Today in this country, too, countless thousands of students have been hurt - by broken homes and childhood abuse. McKenna thinks that the meeting might spark another Great Awakening, a multinational, multiethnic one. Some of its leaders might be the same people who were touched by the 1970 revival, who now are middle-aged and hold positions of church and college leadership. In the end, it is impossible to say empirically what happened at Asbury College in 1970, or in the many great revivals throughout Western history. Or what will underlie any revival to come.
Experts say revivals result when cataclysmic religious, cultural and historical movements collide.
Whether God is present in those collisions is less clear. Noll, the Wheaton professor, said that the truest test of that is whether the revivals produce lasting changes in people's lives. Super Bowls create mass excitement, he said, but they don't alter human beings forever. Unfortunately, the long-tern effects of revivals on individuals have received little academic attention. If permanent change is indeed the test, then the issue was decided long ago for many of the people who witnessed the Asbury revival.