The college had a Wesleyan tradition and a history of unexpected revivals. Students were not strangers to the idea. A number had, in fact, been praying for an outbreak. In addition, the campus was in an upheaval. There was the general distress of the times, and there were tensions specific to the college, stemming from a messy change in administrations a few years before.
Revivals often occur in times of discord.
That's partly why McKenna, the seminary president, thinks a major revival could sweep college campuses in the 1990s. However, those campuses might as easily be in Eastern Europe, Africa or Latin America as in the United States. Those societies, perhaps more than this country's, he said, are suffering breakdowns of moral consensus and of institutions of authority. 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.