finds signs of renewal in the United Kingdom. The UK’s Bible Society has published a report called “The Quiet Revival.” One of the authors of this report writes, “These are striking findings that completely reverse the widely held assumption that the Church in England and Wales is in terminal decline….[W]e’ve seen significant, broad-based growth among most expressions of Church – particularly in Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism. There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.’”
France appears to be experiencing signs of renewal as well. A report from the French Catholic Church “reveals the highest numbers [of adult catechumens] since the survey began over 20 years ago. Even more striking is that young adults now constitute the largest segment of converts.” The National Catholic Register reports “an unprecedented surge in attendance for Ash Wednesday Masses [across France] this year.” The number of evangelical Christians in France is likewise growing. While in 1950 they numbered about 50,000 in total, today there are about 750,000 French evangelical Christians.
The renewal of Christianity is happening all across the world—yes, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—but also here in the U.S. and across Western Europe. And God knows we need it. Seriously, God knows that. That’s why it’s happening.
Who saw this coming? Well, God saw it coming. The Holy Spirit has exceeded the low expectations of many Christian leaders. God is an overachiever.
In light of this new narrative, how will we respond?
Being Yourself
Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, my generation (and then subsequent generations) was the unfortunate victims of the self-esteem movement. We were told we were great just the way we were. We were told to be ourselves, to do our own thing, to follow our hearts.
What a cruel thing to teach children.
It makes sense in the post-Enlightenment era, shaped so markedly by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his intellectual descendants. Rousseau believed the natural state of humanity to be a state of goodness. It was not sin, but society, that caused our corruption. The natural human, unadulterated by the conventions of government, society, and church, is the ideal human. Rousseau wrote his own work called Confessions quite obviously in opposition to Augustine’s work by the same name. It is, among other things, a repudiation of the doctrine of original sin. This perspective churns in the background of the understanding of human nature so pervasive in the Western world. If human beings are, by nature, naturally inclined toward goodness, then the discovery of their true selves is the best possible outcome. Hence we tell them, “Just be yourself,” and unwittingly guide them toward their damnation.
I don’t know how Rousseau ever concluded that people are naturally good. That hasn’t been my experience. We sometimes speak of the innocence of children, but I wonder if the people describing children in this way have spent very much time around children. There is a reason we must train children up in moral character and behavior, and it isn’t because they have been born in a state of moral perfection.
Orthodox Christianity has a balanced and realistic approach to good and evil as these apply to human beings. We are, in one sense, innately good since we are God’s creation and bear his image. And yet sin exerts its power over our lives. Hence we resist God. We rebel. We are proud and willful creatures. We insist on our own way and thus do harm to ourselves and others. Sin tarnishes the image of God and makes it unrecognizable within us.
But in his great mercy, God has sent us a savior. And we don’t have to be subject to the agony, alienation, isolation, frustration, guilt, and shame of our sin. We don’t have to live that way anymore. Jesus Christ sets us free. We can be born again. We can have new life.
Knowledge that Leads to New Life
This is what Paul prays for as he lifts up the church in Colossae. At the outset of this letter, Paul urges the church—and us—to embrace the truth of Christ, and to reject practices and beliefs that distract or divert us from living the life that God has for us. His prayer for the believers of Colossae is, “that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God” (1:9-10).
What’s Paul getting at here? The knowledge of God’s will, spiritual wisdom, and understanding should make us holy. Knowledge of God is a means of grace. It orients us toward our salvation.
Later in Colossians, in 3:9, he reminds his readers that they have taken off the old self and the practices that went with it, and now they are clothed in a new self, “which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”
Knowledge and new life go together.
This isn’t simply knowledge that one would get from reading a catechism. Even the demons believe—and shudder (James 2:19). Catechesis matters, but that’s not only what is at stake here. One can have knowledge but lack wisdom. One can have knowledge but lack discernment. As Wesley put it, one “may be almost as orthodox as the devil … and may all the while be as great a stranger as he to the religion of the heart.” Orthodoxy is necessary, but not sufficient. Thus Paul prays they will be filled with spiritual wisdom and understanding.
His expectation of these Christians is nothing less than the renewal of the image of God, the destruction of the body of sin, the transformation from death to life. They have been rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of his beloved son. This is not an exhortation to lead a happier, more fulfilled, basically moral life.
This is a hard reset.
“When you were buried with him in baptism,” Paul writes, “you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead” (2:12). You died in Christ, and now you have new life in Christ. You’re not just a better person. You’re not the Revised Standard Version of your old self. You’re a new creation. Everything old has passed away. Everything has become new.
