Revival or therapeutic power; what does this documentary show?
23-10-2025
Christian Life
Joost Fidder
Still from documentary The Revival Generation.
Christian Life
Imagine one day: you wake up, go to university, and eventually get baptised in the lake. All on the same day. A new documentary shows the revival that is going on among youngsters in the USA. Or is it not an awakening? Joost Fidder offers a review.
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The university stadium of Auburn is filled with young people and loud music. Hundreds of university students felt drawn to listen to Jennie Allen. She brings an evangelistic message to the young crowd. And not without result. Many people felt the “Spirit of the Lord” and were baptised immediately afterwards in the lake.
Tonya Prewett asked Jennie Allen to speak there. Tonya is the mother of one of the teenage girls at the university. She felt how much those students suffer from loneliness and emptiness, some of whom fell into binge-drinking and have experienced non-consensual sex.
In light of this, Tonya opens the door of her house for prayer meetings, and many students are attracted to it. Tonya is gifted and has a style of positivity and prophetic speech. She guarantees students they can do anything if they “set their minds to it”. She calls them “anointed” and prophesies that things in their lives are about to change soon, because she received a vision of spiritual change.
The documentary The Revival Generation sketches the events at Auburn University in 2023. Hundreds of students would have come to Christ there.
At the time of the event, many of the young people in the gathering, on the university campus, and beyond feel drawn towards the stadium. The event is accompanied by loud music and colourful lights to heighten the experience. One of the students in the stadium says, “We can feel the Spirit of the Lord in this room,” and another says, “Tonya had prayed to God; we could feel it.”
Tonya and Jennie teach the students about the doctrine of new life and call new believers to baptism. Around 200 students are going down in the nearby lake. Some others who had been baptised earlier gave their life to Christ again.
True revival?
The events in Auburn are an example of the broader awakening among the Gen Z generation in the Western world. Earlier in 2023, media from all over the world wrote about a revival on the campus in Asbury, also in the US. After that, there has been a long stream of reports about conversions of teenage girls and boys, also in Europe.
This may be compared with the cross-Atlantic campaign of Billy Graham, who came from the United States to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. This campaign also attracted a great number of hearers and converts. Also, Graham stimulated making a decision for Christ spontaneously.
In Graham’s time, Evangelicals in the UK longed for a more general Christianity in which religious differences were put aside and ecumenism was praised.
These tendencies to ecumenism are essential signs of understanding the spiritual conditions of our time. In Graham’s time and our days, there is an atmosphere where people cherish the idea that conversions of (young) people could remedy the decline of religious attendance. That could be a danger, because ultimately, there may be no discernment of truth any more.
The awakening in Auburn is indeed joined with an increase in Bible reading. We hear some young students talking about repentance and calling one’s neighbour to turn their life to Christ. That gives hope that some may have genuinely come to the knowledge of Christ.
On the other hand, The Revival Generation does not reflect the characteristics that usually come with a true awakening. This documentary does not report that God’s holiness and glory had any place in Auburn. Instead, much attention is paid to students’ emotions when Tonya prays for them.
Caution
There are more doubts. Jennie organises IF:Gathering, a parachurch ministry that aims to equip women to embrace vulnerability and embody their emotions. In some ways, the vocabulary used in this ministry seems more similar to New Age than to biblical language.
Jennie also propagates the Enneagram, which is often seen as a helpful tool for understanding oneself in relation to others based on personality traits. One of its pioneers, Claudio Naranjo, admitted that assigning personality traits to the Enneagram is the result of the occult practice of automatic handwriting.
Finally, both Tonya and Jennie have received visions. Tonya, for those related to the universities, and Jennie shared publicly that a voice out of the sky, a whisper, was the impetus of IF:Gathering. History teaches us to be wary of these stories.
Therapeutical
A deeper underlying problem of this documentary is the idea of self-sufficiency and therapeutic empowerment. Tonya mentions that the students can do anything “if they set their minds to it”. In current mainstream evangelical circles, this seems a topic of central interest. Jennie wrote a book called: Get out of your Head – The one Thought that can Shift Our Chaotic Minds (2020) with over one million copies sold. The idea of the book is that we ourselves can manage our thoughts and be delivered from toxic thoughts. The earlier-mentioned Enneagram is also discussed in this book.
This is in line with the trends of our time, where Evangelicals become more open to forms of Christianity that focus on therapy and mental health. As a result, the word trauma is used excessively in church life. This focus on the therapeutic and emotional seems to obscure the rational and cross some boundaries of Biblical teaching. One can think of arising questions about the role of female pastors.
Finally, it is true that Jesus can heal the brokenhearted and is a physician for sin-sick souls. However, He does not ask us to embark on a journey of healing and embodying our emotions. Rather, those who are healed by Him are called to take up the cross, to live a life of holiness, and to fight the good fight of faith.
Alternatives
Those who truly want to understand revivals have better options than The Revival Generation. One example would be the documentary Revival: The Work of God from Reformation Heritage Books. In the work of God, revival is mainly considered to be painful, God exalting, and glorious in its presence.
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