What does the quiet revival look like? Here’s a snapshot from one London church

This is the story of how one “normal” church plant went from lockdown Zoom arguments to packed-out Easter services. Fuelled by Gen Z leaders, radical hospitality, and faithfulness to scripture, their story echoes the findings of “The Quiet Revival” – not flashy, but undeniably real. Church leader Andy Brims shares the tale of the church that discovered renewal is still possible

I remember the argument - it was just a few weeks into the first Covid-19 restrictions. The novelty of both the restrictions in general, and online church in particular, were wearing off rapidly and being replaced by the gnawing dread of: This is much harder than it looks; the insecurity of: We’re not doing this as well as the other churches we can see online and a healthy dollop of: Is this the end of Church as we know it? melodrama.

That Sunday’s online service hadn’t gone the way we had wanted it to, and so an argument ensued…except it wasn’t really an argument. Our zoom skills hadn’t advanced enough by that point to successfully host an argument and we were Christians, so we had to resort to passive aggressive messages in a hastily convened WhatsApp group instead.   

If you had told me then that we would soon experience the most dramatic turnaround in UK Church growth in our lifetimes, I would have laughed in your face. If you’d told me a few months later, as the Covid curtailment carried on, that we were at the start of a remarkable season of renewal spearheaded by Gen Z, my sobs would have echoed off my ice cream tub toward yet another empty youth zoom call. Indeed, at that point, if you’d suggested I listen to ‘The Blessing’ one more time, I may have been writing this from a prison cell.