More than 20 years ago, I took my first ministry role as an associate pastor. I served at a small Baptist church with senior pastor, Randal Pollock, a man who loves Jesus, models a spirit of prayer, and loves to work together with friends.

One example from my time serving with Pollock stands out. Each year, our local church partnered with four other congregations on Louisville’s South End for a series of “revival meetings.” Over several Sunday nights, we met together for joint worship services at each church. The series of meetings culminated in a week of outdoor worship and preaching each night at a local park.

Revival can’t be scheduled. As Obbie Tyler Todd wrote this week, “A reviving work of God, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, cannot be confined to a pulpit or sanctuary,”—or, I could add, a local park amphitheater. Thankfully, the group of pastor-friends who planned those annual gatherings understood that truth. Pollock often said, “These are actually revival-seeking meetings. True revival begins on our knees.”

He was right. In his article, Todd reviews a history of American awakenings and concludes, “The first showers of an outpouring of the Holy Spirit appear much less extraordinary than most of us tend to think.” We may associate “revival” with tent-style meetings that include passionate preaching or emotional singing, but historically revivals have been birthed from a recovery of the gospel, a hunger for God’s Word, the discipline of prayer, and the practice of repentance.

That’s what has impressed me most about Pollock—not the meetings he helped to plan but his commitment to regularly connect with other pastors to pray that God’s people would be marked by renewal and repentance. In our present cultural moment, that’s what we should be pursuing too. As Todd writes, “The blueprint for revival [isn’t] unlike the blessing of revival itself. . . . True revival is marked less by its press coverage and more by its attention to the ordinary means of grace.”

Editors’ note: If you’re interested in developing your writing skills, join me and the rest of TGC’s editorial team for our next TGC Writers’ Cohort, February 25 to April 15, 2026 (8 weekly sessions). Learn more.