Author and speaker Jennie Allen has witnessed some of the most powerful revival moments over the past year.
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Allen helped hundreds of young people get spontaneously baptized at Auburn University in Alabama last fall — something she recently spoke about with CBN News during a conversation surrounding her new book, “Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It.”
“It was [a] pretty incredible night, and we didn’t plan it,” she said, noting that she had a “sense of the Spirit…moving” after speaking. “I get off the stage, and [a pastor] walked up to me and said … ‘This girl just texted me and said, ‘I want to be baptized tonight.'”
Allen said she asked where they could go nearby to find a place to offer that baptism. At first, they considered a pool, but they wanted to “think bigger.”
“He said, ‘There’s a lake down the street, but it’s like a half-mile away, a mile away,'” she recalled. I said, ‘Do you think they would come?’ And he said, ‘Well, we can try.’
As worship was going, Allen got on the stage again and asked the crowd if anyone wanted to be baptized. As dozens of hands went up, Allen told everyone they would head down to the lake to do the baptisms.
And that moment sparked a massive response.
“Everybody came,” she said. “They picked up people on their way. There were 6,000 people on there, and I mean, it was just wrapping the entire lake, and it’s a pretty big lake. It was wild.”
Baptisms continued until midnight, with the young people sharing their passion for the Lord.
“It was amazing,” Allen said. “And hearing the kids … every single kid said something different, but one of the things they said consistently was … ‘I want to be clean. I want to be clean.'”
She continued, “I just think that’s their longing.”
Watch Allen discuss these issues:
Allen also dove into “Untangle Your Emotions” and the complexities and mistakes people often make when it comes to processing and understanding emotions.
“You look at the world and you see everyone obsessed with happiness to the point that they will drive their entire lives off a cliff to find it,” she said. “The world has not gotten this right, and we know that following and chasing happiness and making that your God is always going to lead to destruction, right? It just does. … You see that the most in … Hollywood places, where they literally have what everyone wants, and it’s still not enough.”
But the church, too, also makes mistakes in this arena, reacting to culture and sometimes labeling emotions as “dangerous” and sometimes out of control, particularly when emotions are in the driver’s seat.
“I believe the church has really not known what to teach about emotions,” Allen said. “And so nobody really has a good working theology of emotions, because we’ve demonized them.”
Contrary to narratives that emotions are unimportant or dangerous, she noted that “God is emotional” and that emotions in themselves are not sinful.
“We know that God is emotional,” she said. “We know that He created us in His image, and He made us to be emotional.”
Allen said the goal is to be emotionally healthy and to operate from that place. She addresses these issues in “Untangle Your Emotions,” and explained in her interview the importance of putting God first and operating from that posture.
Referring back to her passion for Gen Z, Allen described Auburn and other moments of revival like Asbury. She said she’s inspired to help young people looking for spiritual truth.
“It’s really fun to observe and to be a part of,” she said of the revivals. “This generation, it makes me cry. They’re really stuck. They’re really stuck and they need help.”
Allen continued, “Yes, I want them to have Jesus, and I will preach the Gospel every time I get in front of them, I will call for repentance every time I get in front of them, I will do the work of an evangelist and a revivalist, I will do that job because that is the core of who I am and I want to see it happen, but they also need to know how to navigate a very complicated world, and it’s only going to get more complicated and they need to know how to navigate that in a way that is biblical, but also really helpful.”
Watch for more of what Allen had to say about revival and check out her new book “Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It.”
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