Revival Rain and the Soil of the Church
Why an Outpouring Cannot Replace the Work of Forming a Mature People
by Raimer R. ~ May 18, 2026
by Raimer R. ~ May 18, 2026
I wrote this article because I regularly hear pastoral leaders calling the church to pray for revival. Some are local. Others serve in different parts of the world. I understand that longing. I share it. What grieves me is how rarely the pursuit of revival is matched by an equally serious pursuit of biblical discipleship. I hear many calls for a fresh outpouring, but far fewer calls to realign our churches with the way Jesus formed people. I see little urgency to recover the healthy priorities of the New Testament church.
Sometimes it sounds as though we want the church to change without accepting responsibility for how it is presently forming people. We ask God to send something new while leaving unhealthy leadership cultures and shallow discipleship systems largely untouched. That feels wrong and deeply disheartening.
We cannot keep asking God to repair from heaven what we remain unwilling to confront on earth. Prayer is not a substitute for repentance. Dependence upon the Holy Spirit is not permission to ignore what He has already shown us about forming disciples. We have been entrusted with a responsibility to steward. That is the burden behind this article.
— Raimer R.
Many believers sincerely long for revival, awakening, and a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church. They see shallowness. They see division. They see a troubling lack of maturity. Something is clearly missing. But there is a hunger for God to move again — to awaken hearts, restore passion, and bring life where the church has grown dry. The cry for renewal is deeply biblical:
“Lord, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, Lord. Repeat them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy.” — Habakkuk 3:2 NIV
That longing is not wrong. Revival can be a great mercy from God. It can expose sin, awaken hunger, and interrupt spiritual drift. We should pray for the Holy Spirit to move powerfully among His people. But we must also face a difficult question: What if we are asking revival to solve problems that revival alone cannot solve?
Revival can quietly become an external answer to an internal problem. Churches may hope that one powerful outpouring will fix what years of shallow discipleship have produced. Leaders may expect a sudden move of God to repair unhealthy cultures that have never been honestly confronted. Revival then becomes imagined as a spiritual shortcut. It is often easier to call people to pray for awakening than to examine how the church is actually forming them. It is easier to seek a dramatic encounter than to rebuild a culture around repentance, maturity, and obedience.
Wanting revival is not the problem. Abdicating responsibility while waiting for revival is. We cannot pray for transformation while refusing to examine the systems in our churches that continually form people in the wrong direction. Leaders must be willing to ask:
What kind of people are we actually forming?
Is our leadership culture healthy and accountable?
Are we equipping people to follow Jesus without depending on leaders?
Is truth becoming embodied in everyday life?
Are relationships becoming honest and mature?
Can ordinary believers help form other disciples?
These questions are less dramatic than revival meetings. But they may reveal more about the true condition of a church.
The Holy Spirit works through moments of extraordinary power. He also works through repentance, faithful obedience, and long-term formation. We must not celebrate one while neglecting the other.
Without the Holy Spirit, real transformation cannot happen. Christianity is not behavior modification. It is not a human improvement project. Yet the Spirit often transforms people through a long process. He corrects us. He retrains us. He forms us within the life of the church.
An outpouring may awaken people, but awakening does not automatically produce mature disciples. Revival environments can greatly affect emotions and spiritual awareness. People may experience conviction, renewed passion, or a powerful encounter with God. Those experiences can be genuine. But emotional intensity is not the same as internalized transformation. A person may feel spiritually alive during a meeting yet remain unable to respond to disappointment in a Christlike way. Someone may experience deep conviction yet return to the same destructive relational patterns.
Why? Because an encounter can touch the heart in a moment, but formation reshapes the person over time. Our patterns of thinking must be renewed. Our reactions must be retrained. Our relationships must increasingly come under the reign of Jesus.
Revival may open the door. Discipleship teaches us how to walk through it.
Theologian and pastor Jonathan Edwards wrestled deeply with this tension during and after the revival movements that reached Northampton in 1734–1735 and again during the early 1740s. He was not studying revival from a distance. He had pastored the community before the awakening, shepherded it through the intensity, and remained close enough to observe what lasted afterward. Edwards saw genuine conversions. He saw conviction of sin and renewed seriousness about God. He also saw people who appeared deeply affected but did not show enduring evidence of transformation.
That pastoral experience gave weight to his later work, Religious Affections, published in 1746. Edwards argued that true faith involves the affections — the deep loves and desires of the heart. He was not against emotion. He believed real encounters with God should affect us deeply. But strong emotions alone proved very little. Tears were not enough. Zeal was not enough. Spiritual excitement was not enough. The deeper test was the fruit that remained.
Did a person become humbler?
Did love grow?
Did obedience become visible in everyday life?
