Recently (October 15, 2025, to be precise), my colleague Katie Jerkovich authored an excellent story on the burgeoning Christian revival taking place among youth in America. It reminded me of the story told a couple of years ago in the “Jesus Revolution” movie about the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The fundamental difference, aside from the generations involved, was that the Jesus Movement was rooted in rebellion against the establishment of the time. By contrast, today’s revival relies more on rebellion against the current progressive establishment, created by those who were the ones originally rebelling against the conservative establishment.
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My own faith being firmly rooted in the Jesus Movement, I am hopeful that the present revival will grow deep roots and flourish. Helping this process is that faith today is not trendy. Unlike my era, there is no great and grand search for life’s meaning taking place among the youth. The isolationist unreality of online life, which reduces love to leering at OnlyFans models and interpersonal contact to existing solely through text messages in lieu of face-to-face conversations and gatherings, has numbed many to the possibility of discovering life outside of a self-imposed digital prison. Today’s society has unknowingly and unwittingly embodied Solomon’s weary words from Ecclesiastes that all is meaningless.
For the few who do have ears to hear, the unfathomable depths and riches of contact with the living God illustrate even more powerfully than can be imagined the shallow grave that is modern society. A search of Scripture reveals a wealth of human experiences and the complexities of God’s relationship with His creation, formed in His image yet separated from the perfect God by the imperfect nature of fallen, sinful humanity.
Art — music, painting, sculpture, and so on — can express far better than even the most skillfully chosen words this complexity, bringing truth to light and making Biblical truths apparent. It takes a supremely gifted artist to bring such ambitions to fruition. Fortunately, we have some with us today, one of them being Tennessee-based worship artist Rachel Wilhelm, who on October 17, 2025, debuted her new album “Hosea” based on the Old Testament book by the prophet of the same name.
Hosea is a challenging read. Written during the reign of multiple kings, some evil and some good, it starts with God commanding Hosea to marry a sexually promiscuous woman, who, after bearing him children, leaves him for one or more lovers from whom he must buy her back to restore his home. The stuff of a Hallmark Channel movie it is not.
Through his personal story and direct words from God, Hosea offers a chilling message of looming destruction to Israel and Judah due to their pursuit of wantonness and idols. Yet throughout the book, God expresses His heartbreak over having to discipline His chosen people violently, lamenting the need to do so and reassuring them that despite the punishment they have brought upon themselves, they are still His people and He will restore and protect them from annihilation. Hosea is not a book one expects to hear preached at the First Church of the Warm Fuzzies. Yet it is in the Bible for a reason. It speaks of and to the reality of a stumbling church in a fallen world, occasionally paying lip service to God, yet seeking to serve nothing and no one except itself.
Wilhelm does a superb job of translating this into music by approaching the subject, broken down into songs addressing one or two chapters of the book, with the motif of creating an appropriate musical backdrop amplifying the turbulent, multi-faceted nature of Hosea’s message. She does so by forging a stark landscape of acoustic guitar washes, aggressive staccato orchestral string flavorings, sparse growling percussion, and equally sparse growling mournful synthesizers playing deep single-note runs to great effect. The overall vibe is progressive rock dedicated to compositional strength over flash. Atop this, Wilhelm lays her voice that manages the rare feat of being both endearing and tear-stained without slipping into false dramatics. It is all laced together with her gift for sophisticated melody, challenging yet deeply rewarding for those who, again, have ears to hear something beyond pop pablum.
“Hosea” literally proves that preaching straight Scripture can get you a parental advisory warning, as the major music distributors are obviously unaware that the word “whore” is not exclusively limited to profane hip-hop releases. It is an album proving that quality art remains within the church’s grasp should it seek to reacquaint itself with its rich history. It speaks without fear to today’s world, warning the surface religious that their misdeeds, committed under the excuse that such do not genuinely matter given the “great” works they are doing for the Lord, remain inexcusable and indefensible.
True revival embraces not only knowing what to do and say, but what to avoid. Complacency kills. “Hosea” by Rachel Wilhelm is the complacency killer all believers need as we face the common foe, which sadly is far too often ourselves.
The album is available on all major streaming platforms and can be purchased in download form from the artist’s Bandcamp page.
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