Paul was all in on that message. He traveled throughout the Mediterranean world. He proclaimed the Good News wherever he could be heard. The people of the churches he founded became his spiritual sons and daughters. He loved them even when they didn’t love him back. He wept over them and forgave them. He prayed for them. He suffered for them. But more than that, he did all of this for Jesus Christ.
Knowledge and New Life Today
So how about us? What if, despite all of the ways in which we in the Western church have abandoned and betrayed him, Christ has decided to be merciful to us and renew us again? What if we are standing at the cusp of a new Great Awakening? What if God is shaking us out of our spiritual stupor?
Younger generations are beginning to awaken to their need for God. They are beginning, even if in modest numbers, to come to church. So when they show up in our churches, what will we offer them? Milquetoast Methodism won't cut it. Hallmark theology won’t cut it. Churches obsessed with politics or offering self-help with Christian window dressing will only look unserious. What we must give them is what they can receive nowhere else: the knowledge that leads to new life.
Properly understood, the Christian faith involves radical transformation. I hesitate to use the word “radical” because everything from running shoes to allergy medication is styled as radical these days. But I will use “radical” here because it is fitting in the most basic sense of the word. The word “radical” comes from the Latin radix, which means “root.” Properly understood, the Christian faith involves radical transformation. In Christ, we are changed at the very root of our being. The transformation goes all the way through.
That’s what we have to offer: radical transformation, new life. The church has been given the beautiful and frightening responsibility of leading people into new life in Christ.
But will we do it?
Let me tell you about the worst sermon I ever heard. It was at a service and lunch for homeless people in Dallas, Texas. I was part of a church that had a ministry to the homeless. We would provide a hot meal and offer a worship service. This week a retired minister came in to preach. His text was the Beatitudes of Matthew 5, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. These were hurting people. Some were strung out. Most were exhausted by living outside in the unrelenting Texas heat. They needed a word of hope. They needed the gospel. And what better words of hope than Jesus’ own preaching?
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
If you can’t preach on that, you should consider a different vocation.
But this man began by talking about how the Sermon on the Mount was not actually a single sermon Jesus preached, but a collection of sayings from the hypothetical Q document, woven together by a redactor we call Matthew, whose identity is lost to history.
It was a spectacular faceplant. And no one cared about anything he had to say after that. He had an opportunity to proclaim the life-changing Gospel of Jesus Christ, and he squandered it by beginning with a pedantic lesson in higher criticism.
This is an extreme example, however, of something more common: we teach and proclaim, but what we teach and proclaim is not always the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It may be the kind of thing I’ve come to call Christianity-adjacent. It sounds like Christianity. It uses many of the same symbols and words as Christianity, but it cannot save. There is no new life there. There is no radical transformation. And what a tragedy that is…. What a waste to give people a placebo when we have the spiritual medicine of the Holy Spirit.
In the United States, we are experiencing what the U.S. Surgeon General called an “epidemic of loneliness.” We live among an increasingly disconnected, individualistic, dopamine-fueled, porn-addicted culture where we are taught to be slaves to the attention economy. No wonder younger generations are seeking something deeper.
And here’s the good news: we have that “something deeper.” Amid this world gone wrong, we get to offer people new life in Christ. That’s our birthright: to lead people into the knowledge of God so that they can receive newness of life.
So will we live into our birthright, or will we sell it for a mess of pottage? Will we impart the knowledge of God that leads to salvation, or will we settle for smooth words and TED talks? Will we live out and teach the message of radical transformation, or will we sink back into a warm bath of comfortable platitudes? Will we contend for the faith once delivered to the saints, or will we seek the path of least resistance? Will we mentor the young? Will we invest in them, spend our time with them? Will we love them? Will we sacrifice for them? Or will simply beget children for the murderer and leave them to wander like sheep without shepherds?
This world doesn’t need Christian-adjacent preaching or smooth words that give us comfort without conviction. It doesn’t need the form of religion without the power. It needs an industrial-strength, high-octane proclamation of Jesus Christ and salvation from sin and death. It needs a church that takes seriously the salvation of the lost. It needs people who will pour themselves out to teach, mentor, and love new generations of believers. It needs people who will live and die for the gospel.
Now is the time to be bold, to be clear, to contend for the faith once and for all entrusted to the saints. Now is the time to be all-in. And if we are, there are generations yet to be born who will be blessed by our witness.
So what will we do?
I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to pursue my calling and vocation here at United. What a ride it’s been. I have prayed for this community countless times over the years, and will continue to do so. May God bless you and fill you with the knowledge of his will, so that you, too, may lead lives fully pleasing to him. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. Starting July 1, he will begin serving as president of Asbury Theological Seminary.