Edwards had seen authentic transformation and shallow emotionalism exist within the same movement. That forced him to face an uncomfortable truth: Not every powerful spiritual experience produces lasting spiritual change. Some experiences awaken us. Some begin real renewal. But when those experiences are not followed by repentance and formation, the emotion may fade while the old person remains largely untouched. That insight carries enormous weight for every leader longing for revival.
Later revival movements offer similar warnings.
The Azusa Street Revival, beginning in 1906, helped spread Pentecostal Christianity around the world and crossed racial barriers in remarkable ways. Yet the mission later fractured through leadership conflict, theological disputes, and growing racial division. Key leaders left, competing ministries formed, and the interracial unity that had marked the revival weakened. The loss of The Apostolic Faith newspaper and its mailing list was one part of this larger breakdown. Azusa blessed the nations while leaving painful wounds at its center.
The Brownsville Revival began in Pensacola in 1995 and influenced churches far beyond Florida. Many people testified to repentance and renewed faith. Yet the church’s aftermath was painful. Leadership relationships fractured, key leaders resigned, and the congregation was left carrying heavy debt after repeated building expansions. Some who lived closest to the revival were left deeply disappointed and disillusioned.
The Lakeland meetings of 2008 spread rapidly through television and the internet, drawing large crowds even as some Pentecostal leaders raised concerns. The movement ended abruptly when its central leader, Todd Bentley, separated from his wife amid an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. Later investigations concluded that the problems went far beyond one failed marriage, revealing a years-long pattern of sexual misconduct, substance abuse, and inappropriate behavior toward people under his spiritual care. Bentley was ultimately declared unqualified for ministry, leaving many wounded and confused by how quickly spiritual excitement and public endorsement had moved ahead of tested character and meaningful accountability.
These movements were not identical, and their fruit should not be flattened into one judgment. Real people may have encountered God within them. But history still issues a warning: A church can attract the world’s attention while neglecting the health of the people standing nearest to the fire.
Crowds can grow quickly. Influence can spread quickly. But character and healthy community are formed much more slowly. When leadership cannot carry the pressure, hidden weakness becomes public damage. People who came hungry for God may leave angry at the church.
A sudden rainstorm can be a gift to land suffering through drought. But when heavy rain falls upon hard or neglected soil, the water may not sink in. It runs across the surface. It carries the soil away. What should have brought life can produce flooding and destruction. The problem is not the rain. The problem is the condition of the soil receiving it.
In the same way, a powerful spiritual outpouring can overwhelm a church that lacks depth, stability, and healthy discipleship. When formation is weak:
zeal can outrun character
influence can grow faster than accountability
crowds can overwhelm discipleship
spiritual experiences can exceed maturity
charisma can hide a lack of integrity
passion can burn without rootedness
The result may be confusion. It may be division. In some cases, it becomes collapse.
Healthy soil can receive the rain. Healthy soil can absorb it deeply. Healthy soil can hold it long enough to produce lasting fruit. But hard soil may be unable to contain the very thing it desperately longs for. That is a sobering truth for leaders seeking awakening.
The question is not only: “How do we pray for an outpouring of spiritual rain?” It is also: “What kind of soil are we becoming?”
Are we cultivating communities marked by:
humility and truthfulness
repentance and emotional maturity
healthy relationships
wise leadership
loving accountability
deep discipleship
reproducible practices
multiplying disciples
stability under pressure
embodied faith
long-term formation into Christlikeness
Or are we calling people to seek an outpouring while failing to cultivate the kind of church that can faithfully receive and steward it?
Revival is not only about praying for rain. It is also about preparing the soil.
The church truly needs awakening. We need the Holy Spirit to expose sin. We need Him to restore love for Jesus. We need Him to breathe life into places that have grown dry. But perhaps one of the great works God desires to do in this generation is not only to send revival rain. Perhaps He also desires to prepare the church to carry the weight of genuine renewal.
The Spirit does not only awaken people in moments. He forms people over time. He works through repentance and discipleship. He leads us into embodied obedience. He forms us into the likeness of Christ.
True renewal requires both:
the fresh rain of God’s Spirit
healthy soil that can receive it
Without rain, the land remains dry. But without healthy soil, even a great outpouring may run across the surface and disappear. Worse, it may expose every weakness that leaders refused to address beforehand.
Revival without formation can produce temporary excitement. Formation without the Holy Spirit becomes lifeless religion. But revival joined to deep discipleship can produce something far more enduring: mature people who love Jesus, remain steady under pressure, and faithfully carry His life into the world.
So let us pray for revival. But let us also repent, rebuild, and realign. Let us ask God for rain while allowing Him to break up the hard ground beneath our feet. The church does not merely need another powerful moment. It needs to become the kind of people who can carry what God pours out.