Richard F. Lovelace - Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal

Dynamics of Spiritual Life is a book we cant do without. Richard Lovelaces classic was amazingly prescient when first published forty years ago, and it is still relevant to many of todays ministry issues.

Earlier in my ministry, when church planters came to me and asked, What should I read? I always gave them two books: Michael Greens Evangelism Through the Local Church (Hodder & Stoughton, 1990) and Lovelaces Dynamics of Spiritual Life. The Green book was a practical how-to guide for getting the gospel out. Lovelaces book gave leaders a way of using the gospel in peoples lives that not only brought them to saving faith but also kept renewing them individually and corporately.

Lovelaces expertise is in the history of revivals. Today there is less interest in and desire for revival than there was a generation ago. Every traditionMethodist, Pentecostal, Reformed, and so onalso has a somewhat different conception of what revival entails. Lovelace, however, worked to discover what all revivals have in common. He reached a conclusion that has become a key component of my own writing and teaching: revivals and renewals are a necessary part of the life of the church. Because of the default mode of the human heart, revival is a pattern repeatedly used by the Holy Spirit to reconnect Christian communities with the power of the gospel.

I took several courses with Richard Lovelace at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, including the class by the very title Dynamics of Spiritual Life, right after I arrived in the fall of 1972. The following semester I took his course on the history of evangelical revivals and awakenings. The content of those classes eventually became this book. Under Lovelace I read deeply in Jonathan Edwards and also met his modernizers, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, J. I. Packer, and Lovelace himself, who distilled Edwardss thought in Dynamics. Their descriptions of revival were an enormous help to me in understanding what my wife, Kathy, and I had recently seen, albeit briefly, on our own college campuses.

When I became a Christian, around January 1970, I was attending an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter at Bucknell University. At that time the InterVarsity groups on campuses throughout central Pennsylvania were all small and sleepy. Then during the 19701971 school year there was an explosion of spiritual interest. By the end of the year we had about one hundred students attending meetings, up from the longtime average of five to fifteen. Dozens of people came to Christ, though there had been no outreach programs to speak of. I also remember going that spring to the central Pennsylvania area retreat and discovering that similar changes had spontaneously been occurring on most of the other campuses, including Allegheny College, where Kathy was a student.

Years later, during the first eighteen months after founding Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, we again saw the spiritual dynamics we had seen on those campuses. At that time (19891991) Manhattan was crime-ridden and hard hit by a recession. There were very few evangelical churches in the whole metro area, and Christians were not moving into the city, only out of it. Yet we saw about one hundred people come to faith and our church grow from zero to hundreds in attendance in just a few monthsall in a location where no one said it could happen.

What I learned firsthand from these experiences was this: Revivals can last several years or only a few weeks. They can be widespread, affecting a whole town or region or country, or more narrow in scope, such as within one congregation. But they are always seasons in which the ordinary operations of the Holy Spirit are greatly intensified. We cannot