Frank Bartleman

As noted in the previous chapter, there were reports in the press of scattered revivals in many areas of America between 1900 and 1904 that preceded the worldwide revival of 1905. To gain a broad perspective and penetrating insight into the events and outworking of the American edition of the 1905 revival and the 1906 Pentecostal revival, we can look to the life and work of a young minister who became both a participant in and historian of the great American awakening during the first decade of the twentieth century. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1871, Frank Bartleman became a journalist and traveling evangelist for forty three years to the time of his death in 1936. His participation in both the American Awakening of 1905 and the Pentecostal movement’s embryonic stirrings in 1906 coupled with his extensive, first-hand accounts give the modern reader an unparalleled view of those momentous times in church history.

Bartleman grew up on his family’s farm but left at age seventeen. He was converted in the Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia in 1893. Within a year he felt a call to full-time ministry and was soon ordained by the Temple Baptist Church. He ended his association with the Baptists in 1897 and chose “a humble walk of poverty and suffering” which characterized his wondering lifestyle for the remainder of his life. In 1900, he married Anna Ladd who at that time was the head of a Pittsburgh home for wayward girls. Following a brief pastorate of a Wesleyan Methodist church, he left for the more emotional and expressive Holiness movement. His departure from the Wesleyans eventually led to his departure from Pennsylvania. In 1904, Bartleman, his wife, and the first of their four children arrived in California where he became the appointed director of the Peniel Mission located in Sacramento, one of several Holiness rescue missions located in California. In December 1904, the family moved to Los Angeles where his daughter died in January 1905.[1]

It was only a week after the death of his daughter that the grief-stricken father plunged himself into ministry as he began preaching twice each day at the Peniel Mission in Pasadena. His labors bore considerable fruit as several young men experienced substantial spiritual growth, some of whom were called into full-time service for the Lord. In April, Bartleman was greatly inspired by F. B. Meyer, the great English evangelist, who while visiting California gave a first-hand account of the great revival in Wales. Recall from the previous chapter that Meyer, a close friend of D. L. Moody, was greatly used by God to minister many young Welsh ministers through the Keswick movement to deepen spiritual life. Meyer was instrumental in bringing revival to the British Isles in 1905. As a result of Meyer’s influence, Bartleman was inspired to write and distribute thousands of tracts in and around Los Angeles. He prayed incessantly for revival.[2]

A great revival broke out around the first part of May at the Lake Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church in Pasadena. Young men from the Penial Mission attended this church and began praying for a revival in Pasadena and then for Los Angeles and the whole of southern California. In June Bartleman attended the First Baptist Church which was pastored by Joseph Smale who had just returned from visiting Evan Roberts in Wales. The church was seeking the same visitation of the Holy Spirit as had been experienced in Wales. Bartleman continued writing articles, preaching, visiting various churches in the Los Angeles area, and praying in “soul travail” for revival throughout the remainder of 1905. He began corresponding with Evan Roberts and asked him to pray for a revival of the church in California.[3]

Praying for a Pentecost

Bartleman was unaware that a new tributary of the 1905 revival was about to surge forth in early 1906.

We had been for some time led to pray for a Pentecost. It seemed almost beginning. Of course we did not realize what a real Pentecost was. But the Spirit did, and led us to ask correctly. One afternoon, after a service in the New Testament Church, several of us seemed providentially led to join hands and agree in prayer to ask the Lord to pour out His Spirit speedily, with “signs following” (Mark 16:20)…We did not have “tongues” in mind. I think none of us had ever heard of such a thing. This was in February 1906…

On March 26, I went to a cottage meeting on Bonnie Brae Street (in Los Angeles). Both white and black believers were meeting there for prayer. I had attended another cottage meeting shortly before this, where I first met a Brother Seymour. He had just come from Texas. He was a black man, blind in one eye, very plain, spiritual, and humble. He attended the meetings at Bonnie Brae Street.[4]

Another account states that William Seymour actually lived at the cottage on North Bonnie Brae Street and was invited to also hold meeting there. At one of the meetings it was reported that a man was healed instantly after being anointed with oil. Following a second prayer, the man began to speak in tongues, but Seymour did not speak in tongues until April.[5]

On Sunday morning, April 15th, Bartleman went to Burbank Hall, the New Testament Church, where a black woman had spoken in tongues. When he learned that the Spirit had also fallen almost a week earlier on April 9th at the small cottage at Bonnie Brae Street, Bartleman went there that afternoon and found that the working of the Holy Spirit was still being manifested. The small group had been seeking for some time for an out pouring of the Holy Spirit. Many had been praying for months for a Pentecostal outpouring. Bartleman recognized that this little group that met outside of any established mission was the place where God “could have his way.” The Pentecostal pioneers at Bonnie Brae Street “had broken through for the multitude to follow.”[6]

On that same Sunday (April 15) when Bartleman attended the New Testament Church and learned of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at the Bonnie Brae Street cottage, he felt a great burden to begin ten days of special prayer. On Wednesday three days later, the great San Francisco earthquake (April 18) occurred and devastated the city and surrounding region. The following day Los Angeles was struck by a small earthquake. When the earthquake struck the Los Angeles area, Bartleman was attending a noon meeting at Peniel Hall, 227 Main Street. He went home and then was impressed to go to a meeting that evening at 312 Azusa Street to which the Bonnie Brae group had moved since the previous Sunday because of the increasing size of the crowds. That evening Bartleman gave his first message at the Azusa Street Mission. After the message, two of those in attendance spoke in tongues, and many great blessings followed.[7] But it would be Friday, June 15th, before the Holy Spirit would “drop the ‘heavenly chorus’ into my soul. I found myself suddenly joining the rest who had received this supernatural gift.”[8]

Bartleman wrote that the April 18th and 19th earthquakes had opened many hearts to spiritual concerns, but most of those occupying the pulpits throughout the land were vigorously attempting to dispel the fears of the people by denying the earthquakes in San Francisco and Los Angeles were a judgement of God on a wicked people. But Bartleman believed the Holy Spirit was striving to reach the hearts the people by convicting them of their sin. By the following Wednesday Bartleman had received a message from God regarding the earthquakes in Los Angeles,had written it, had it printed, and began distributing thousands of tracts in Los Angeles. By May 11, Bartleman had finished his “Earthquake” tract distribution. In only three weeks, Bartleman had published and distributed with the help of others seventy-five thousand tracts in Los Angeles and other southern California cities. When describing the consequences of his tract distribution efforts, Bartleman wrote that, “All hell was stirred.”[9]

The revival at Azusa Street lasted about three years before the power was lifted in 1909. Bartleman wrote that by then (1909) those attending had come under bondage for there was a “spirit of dictatorship.” Every part of the meeting was planned and programed which did not allow for the Holy Spirit to move and work in freedom. Bartleman returned to Los Angeles from an overseas trip in late February 1911 and found that William H. Durham, a former Baptist minister from Chicago, had begun to hold meetings at the Azusa Street Mission (now called the Apostolic Faith Mission) in the absence of William Seymour. Under Durham’s preaching revival had broken out once again with as many as five hundred being turned away on one Sunday. But the trustees of the church quickly summoned Seymour back from the East Coast where he had been preaching. On May 2, 1911, Seymour and his trustees padlocked the doors of the Apostolic Faith Mission to keep Durham out because they didn’t like his message. But they also “locked God and the saints out from the old cradle of power.”[10]

The Pentecostal movement

The Topeka Bible School in north-central Kansas was under the leadership of Charles Parham. On December 31, 1900, at 7:00 p.m., just five hours before the beginning of the twentieth century, Agnus Osman asked Parham to lay his hands on her so that she might receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Parham did as she requested, and “a glory fell upon her, a halo seemed to surround her head and face.” As the eighteen-year-old Agnus received the baptism she began speaking in tongues. Revival historian Mathew Backholer wrote of Ozman’s experience. “This was the beginning of the first fruits of the Holy Spirit being poured out en masse at the very dawn of the twentieth century.”[11]

Prior to 1900, instances of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) had been reported in Tennessee which was followed by some fanaticism. After the occurrences at Topeka, the manifestations spread to other cities such as Houston, Texas. But the real explosion of Pentecostalism began with those who ministered at and participated in the Azusa Street revival. Soon the Pentecostal revival spread to Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the British Isles.[12]

Only a minority reached in the American revival of 1905 would become Pentecostals.[13] Dr. Orr estimated that in 1906 there were approximately ten thousand to fifteen thousand people considered to be Pentecostal, and twenty years later that number had increased ten-fold. By 1950, it was estimated that all Pentecostal denominations included more than a million adherents in the United States. The Assemblies of God established in 1914 was by far the largest of these. The Foursquare Gospel Church that grew out of the ministry of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Los Angeles ministry was another Pentecostal denomination of note.[14]

In describing the early Pentecostal movement, Dr. Orr wrote,

There was worldwide opposition to the new manifestations and the most violent attacks came from some of the most evangelical leaders and teachers among Protestants. In “Pentecost,” no John Wesley had risen to guide by wisdom or recommend by acknowledged scholarship. There were extremes and extravagances that the later Pentecostal leaders deplored…As opposition increased, Pentecostals began to withdraw membership from other denominations and form Pentecostal congregations…As early as 1907, missionaries were proceeding to far off mission fields from American Pentecostal Assemblies…[15]

The worldwide Awakening of the early 1900s and the Pentecostal revival that sprang from it were both similar and different in many respects. Of course the principal difference was that the widespread awakening of 1905, although charismatic in many ways, was not glossolalic. Early Pentecostalism also differed from the general awakening in that it stressed the spiritual gifts of tongues and healing. However, both movements rose from the common people, both were unmistakably interdenominational movements, both relied on the unplanned and sovereign ministry of the Holy Spirit, both were generally demonstrative in their worship and preaching, and both suffered from occasions of fabricated emotionalism and exploitation of feelings to achieve “religious” experiences when a genuine move of the Holy Spirit was not present.[16]

In defense of the early Pentecostal movement, it can be said that its failings in many respects were similar to the failings of the first century church which also sought to find its way without an historical pattern. Similarly, early twentieth century Pentecostals had to find their way given that the Pentecostal distinctives had generally not been operational within the body of Christ for almost two thousand years.

It was in the remainder of the twentieth century that the Pentecostal movement would span the globe and claim eight hundred million adherents by 2012.[17] By the middle of the century the Pentecostal movement had eclipsed the Awakening of 1905 to such an extent that modern historians and the church itself appear to be unaware of the magnitude and reach of the general awakening that occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century.[18]

Other American revivals in the twentieth century

There have been many revivals in America during the remainder of the twentieth century following the awakening of 1905 and the Pentecostal revival that sprang from it in 1906. However, most of these revivals occurred in the local church or community. But even local revivals have largely disappeared from the American evangelical landscape since the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the rise of the monolithic Church Growth movement which does not include the message of Holy Spirit led revival.

In the twentieth century, district and regional revivals were very rare, and it can be safely said that there has not been any true national revival or a general awakening in America since the first decade of the twentieth century. However, there have been some local revivals that have received national and even international notoriety but cannot be classified as having been truly national in character even though efforts to transplant these revivals to other parts of the country have met with very limited success. Realistically, the awakenings of the first decade of the twentieth century can be said to be the last chapter in the history of widespread American revivals and awakenings with one minor exception known as the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Jesus Movement contained some rudimentary but incomplete elements of revival among the hippies, druggies, bikers, and others in the late 60s and early 70s who found their drug-saturated, free-love lifestyle to be empty and unfulfilling. These West Coast counter-culturalists were drawn to Jesus’ teachings of love and peace. The movement was somewhat Pentecostal in its nature due to the emphasis on healing, signs, and miracles. Their new-found Christian faith included certain aspects of their old lifestyle such as communal living and modern music. A byproduct of the Jesus Movement was the development of Calvary Chapel and Vineyard churches, but the Jesus Movement as a separate recognizable entity largely died out in the 1980s.[19]

A unique occurrence in the twentieth century was the rise of several errant revivals that stand in fundamental opposition to the biblical nature and character of revivals from the first century through the worldwide awakening of the first decade of the twentieth century. These revivals have been deemed counterfeit when measured against biblical standards and the historical record of other evangelical revivals and awakenings in America.

It must be remembered that there are always those in every revival that come under the influence of self or demonic forces who knowingly or unknowingly attempt to inject the false or counterfeit into a revival. The influence of the counterfeit in revivals grew considerably in the last half of the twentieth century as the church entered the great end-times apostasy prophesied in the Bible. Apostate leaders, those who are merely deceived, and even those who lack a measure of discernment have made it possible for Satan to place false teachers and/or demonic leaders in the church in positions of power and influence to initiate, promote, and conduct counterfeit revivals that are unparalleled in church history.

The general decline of American revivals in the twentieth century

The general decline of American revivals in the twentieth century has occurred in both quantity and quality. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of local revivals coupled with a significant decline in the sustainability of the results of revival in churches and the lives of individuals. The quality of revival has been marred by increasing numbers and magnitude of counterfeit revivals based on false teachings and aberrant manifestations purported to be the work of the Holy Spirit.

The church has failed to distinguish between true revival and the counterfeit. True revival is measured by its impact on the individual, the church, and the community. Is Christ the center of revival? Is sin exposed and conviction present? Are believers revived? What is the depth of the spiritual renewal in the individual heart and church body? Is there a general spiritual and moral uplift of the individual, church, community, and beyond?

By contrast, counterfeit revivals are leader-centered; identified with bazaar manifestations that are not consistent with the history of authentic, biblically sound revivals and awakenings; are not Christ-centered; have brought widespread reproach upon the church; have little positive impact on the community; and substantially ignore sin, conviction, repentance, and living a holy lifestyle.

There are several elements that have greatly contributed to the decline of revivals in the twentieth century and include:

• The Protestant split between the liberals and fundamentalists during the early twentieth century.
• Two world wars and the Great Depression over the brief span of thirty years.
• The cultural suicide of Western civilization as it embraced and became dominated by humanism and its anti-God worldview that invaded the culture, the state, and much of the church.
• The substitution of mass evangelism for revival, the essential prerequisite for evangelism.
• The late twentieth century domination of the evangelical church by the Church Growth movement, its philosophies, and seeker-sensitive methods of doing church which stand in opposition to the message of revival.

These and other causes are discussed in the chapter on hindrances to revival.

For those contrite and lowly Christians who yearn for and seek revival of the church, it is difficult to close this section on the history of revivals on such a low note. However, we must remember the words of John, “Truly, truly, I say to you, that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will grieve, but your grief will be turned into joy.” [John 16:20. KJV] We must also remember that it is when the hour is the darkest and the situation the bleakest that Christians must pray with “soul travail” for revival. Heartfelt prayer has been the precursor for every revival in the history of the church, and it is no different for us today.

I close by repeating the words of comfort from Isaiah that I gave in the first chapter of this book. “I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.” [Isaiah 57:15. NIV] [emphasis added]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street, (New Kensington, Pennsylvania: Whitaker House, 1982), pp. 169-170.
[2] Ibid., pp. 7-8.
[3] Ibid., pp. 12, 14-15.
[4] Ibid., pp. 37-38.
[5] Mathew Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings-Thirty Six Visitations of the Holy Spirit, (ByFaith Media, 2009, 2012), p. 85.
[6] Bartleman, Azusa Street, p. 39.
[7] Ibid., pp. 44-46.
[8] Ibid., p. 53.
[9] Ibid., pp. 47-49.
[10] Ibid., pp. 117-118.
[11] Ibid., p. 84.
[12] J. Edwin Orr, The Flaming Tongue – The Impact of 20th Century Revivals, (Chicago, Illinois: Moody Press, 1973), pp. 179, 181-183.
[13] Ibid., p. 178.
[14] Ibid., p. 184.
[15] Ibid., p. 185.
[16] Ibid., p. 185.
[17] Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings, p. 83.
[18] Orr, The Flaming Tongue, p. 178.
[19] “Who were the Jesus freaks? What was the Jesus Movement?” Compelling Truth.
https://www.compellingtruth.org/Jesus-freak.html (accessed March 10, 2018).

The Welsh Revival of 1905

Wales has been called the “land of Revivals.” No less than sixteen remarkable revivals occurred in Wales between 1762 and 1862.[1] Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom on the island of Great Britain. It borders England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, and the Bristol Channel to the South.

In spite of its great history of revivals throughout the land, the church in Wales was in decline during the last decade of the nineteen century. According to revival historian Dr. J. Edwin Orr, the church suffered from a “loss of power in the pulpits and a worldly spirit in the pews.” Church attendance was low for Sunday services, prayer meetings, and general fellowship among the members. Bible reading and family worship was neglected by much of the church. These conditions greatly concerned many of the leaders of the Welsh churches, and most saw a great need for a spiritual revival through a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit.[2]

F. B. Meyer was a friend of D. L. Moody and one of several of Moody’s American and British preaching associates such as Reuben A. Torrey, J. Wilbur Chapman, and Henry Varley during Moody’s ministry in the latter part of the nineteenth century.[3] Meyer had become the spokesman for the “Keswick” movement in 1887, succeeding Andrew Murray, the leader of the South African revival of 1860. In 1875, the small resort town of Keswick in which the meetings were held became known as the Keswick Convention for the Deepening of the Spiritual life. The movement gained a worldwide influence and was supported in America by men such as Moody and R. A. Torrey, but its ecumenical nature generally was not well received in America due to the schisms between the holiness and liberal wings of the Protestant church.[4]

Meyer had taught many young Welsh ministers who eventually sought a Keswick-style convention in Wales. The convention was held at the beautiful Welsh spa located at Llandrindod Wells where the ministers prayed much for an awakening in Wales. A second convention was held in August 1904 at which Meyer and Dr. A. T. Pierson ministered. A number of these ministers began conducting meetings in support of the message of deepening the spiritual life of the church. Although Seth Joshua participated in these meeting, he was not an advocate of the Keswick teachings but appreciated the Keswick efforts to promote holiness. He considered the Keswick approach as one of many. Fearing the Keswick’s prevailing emphasis on spiritual qualifications would dampen the spiritual side, Joshua began praying that God would send revival to Wales through the efforts of a lowly young man from the mines or perhaps the fields. Not only would God grant Joshua’s prayer, this young man would be called from one of Joshua’s own meetings.[5]

But the seeds of the Welsh revival were planted months before Seth Joshua’s yet unknown young miner or ploughman arrived on the scene. It was at the chapel of at New Quay, Cardiganshire, in February 1904 that marked the lowly beginnings of the Welsh revival which along with other revivals would have a worldwide impact during the remainder of first decade of the twentieth century. Rev. Joseph Jenkins was appointed to the New Quay pulpit in 1892. Over the years of his pastorate, Jenkins became greatly burdened by the spiritual indifference among Christians generally and especially among the young people of his church. He began preaching to the young people about the necessity of obeying the Holy Spirit. In the late winter of early 1904 at a young people’s prayer meeting Rev. Jenkins asked for testimonies of their spiritual experience. The testimonies tended to drift to other topics, but the minister persisted in seeking to keep the young people focused on their spiritual experiences. Florrie Evans, a timid young girl, rose to speak. With a tremor in her voice, she said, “I love Jesus Christ, with all my heart.” The gathered young people were greatly moved and blessed by her sincere declaration. News of the Holy Spirit’s power and blessings that had begun with Flossie Evans’ eight words spoken at the New Quay young people’s prayer meeting soon spread throughout the area and opened the door for revival.[6]

Evan Roberts

By September 1904, the move of the Holy Spirit in New Quay had been sustained for six months. When Seth Joshua arrived he found a wonderful revival spirit prevailing. His meetings lasted far into the night, and on Sunday, September 18th, Joshua said he had “never seen the power of the Holy Spirit so powerfully manifested among the people as at this place just now.” After a week of unparalleled services, he traveled to Newcastle Emlyn to conduct meetings. Several ministry students from the Academy attended and were stirred by the services. Two of the students were Sidney Evans and Evan Roberts, roommates who arrived at the Academy that same month. The two traveled with other students the next night to Seth Joshua’s meeting at Blaenannerch. On Thursday morning Joshua closed the meeting with a prayer in which he cried out in Welsh, “Lord…bend us.” Evan Roberts went to the front, kneeled at the altar, and cried out in agony, “Lord…bend me.” A wave of peace passed over his soul which was followed by a concern for others. Joshua took note of the young man, but other leaders were disturbed by the young man’s intensity. They were concerned that such free expression would lead to a spiritual uproar as opposed to a quiet, Keswick-style meeting.[7]

Evan Roberts was twenty-six at the time of his life-altering encounter with God. He was the product of a devout home centered on Bible reading, family worship, and Sunday school at the Moriah Church in Loughor which was associated with the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist denomination. Roberts was obsessed with revival from his early youth. After his father was injured in the mines, the young Roberts went to work in the mines before he reached his twelfth birthday. After twelve years in the mines he became a blacksmith for a short while, but in 1903 he began preparation for the ministry.[8]

Immediately following his experience at the altar, Roberts knew that an extraordinary work of God was about to occur in his life. He began praying for his associates that would comprise his first ministry team, withdrew his savings for their support, and shared his vision with Sidney Evans, his college roommate and future brother-in-law.[9]

I have a vision of all Wales being lifted up to heaven. We are going to see the mightiest revival that Wales has ever known—and the Holy Spirit is coming soon, so we must get ready. We must have a little band and go all over the country preaching.[10]

Roberts immediately asked Evans, “Do you believe that God can give us a hundred thousand souls now?” Before launching out with his team, Roberts returned home on October 31st to convince his family and members of his home church in Loughor of his mission. He asked the ministers at the Moriah Church and its daughter church in Gorseinon if he would be allowed to speak. With permission, Roberts conducted a youth meeting on the evening of October 31st, 1904. Seventeen people were in attendance. Roberts shared his vision with the people and encouraged them to declare their Christian faith. Overcoming their initial reserve or shyness, all would give testimony of their faith that evening including three of Roberts’ sisters.[11]

Over the next twelve days, Roberts continued to hold nightly meetings alternating between the Pisgah Chapel near the Roberts’ home, the Libanus Church in Gorseinon, and at Moriah, the mother church in Loughor. On November 13th he was driven to Sunday services in Swansea where the results were disappointing as there was open criticism of the girl singers that accompanied Roberts’ ministry. But on Monday the 14th Roberts spoke at the Ebenezer Chapel in Aberdare which was crowded by a thousand people eager to hear the young preacher. The next day at the early morning prayer meeting, Roberts made a prophetic announcement that a great awakening was soon to occur in Wales.[12] It had been less than forty-five days since the unknown ministry student had knelt at an altar and cried out to God, “Lord…bend me!”

And so it was that the young ex-miner would become God’s chief instrument in initiating a great awakening in Wales and which would spread to many other parts of the world. Roberts began to receive invitations to speak from churches throughout Wales. Within six weeks, one hundred thousand Welsh men, women, and children came into the Kingdom of God (out of a population of one million at the time). Within eight months, one hundred fifty thousand had applied for church membership. Dr. Orr estimated that as many as a quarter of a million people could have been converted during the revival. Unfortunately, many Christians and churches in Wales rejected the message of revival and as a result many villages and towns were entirely bypassed as the outpouring of the Holy Spirit flowed across the land.[13]

The magnitude of the conversions had a profound effect on almost all daily life in Wales. A brief account of the remarkable transformation of the spiritual climate in Wales is found in Mathew Backholer’s Revival Fires and Awakenings.

The daily shifts at the coal mines soon started with a word of prayer…Mine shafts resonated with the hymns of the converted…pit ponies which were used to being commanded by the unconverted foul mouths refused to work as they could not recognize the sanctified tongues!…magistrates were given white gloves (a symbol of purity) as there were so few cases to hear—God’s spirit brought conviction of sin, brought about changed lives, sobriety and restraint. Aberdare on Christmas Eve was almost entirely free from drunkenness and on Christmas Day there were no prisoners at all in the cells…Whole football and rugby teams were converted and praying became more important than playing! Games were either cancelled or put off until a more convenient time, whilst other teams disbanded. Theatre attendance dropped, dance halls were deserted and pubs (drinking establishments) were emptied and closed; the proprietors were furious! Talented actors and actresses failed to draw the crowds…[14]

The magnitude of the worldwide impact of the news of the Welsh awakening is almost incomprehensible. The following list of revivals that were birthed almost simultaneously with the Welsh revival is not meant to be exhaustive: New Zealand, Scotland, North Africa, South Africa, Algeria, South Seas, India (six different revivals across the large nation), North America (including the Azusa Street Revival of 1906-1909), Mexico City, Sweden, France, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, China (Shanghai and Canton – 1906), and Korea (1907-1910).[15] Some of the revivals were sporadic such as in France while others blanketed entire nations such as North America and India.

Revival stirrings in America at the beginning of the twentieth century

Between 1900 and 1904, there were reports by the press of scattered revivals in many areas of America. However, these were generally considered to be local evangelistic meetings and were not comparable to the spontaneous outpouring of the Holy Spirit such as occurred in 1858. As early as 1900, an increasing number of conversions were occurring as a result of various Methodist evangelistic campaigns conducted throughout the United States. There was a growing optimism and expectancy that a twentieth century awakening would occur. The Baptists both in the north and south were united in prayer for revival. Although the Presbyterians were “theoretically” opposed to revival in favor steady growth of their churches, that attitude changed in 1901. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) under the leadership of J. Wilbur Chapman organized an Evangelistic Commission which fielded fifty-six evangelists in 1902 and twelve hundred pastors united in prayer in 1903.[16]

At the turn of the century, the central and western valleys of Pennsylvania had become home to many thousands of immigrants from Wales. The majority of the immigrants had become members of Welsh-speaking or bi-lingual churches. It was only natural that many of the immigrants were in frequent contact with family and friends that were left behind in Wales. One of those was Rev. J. D. Roberts whose heart had been touched by the first-hand accounts of revival received by him and many other Welsh Pennsylvanians. As a result of the various reports, a sudden awakening arose in Rev. Roberts’ Wilkes-Barre church in which 123 converts were reported in one month. The revival spread to churches in many other towns and districts in Pennsylvania including New Castle and Pittsburgh.[17]

In 1905, news of the revival in Wales spread through all religious journals and newspapers of various denominations. Even the Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians in the United States had friendly opinions of the Welsh Revival brought about “by the strong breath of God’s Holy Spirit.” The Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists were all talking about the revival in Wales and praying for revival in America. Revival prayer meetings were held by the thousands throughout the nation.[18] By the end of 1905, the revival had spread throughout the United States—from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Canadian border to the Mexican border and all points in between. Churches in Canada were similarly affected from coast to coast.[19]

But the Revival of 1905 in America was more than a revival of the church but an awakening of the larger culture to the faith and principles of the Christian life. One report from Portland, Oregon, described the deep incursions of “religious enthusiasm” (revival) not only into the church and hearts of individual Christians but into the very fabric of the everyday life of the culture.

…for three hours a day, business was practically suspended, and from the crowds in the great department stores to the humblest clerk, from bank presidents to bootblacks, all abandoned money making for soul saving.[20]

Such was the spirit of cooperation in the revival that two hundred major stores agreed in writing to close between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. to allow customers and employees to attend prayer meetings. Similar actions were taken by Seattle merchants.[21]

Characteristics of the worldwide awakenings and revivals of 1900-1910

The awakening of 1900-1910 spread across the globe and was the most evangelical of all of its predecessors.

In his comprehensive The Flaming Tongue – The Impact of Twentieth Century Revivals, Orr wrote of the origins and characteristics of the worldwide awakening that occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century.

The early twentieth century Evangelical Awakening was a worldwide movement. It did not begin with the phenomenal Welsh Revival of 1904-1905. Rather its sources were in the springs of little prayer meetings which seemed to arise spontaneously all over the world, combining into the streams of expectation which became a river of blessing in which the Welsh Revival became the greatest cataract.

The first manifestations of phenomenal revival occurred simultaneously among Boer prisoners of war in places ten thousand miles apart, as far away as Bermuda and Ceylon. The work was marked by extraordinary praying, by faithful preaching, conviction of sin, confession and repentance with lasting conversions and hundreds of enlistments for missionary service.[22]

The awakenings of 1900-1910 were thoroughly interdenominational and included many instances of various congregations sharing in the revival including Anglican, Baptist, Brethren, Congregational, Disciple, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Reformed churches, but there was no evidence of revival involvement among Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches.[23]

There existed similarities between the Revivals of 1857-1858 and 1900-1910: their beginnings were found in prayer meetings, repentance within the church followed by an awakening of those outside the faith, evidence of great conviction of sin, and public confession of sin. The 1900-1910 revival exhibited many similarities with the evangelical revivals recorded in the Acts of the Apostles: awakenings began in prayer meetings, reports of a mighty rushing wind; many outpourings of the Holy Spirit: infilling of believers with the Holy Spirit; some glossolalic utterances (unknown tongue); prophesying of young men and women; reports of unusual dreams and visions; the hearts of many hearers were pierced upon hearing the message of Christ preached; under great conviction of sin, many cried out for help which was followed by repentance; fellowship and prayer were often spontaneous and guided by the Spirit; a great sense of the presence of God in meetings; and very little hostility or opposition from those outside the revival movement.[24]

Impact of the worldwide awakening of the early twentieth century

The nineteenth century was a period of massive evangelical renewal and advance in which the light of the Gospel of Christ spread across the globe.[25] The best method of gauging the impact of a revival of Christianity was to determine the number of people “revived” for Christianity and the extent to which a culture is awakened. A review of the history of the Christian church and revivals of Christianity through the centuries inevitably brings one to the conclusion that each successive evangelical awakening is more thoroughly New Testament in its emphasis and outworking than the preceding awakening. As evidence, one may point to the chain of revivals and awakenings in which each successively was more evangelical (i.e., a true reflection of New Testament Christianity): John Wycliffe’s Lollards of the thirteenth century, the Reformers of the sixteenth century, the Puritans of the seventeenth century, the Revivalists of the eighteenth century, the Revivalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the Pentecostals of the twentieth century. Applying the same criteria as to the number of people influenced and the worldwide extent of the revivals, the awakening of 1900-1910 far exceeded the Revival of 1857-1858.[26]

Recall that in an earlier chapter it was noted that the Revival of 1857-1858 caused the nation and individual men and women, in both the North and South, to be spiritually prepared for the coming Civil War (1861-1865) in which the nation would exorcize the demon of slavery and recover its national unity. In much the same manner but on a far larger scale, the unprecedented worldwide awakening of the church and spread of Christianity that occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century prepared most of mankind for the cataclysmic global conflict that would engulf much of the world with the advent of World War I (1914-1918). The Revival of 1857-1858 was a harvest before the devastation of the American nation in the Civil War. The awakenings of 1900-1910 were a harvest before the devastation of Christendom during and after World War I.[27]

The worldwide outpouring of the Holy Spirit was not only for the revival of the church and awakening of nations, but the awakenings also served as reservoirs of strength, mercy, grace, and truth to be drawn on in times of extreme wickedness, devastation, and chaos during and after World War I. May we not compare the times of revival and great spiritual blessing of the church before the War and its aftermath with Joseph’s Egyptian grain bins filled to capacity during the seven good years which sustained Joseph’s brethren and the Egyptians during the lean years of drought and desolation?

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Mathew Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings-Thirty Six Visitations of the Holy Spirit, (ByFaith Media, 2009, 2012), p. 74.
[2] J. Edwin Orr, The Flaming Tongue – The Impact of 20th Century Revivals, (Chicago, Illinois: Moody Press, 1973), p. 1.
[3] Edwin Orr, The Light of the Nations – Evangelical Renewal and Advance in the Nineteenth Century, (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1965), p. 194.
[4] Ibid., pp. 204-207
[5] Orr, The Flaming Tongue, pp. 1-2.
[6] Ibid., pp. 2-3.
[7] Ibid., pp. 3-5.
[8] Ibid., pp. 4-5.
[9] Ibid., p. 6.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., p. 8.
[12] Ibid., pp. 8-11.
[13] Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings, pp. 75-76.
[14] Ibid., pp. 76-77.
[15] Ibid., p. 78.
[16] Orr, The Flaming Tongue, pp. 66-67.
[17] Ibid., p. 70.
[18] Ibid., p. 68-69.
[19] Ibid., p. 80.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., p. 188.
[23] Ibid., pp. 195-196.
[24] Ibid., pp. 198-200.
[25] Orr, The Light of the Nations, p. 275.
[26] Orr, The Flaming Tongue, pp. 186-187.
[27] Ibid., p. 287.

America succumbs to mammon

J. M. Roberts in his definitive The New History of the World stated that the magnitude of societal change produced by industrialization was the “most striking in European history since the barbarian invasions”…and perhaps the “…biggest change in human history since the coming of agriculture, iron, or the wheel.” By 1850 Great Britain was the only country in the world that had established a mature industrial society. Yet, most industrial workers in England were found at businesses employing fewer than fifty people and those that worked in larger factories were concentrated at the large Lancashire cotton mills with their distinctive urban appearance and character. However, a significant increase in the number of large factories would soon occur because of the trend toward greater centralization, specialization of function, economies of scale and transport, and regimentation of labor. By 1870, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, and the United States had joined Britain in the race for self-sustained economic growth through industrialization.[1]

In “Shame of the Cities,” American historians Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen gave a vivid description of American life in the cities during the late 1800s.

…immigrants flooded into the seaport cities in search of a new life. Occasionally, they were fleeced by local politicians when they arrived. Often they melted in the American pot by starting businesses, shaping the culture, and transforming the urban scene. In the process the cities lost their antebellum identities, becoming true centers of commerce, arts, and the economy, as well as hotbeds of crime, corruption and degeneracy…in 1873, within three miles of New York’s city hall, one survey counted more than four hundred brothels housing ten times that number of prostitutes. Such illicit behavior coincided with the highest alcohol consumption levels since the turn of the century, or a quart of whiskey a week for every adult American. Some level of social and political pathology was inevitable in any population, but it was exacerbated by the gigantic size of the cities.[2]

The social gospel

Because compassion was the premier Christian innovation in all of history and an example of Christ’s concern for the hurting and sick, the church did not quietly cede Western civilization to the flood waters of industrialization throughout the nineteenth century. From the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, Christianity invaded the cities to not only save the soul but provide for earthly needs and address societal ills afflicting the hurting masses. The social impact of the mid-nineteenth century evangelical awakenings fostered tremendous efforts for the betterment of social conditions including the issues of the working man, the protection of women and children, poverty, education, slum housing, and racial strife. Changes came through sharing the gospel message, the transforming of individual lives by the power of Jesus Christ, evangelism, and initiating reforms through the work of tireless individuals and societies.[3]

But out of Christian compassion and its concern for a hurting humanity eventually arose a liberal social gospel found within many Protestant churches that had become less concerned with saving the soul than fixing the ills of society by works of men and government. However well-intentioned the liberal church’s social gospel was, it was soon subjugated by the powerful forces of Enlightenment liberalism which quickly rolled over the nineteenth century Protestant establishment and the nation between 1870 and 1930.

Following the Civil War a perfect storm of societal dysfunction and pagan philosophies caused much of America to forget her Christian heritage and the blessings that flowed therefrom. The humanistic spirit of the age became a cultural force that inundated the Western world during the last half nineteenth century. Karl Marx in politics, Charles Darwin in biology, Christopher Langdell in law, and John Dewey in education and psychology were among the principle players of the nineteen century vying to introduce within society a “new way” to solve its seemingly inextricable problems. The end result was devastating to the American Protestant church.

The enormous changes that occurred in the six decades between 1870 and 1930 profoundly transformed the way Americans thought and acted in all spheres of American life. By 1870 the nation had been guided for 250 years by a central cultural vision infused with the collective Judeo-Christian worldviews of the great majority of Americans since the Pilgrims undertook to establish a colony…Although Protestant cultural authority was at its peak in 1870, a brief sixty years later it had been relegated to the shadows within every institution of American life, despairing of approval and hoping only for an occasional hint of recognition from the new masters of American culture. The once prevailing Christian Protestant dominion had surrendered substantially all of its social power, institutional influence, and cultural authority and did so without much of a whimper. For the first time in American history a vast schism had developed between the religious and secular.[4]

The Gilded Age in America 1870-1930

The Gilded Age is generally considered to be the American era from about 1870 to 1900. It was a time of immense growth and change in America which did not bode well for all Americans. Not long after the beginning of the disaster known as Reconstruction Act of 1867 following the Civil War, concern for the plight of the former slaves was supplanted by other issues which began to occupy the attention of the nation: the often chaotic westward expansion, the rise of big business, rampant political corruption, and community fragmentation and moral decline caused by the rapid growth of large cities.

The tentacles of the monumental graft and corruption within Ulysses Grant’s administration (1869-1877) spread over the whole nation—from the rural areas of the devastated Southern states to the cities of the north. In the first year of Grant’s two terms in office, the notorious stock promoters Jay Gould and Jim Fisk almost succeeded in cornering the gold market after lavishly entertaining Grant and bribing his brother-in-law. The cities were no less corrupt. New York City was robbed of seventy-five million dollars by the Tweed Ring, and Philadelphia’s city debt grew by three million dollars a year through the collusions of the Gas Ring.[5] In May 1869, the immensity of fraud and corruption in the world of government and business was epitomized by the Credit Mobilizer scandal which was a complicated scheme that involved using massive public funding for the benefit of transcontinental railroads (Union Pacific and Central Pacific). To keep government land grants and federal loans flowing to the railroads, a number of congressmen, senators, Grant administration officials, and even Vice President Schuyler Colfax were given generous Credit Mobilizer holdings.[6] These examples of corruption stand at the apex of a labyrinthine web of business and government graft, bribery, fraud, dishonesty, and greed that had infected almost all levels of American life during the Gilded Age.

The Great Divide – modernists and liberals v. fundamentalists and evangelicals

The American Protestant church, already divided by denomination, region, race, ethnicity, and class, would split again into fundamentalist and modernist factions between the late nineteenth century and the mid-1920s. Amid rising skepticism, positivism, and Darwinism emanating from Enlightenment liberalism, the new liberal and modernist Protestant leaders chose survival through accommodation by embracing their adversary’s doctrines of Science, Progress, Reason, and Liberation. But this compromise would only forestall the approaching “…final dominance of Enlightenment moral order in the public square and the relegation of Christian and other religious concerns to private life” that has gained increasing momentum since the 1930s.[7]

As modernism and liberalism ascended in many Protestant churches, many members began to feel uncomfortable with the growing formalism among the wealthier and more prosperous segments of the congregations. Of greatest concern was the disappearance of a heart religion that was the defining symbol of evangelicalism since its birth the early 1700s. As a result of these concerns the question of “holiness” became a topic of great concern. This was especially true for the Methodists because Christian perfection as taught by John Wesley was no longer a goal of most Methodists of the late 1800s. As a result, a large measure of worldliness had crept into the church. Holiness groups began forming within these churches to defend Wesley’s doctrines and ideals. Because the pastors and leading men of the most influential churches were opposed to Holiness groups and their concerns, the more orthodox and less powerful Holiness groups began to withdraw and form their own denominations.[8]

New Holiness denominations came from many churches and were mostly found in the rural districts of the Middle West. However, most Holiness denominations came out of Methodist churches. Between 1880 and 1926, twenty-five or more Holiness and Pentecostal denominations were formed in protest against the increasing modernism and liberalism they saw in the larger churches of America. [9] The new denominations included the Church of the Nazarene (formed in 1894 when eight smaller holiness groups combined), Christian and Missionary Alliance (1897), Church of God, Anderson, Indiana (1881), Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee (1896), the Pilgrim Holiness Church, Cincinnati, Ohio (1897), and the Assemblies of God (1914).[10]

Dwight Lyman Moody

As previously noted, Charles Grandison Finney dominated the middle third of the nineteenth century. The man who would dominate the last third during the Gilded Age was Dwight Lyman Moody (1837-1899). The contrasts between the two men could hardly have been greater. Compared to the well-educated, articulate, and polished Finney, Moody was born in poverty and had little formal education. He was one of nine children whose father died when Moody was only four. Moody was converted at eighteen and a year later moved to Chicago where he was profoundly affected by the Revival of 1857-1858. Moody quickly developed a passion for winning young people for Christ through Sunday school and the Young Men’s Christian Association. Moody’s Sunday school soon became a church, and in 1860 Moody devoted himself to full time ministry.[11]

In 1867, Moody traveled to Britain to seek out leaders of the evangelical movement such as of Charles Spurgeon, George Muller, and Harry Morehouse. Moody listen to Morehouse preach for a week on the love of God and was so profoundly affected that Moody’s preaching was forever changed. In 1872 Moody again traveled to England, and his preaching brought a local awakening to a church in North London. Other invitations followed, but the great breakthrough in his ministry came at Edinburgh, Scotland, where his meetings filled even the largest arenas. Moody continued holding meetings throughout Scotland, Ireland, and England. Attendance was enormous. Twenty thousand each night listened to Moody preach in London’s Islington Agricultural Hall. The London campaign lasted twenty weeks at which two and a half million people attended.[12]

Moody spent three years in Britain before returning to the United States in August 1875. As in Britain, vast crowds flocked to hear Moody preach all across the United States. Another trip to England was made in October 1881. Beginning in 1884, Moody began devoting much of his time to promotion of education at his institutes in Chicago and Northfield, Massachusetts, as well as conducting a number of evangelistic campaigns in smaller cities. In 1893, approximately two million visitors attended evangelistic services held by Moody during the World’s Fair, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. With the help of Moody’s Bible Institute, three centers of preaching were established on the north, west, and south sides of Chicago. On Sunday’s, Moody preached in a large circus tent at the city’s lakefront on the east side. In November 1899, Moody preached his last campaign in Kansas City, Missouri. Exhausted, he withdrew from the campaign and returned home. He passed away December 22, 1899, after forty years of ministry.[13]

D. L. Moody’s success did not depend on his earthly attributes. He did not have a commanding physical appearance, was not a renowned theologian, and certainly was not a great orator. His theology and convictions were strongly conservative. His preaching was very simple but strong on scripture which he illustrated with homely stories presented in everyday language. [14]

The inspiration that led to Moody’s great contributions to the Kingdom of God occurred when Moody visited England for the first time in 1868. There he met Henry Varley, one of the great British evangelists, who said to him, “Moody, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to Him.” Over thirty years later, the world had seen and heard Dwight Lyman Moody and now knew what God could do with a man fully consecrated to Him.[15]

Revival or evangelism?

Although the words “revival” and “evangelism” are often used interchangeably, Dr. J. Edwin Orr in his book The Light of the Nations explained that there is a difference. In English-speaking countries outside of North America, revival is generally used to identify a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the churches resulting in a renewed interest in religion after a period of indifference or decline. Although this is the correct meaning when the term “revival” is used in the United States, it is often used interchangeably to describe an organized campaign of evangelism or a series of evangelistic meetings.[16] Dr. Orr points out the differences.

It often happens that there are elements of revival in an evangelistic campaign, and effects of evangelism in a revival movement. Evangelism is what dedicated men do for God, but revival is what God does to earnest men to bring them to fuller dedication.[17]

Orr described Moody as an evangelist and not a revivalist in the historic sense whereas Orr used revivalist as the correct term to describe the works of George Whitefield, John Wesley, Charles Finney, and Evan Roberts of Wales. Nevertheless, there are almost always elements of revival in evangelism and elements of evangelism in revivals.[18]

Revival and religion in the Gilded Age 1870-1900

Timothy L. Smith in his book Revivalism and Social Reform stated the primary feature distinguishing American religion after 1865 was “The rapid growth of concern with purely social issues such as poverty, working men’s rights, the liquor traffic, slum housing, and racial bitterness.” The Christian imperative of this concern eventually divided into two avenues. The first avenue was “militant modernism” in theology of the liberal branch which focused its energies on socialism, preaching a social gospel, and establishing a pre-millennial “Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.” On the second avenue were found the footprints of Moody and other conservative evangelicals and revivalists who advocated social service and the post-millennial hope of the Kingdom of God while distancing themselves from the social gospel which abandoned the soul in its quest for humanistic answers to individual and societal pathologies.[19]

The Revival of 1857-1858 in America was often called the Layman’s Revival because of the broad inter-denominational support, absence of clerical leadership, and focus on prayer. According to Dr. Orr, the greatest achievements of the nineteenth century were brought about by dedicated lay men and women nurtured in the faith and worship of evangelical fellowships. Because of the Great Awakenings, it was individual Christian lay people who persuaded church leaders and parliaments to address the great issues of the century: “abolition of the slave trade, reform of prisons, emancipation of slaves, care of the sick, education of the young, protection of workers and the like…”[20]
______

In his final summation of the impact of the evangelical awakenings throughout the nineteen century, Dr. Orr wrote:

The nineteenth century proved to be a time of evangelical renewal and advance, in which shone widely the Light of the Nations. The phenomena of the Great Awakenings brought blessing untold to the Christian believer, to the congregation, to the Christian community, to the Church at Large, to the laboring man, to the world of women, to the welfare of children, to the care of the sick, to the shelter of the insane, to the protection of the unfortunate, to the education of the young, to the guaranteeing of liberty, to the granting of freedom, to the administration of justice, to the evolution of self-government, to the crusade for peace among nations—in fact, in the nineteenth century, the Evangelical Awakenings may be shown to be the foremost method of an almighty God to promote the betterment of all mankind and His chiefest instrument to win men to transforming faith in Himself.[21]

In the next chapter we will examine the great revivals in the first decade of the twentieth century and the gradual decline of revival and revivalism thereafter in America, Great Britain, and continental Europe, all former strongholds of evangelicalism but now in decline because of the absence of revival.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] J. M. Roberts, The New History of the World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 708-709, 711-712.
[2] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, (New York: Sentinel, 2004), pp. 443-444.
[3] J. Edwin Orr, The Faming Tongue – The Impact of 20th Century Revivals, (Chicago, Illinois: Moody Press, 1973), p. xiv.
[4] Larry G. Johnson, Evangelical Winter – Restoring New Testament Christianity, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2016), p. 77.
[5] Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941), pp. 182-183.
[6] Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, pp. 182-183.
[7] Christian Smith, “Introduction,” The Secular Revolution, ed. Christian Smith, (Berkeley, California: The University of California Press, 2003), pp. 58, 67; Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods-Humanism and Christianity-The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 213-214.
[8]B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 389.
[9] Ibid.
[10] “Holiness Movement,” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Holiness-movement (accessed January 22, 2018).
[11] J. Edwin Orr, The Light of the Nations – Evangelical Renewal and Advance in the Nineteenth Century, (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1965), pp. 190-191.
[12] