Front Row at the Quiet Revival

Nine months ago, as my family and I prepared to move from Indianapolis to London for my PhD program, a friend commented that we were so lucky to go to the U.K. and be part of the “quiet revival” sweeping across Great Britain. “How exciting it will be,” she said, “to be part of God bringing a generation back to Jesus!”

Though I’d not heard the phrase before, I caught her enthusiasm immediately.

Last fall, on a Sunday morning, I experienced this reality while serving as a greeter for a church in London. I was assigned to be a welcoming presence at the front door of the small former-pool-hall-turned-cafe-and-worship-center just a few blocks from a major transportation hub. I watched in excitement as dozens and dozens of 20-somethings flooded into the church building.

Very quickly, our worship center was full, and we were setting up chairs in the cafe for overflow. Just a few minutes after that, I was instructed to close the front doors and politely tell people that we’d reached our building capacity and ask them if they could come back to the afternoon service. Fire safety regulations wouldn’t allow us to let anyone else in.

We chose to become part of this particular church because it was close (we didn’t want to ride the Tube for 45 minutes each way every Sunday!) and because it has a youth group (our daughter is 15, and most churches don’t have programming for young people her age) and because the church passionately preaches the gospel. But we also chose this church because we were overwhelmed by the number of young adults in the services.

I’d spent the last 15 years of ministry in the States longing to see a movement of God among young adults in Indianapolis. While we certainly saw young adults growing in faith, learning to lead and committing to evangelism, this “quiet revival” felt a lot louder than anything I’d experienced in Indianapolis.

That Sunday morning, I wondered: What could the church in the United States learn from the church in the United Kingdom?

The quiet revival 

In April 2025, the Bible Society in the U.K. published a report titled, “The Quiet Revival,” which initially indicated that the church attendance decline in the U.K. had turned around, and most drastically among young adults. Though the initial report was unfortunately based on faulty data and has been retracted, other data collected from reputable sources and compiled by the Bible Society still indicates that something is happening in young adults' attitudes towards traditional belief in God. One fun statistic: Since 2022, people in the U.K. are searching more often for "Bible" than for "Harry Potter"!

To find out more, I met with Matt Davis, ReachGlobal London City Team leader. We sat down for a cup of coffee—an Americano for me and a cortado for Matt—at a specialty coffee shop in Lambeth, south of the Thames, not too far from the church where Matt serves as an elder.

Matt was definitive: “The quiet revival is real.” He and his family have been in London since 2013, and he has seen more spiritual openness in the last few years than in the first decade they served. Sales of the Bible in the U.K. have more than doubled since 2019, driven in part by strong sales of Bibles aimed at younger audiences.

Matt told me about Globe Church, which was planted 10 years ago and has met in 17 different venues since then. Currently, they meet on Sunday afternoons in a rented school auditorium with a seating capacity of 300, a limit they’re quickly approaching. Matt described it as “an ugly building with terrible lighting and bad technology—but the church continues to grow.”

Eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds are walking in the door, hungry. They’ve been left empty by the relentless pursuit of “more” and are looking for someone who will listen to their questions, someone who will engage them one-on-one about the emptiness they feel. As John Stevens, director of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, says in an article from The Gospel Coalition reflecting on the Quiet Revival report:

“Secular liberalism hasn’t delivered the happiness and freedom it promised, and loneliness and mental health issues are ever-increasing. Young people bear the impossible burden of defining their own identity, and young men are tired of the relentless castigating of so-called toxic masculinity.”

Graham Miller, chief executive of the London City Mission, agrees: “COVID, and the social isolation that came with it, left young people facing a pandemic of mental health issues—which they’re still facing now...Unlike their parents or grandparents, they haven’t been exposed to a steady diet of liberal Christianity, with its vague sense that ‘everything will be alright.’ Instead, many are looking for meaning, truth, and answers.”

A key to understanding this new openness may lie in Britain’s path toward secularization. Though its cultural heritage is littered with Christian influence, young adults can be introduced to the claims of Jesus as something new. They may have a vague awareness of Christian stories—nativities and Noah’s Ark—but growing up secular seems to be paradoxically resulting in more openness to Jesus, not less. They’re looking for transcendence, and because they haven’t inherited an assumption that Christianity is a dead-end endeavor, Jesus becomes plausible. More than plausible: Believable! 

John Stevens adds an intriguing thought: “In many ways, it’s easier to preach the gospel in a post-Christian, liberal, progressive culture than to try to fight the battle to maintain cultural Christianity and its attendant morality.”

When I served as a student ministry pastor, I served alongside phenomenal parents who led as small group leaders that engaged the deep questions, were patient and caring and loving, gently welcoming and embracing kids who were exploring faith for the first time, while reaching out with compassion to kids who were wandering away from their faith.

Unless it was their own child.

If it was their own kid who was deconstructing, they were wracked with guilt: “What did I do wrong?” And consumed with worry: “Will they ever come back to Jesus?” If they weren’t careful, that guilt and worry turned to anger: “I raised them better than this!”

It’s easier to preach the gospel to someone else’s post-Christian, liberal, progressive kid than to your own.

The church in America, I’ve come to realize, tends to think of the United States in a similar way. U.K. churches, on the other hand, see themselves as a remnant living in exile. That’s the way Matt Davis put it: “Christians in the U.K don’t have all the parallel Christian institutions that exist in the States. There aren’t many youth groups or Christian schools. It’s just not possible to opt out of broader society. A Christian life in the U.K. won’t be easy. It shouldn’t be easy. We should feel like aliens here. When we choose to follow Jesus, we’re choosing something that will ostracize us. This is not our home.”

What can we learn? 

I asked Matt: “What can churches in the United States learn from the experience of churches in the United Kingdom? How can we, too, have our own quiet revival?”

On one level, I was surprised by Matt’s answer, though I shouldn’t have been. “Every church that’s experiencing the fruit of this quiet revival,” he said, “is focused on three main things.” I leaned in. This is what I was hoping to learn.

“Prayer. Worship. Preaching. That’s it.”

I was surprised by the simplicity of the answer, surprised that his answer lines up exactly with what I’ve experienced at the church we’re attending, and even more surprised when I realized that in my previous ministry, of all the things I spent my time focusing on, these three were often last on the list and received the least energy.

Prayer, worship and preaching. That’s it.

Matt has toured more than a few American pastors around evangelical church plants in London and has spent hours upon hours talking with them about leading gospel-centered churches in the U.K. Their reflections at the end of their trips are almost always the same. First, they reflect on the culture of prayer: “Wow. You guys pray a lot! In services, in homes, at coffee shops. You’re always praying.”

I’ve experienced the same thing and heard it from others. Our church’s worship service routinely goes almost two hours, though it’s only scheduled for an hour and fifteen minutes. Some of the overage is the preacher’s fault, but most of it comes from open-ended, un-scripted prayer, when the congregation can come up and be prayed for. Sometimes these prayer moments last for a few minutes, sometimes for almost half an hour.

U.K. churches have been praying for decades, seeking God’s presence as a people, unconcerned with perfect production value. Even amidst the miscues, flubbed lines and missing lyrics, the church services I have attended felt beyond it. I witnessed church leaders expecting God to show up.

Somewhere along the way in my pastoring, I lost that sense of expectation, that eager anticipation and prayerful pleading for God to move among His people as His people worshiped Him. I’m not sure I could even recognize God when He did show up. I thought that if someone had an emotional experience, that must mean that God had met them in that moment. It’s easier to create an emotional experience for people than it is to create an opportunity to encounter God.

Thirdly, after Matt tours his pastor friends around, they also inevitably comment on the role of Scripture in London churches. “You guys are always in the Bible.” Matt agrees. “When I get together with someone one-on-one, there’s an expectation that we’re going to get our Bibles out and we’re going to read together and talk about what we’re reading. There’s no way we wouldn’t. People want to be in the Word, and they want to be growing in Him.”

I’ve noticed the same thing. Growing, healthy churches are unapologetically committed to the authority of Scripture while at the same time making room for people who don’t agree with them to encounter Scripture for themselves. People are invited to ask difficult questions, and leaders don’t shy away. They assume that with prayer and dependence on the Holy Spirit, eventually every hard question will be answered. And if not answered, at least held in tension with faithfully following Jesus.

Matt summarized it all by recalling one particular American pastor who, after visiting London, touring church plants and talking about leadership, wryly stated, “After seeing you guys, I realize we don’t need half the stuff we think we need in the American church.”  

My takeaways 

I don’t know if I fully agree with Matt’s American pastor friend. The U.S. isn’t secular enough yet for us to introduce Jesus as new. But I think there are things the U.S. church can learn from the quiet revival in the U.K. I don’t know what’s next for me after my PhD, but if I am called back into pastoral leadership, I know what three things I’ll emphasize more than anything else. 

First, we’ll zealously pray for the lost. When I look back on my ministry in Indianapolis, I’m saddened to realize that I did not lead a single effort toward revivalistic prayer. I'm ashamed to say that we prayed for lesser things—good things, but lesser. Moving forward, I would zealously call us to prayer for our neighbors to know Jesus, and commit to that focus for decades. I’d love to be the one who sees the fruit of those prayers, but if I’m not, I want the next generation to receive the fruit of decades of prayer. 

Second, we’ll worship God, not schedules. I perfected my minute-by-minute run sheets for worship services, so everyone knew exactly who was doing what and how long it should take. I led as if excellence was how our team could guarantee people would encounter God, but excellence is simply a byproduct of passionately offering our whole selves to creating the opportunity for people to encounter God. Last week, I caught a glimpse of my current church’s run sheet when I was volunteering to run a camera. There were no times on the sheet. For them, encountering God in prayer and worship was more important than ending at a specific time. 

Third, we’ll preach the Word like we can’t live without it. We’ll make the Word central to why we gather, whenever and wherever we meet. We’ll make sure people don’t have to already agree that the Bible is true before they’re welcomed into the community that is living by it. Let them see that it is true by watching it truly lived out in us. 

These practices don’t guarantee revival. Instead, they’re the simple habits that God is blessing in U.K. churches—and, I expect, of the churches He’s blessing across the world. 

If the quiet revival has taught me anything, it’s taught me that maybe it’s true we don’t need half the stuff we think we need in the American church.