Throughout this week, I have been following the online reports about the remarkable day-after-day revival gatherings that are taking place at Asbury University in Kentucky.

If you know about Methodist and Holiness movements, it isn’t surprising that this kind of spiritual earthquake would take place — again — at this location (here are some Asbury library resources on the history of earlier revivals).

Years ago, I went to Asbury for a speaking engagement. I noticed that there were tissue boxes placed a regular intervals along the sanctuary prayer rail-kneeling area. In other words, this is a campus in which it is normal for worshippers to kneel in sorrow/joy (often part of the same experience) while offering prayers of petition or repentance. This is part of the spiritual DNA of this community.

While reading social-media offerings about the revival, I also ran regular Google News searches (sample here) to see if journalists — including those at elite publications — have been covering this event.

The pickings have been rather lean, for reasons we discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). I found myself, in a kind of time-travel experience, imaging myself attempting to convince a newspaper editor that this mysterious, spiritual outbreak was a BIG. NEWS. STORY.

This led me, believe it or not, straight to “The Screwtape Letters,” by C.S. Lewis, the famous Oxford scholar and Christian apologist. In this classic, global bestseller a master demon writes letters to his nephew Wormwood, an apprentice in need of advice on how to lead a human soul into hell. The relevant text, in my musings on the “news value” of this Asbury revival, is Letter 25. The key passage states:

“The real trouble about the set your patient is living is that it is merely Christianity. … What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity AND.’ You know –– Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.”

In other words, national journalists may be trying to figure out what the “AND” is in this story.