I had an email recently alerting me to "a great revival" going on in Lakeland, Florida at which (reportedly) people are being healed from profound health or physical problems, and a few (reportedly) have even been raised from the dead. My reaction was not spontaneous joy, but "I don't buy it." Not because I think miracles are absolutely impossible, but because I've come across this kind of revival over and over since i was a teenager, and seen up close what a mix of naivety, imagination and hysteria is mixed in with the faith, not to mention the less forgiveable aspects of deliberate powermongering, hype and fabrication that have gone on in some similar settings. (Steve Martin's Leap of Faith is a fictional version of a fake revivalist, but not too wide of the mark.)

I don't doubt that for some, an initial experience in one of these revivals can eventually result in a genuine life change for the better. For others, though - like the seed that falls on rocky ground - once the revival is over there is neither enough substance to their faith nor an ongoing community to nurture it, and what seemed like faith quickly withers away. For many more, the whole thing serves as an innoculation against religion when they discover that what they think they were promised doesn't materialise. Hank Hanegraaf, host of the "Bible Answer Man" programme, is stark in his assessment: "The vast majority of what is claimed to happen in these revivals …doesn't happen." So revivals may not be all bad, but they are not all good either.

One of the most troubling aspects of these revivals, though, is when they are overlaid with promises of material gain, and under the guise of faith, people start counting on the revival as a down-payment for a lottery win. As others have noted, focusing on a "bless ME" kind of Christianity particularly sticks in the throat in a month where two massive natural disasters have left hundreds of communities bereaved and materially devastated. 

Deconstructed Christian's reaction here.