Do You See Revival Happening Where You Live?

Bottom line upfront: Before I stand up in front of a think tank in a couple of weeks, I need to hear your thoughts. Do you see evidence of revival in your community, and in the United States? Take the 30-second survey: https://bttb.org/revival

Let me tell you about the time many ministry leaders, churches and donors got fooled.

In the spring of 2025 a report came out of England called “The Quiet Revival.” The Bible Society of England and Wales published it, and the numbers were the kind to make you sit up and take notice. Monthly church attendance among adults had climbed from 8 percent to 12 percent in six years. Among 18-to-24-year-olds it had gone from 4 percent to 16 percent — a fourfold jump — with young men leading the way.

Most people absolutely loved it. Many passed it around and tons of people quoted it.

Before you know it, the report was everywhere. It was cited in Parliament. It was the focus of conference programs on both sides of the Atlantic. At least one local council made long-range planning decisions on its strength.

Budgets moved: There were youth ministry hires, long-range planning, denominational strategizing, donor appeals — real money and real people were mobilized to capitalize on the quiet revival in the church.

On March 26 of this year, the report was retracted.

YouGov, the firm that ran the research, found that the quality-control systems built to screen out fraudulent and duplicate respondents had never been switched on. The sample contained people the firm identified as fraudulent. YouGov's chief executive took full responsibility and apologized. The Bible Society — which had reported the data it was handed in good faith — pulled the report.

Researchers questioned those numbers almost from the start. Their objection wasn't complicated: the figures were wildly out of step with the Church of England's own attendance records, the Catholic Church's records, and the British Social Attitudes Survey. David Voas, an emeritus professor at University College London who has spent a career studying religion, put it plainly — the findings were too good to be true.

Here's the part I'd rather not write.

Almost nobody in the Christian world listened. Why? Because it was a finding we wanted.

That's the sentence I can't shake. Not we were deceived. Not the pollster failed. Both true. But the deeper failure was ours. We wanted those results to be true so badly we skipped the checking.

I've spent decades studying how people actually follow Jesus as opposed to how they say they do, and what scares me most is how easy it is to market a story that was never verified — describing how God has “humbly” used the organization, implying that every dollar buys another soul.

It’s a sobering truth that perception is reality. And what you believe about a situation drives how you act. It becomes a functional truth whether or not it matches the facts. 

“Test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Paul wrote that to the Thessalonians. I don't think he carved out an exception for the good news we were hoping for.

So here's what the next three weeks look like.

This week — you tell me: Do You See Revival? I want your honest opinion: do you see evidence of revival where you live? In the country? It will only take thirty seconds. That’s all I’m asking.

Next week — I show you everything, both sides. The strongest case that America is in a revival right now, and the strongest case against, side by side. We’ll go over all the findings for revival: all the baptisms, Bible sales, young men coming back, campus movements. And we’ll go over all the findings against and let you decide.

The third week — we look at what you said. We’ll look at your answers this week, your answers after the evidence, and discuss what the distance between them tells us. That's what I will carry into the think tank I mentioned

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I highly value and appreciate your opinions and honest assessments!

And if you're over 50 know that you are the most valuable respondent I have. You have lived through real movements of God, and you have lived through a few things that got called revival and weren't. You know the difference between a crowd and a change.

Thirty seconds. Four questions. Take the survey here: https://bttb.org/revival

Then watch your inbox next Sunday (if you would like to be on the mailing list - email me at arniecole@bttb.org). I'm going to lay out everything I have — and some of it is going to surprise you in both directions.

All in, eyes up!

P.S. Be sure to start the day with Back to the Bible Daily and Spiritually Fit Today where, this week, I welcome Mike Heili to the studio to talk about how a single Bible verse helped him overcome childhood trauma, addiction, and sparked a journey from running in fear to running toward restoration.