Pastor Francis Chan says he's tired of man-made revivals and warned the church that there's no time for "playing games" any more. Chan's comments came during a February 6 speech at Liberty University's Convocation gathering.
Chan, an avid surfer, compared man-made revivals to a wave pool—controlled and fun, but ultimately predictable and artificial. He says he came to that realization while visiting a wave pool in Waco, Texas.
"One of my favorite things to do on this earth is to surf," Chan says. "So I just go, 'OK, what is this wave pool like?' And it was really cool. It just showed these people playing on this wave that comes in and I thought 'That's kind of cool. Like every 30 seconds, you know.' Because usually when you surf, you paddle out in the water [and] you don't know if a wave is coming or not. You kind of assume, you kind of see some things, but there's so much unknown. I thought 'That's so nice. You can just paddle out to this one spot in this pool and know what wave is going to come, and you know when it's going to peak and then it's going to die out, and you just paddle back out to the exact same spot over and over and over again. That's pretty fun.'
"It's so different than going in the ocean, where it's like, 'Gosh, I don't know if something huge is going to come.' There have been times where we've driven for like an hour and just sat in the water—nothing happened. ... There's so many things that can happen in the ocean. And I thought, 'This is so nice. You can just go to a wave pool and you won't have any fear.'
"And when I looked at that thing, I thought, 'Gosh, you know, this is what church services sometimes feel like to me.' It's like this wave that you can create. You know at 9:15 this is going to happen, and you know at 9:20, and then you know at 9:40 it's going to start dying out because it has to. It's just going to happen. And you can do it over and over and over again. And I feel like for many years I've been content with that, because it's fun and everyone's having a good time. But man, don't you read the Scriptures and go 'Gosh, there was so much that was unpredictable'? Where it really was a move from God. It wasn't mad-made. It wasn't this man-made wave, but things would happen that were out of your control."
Chan says he is done with artificial moves of God and instead said he craves an authentic move of the Holy Spirit.
"I've been praying that this would be something that is not man-made, because I feel like I know how to make a wave in a room," Chan says. "And I'm just done with it. There's just no time for that anymore. I'm just done playing games."
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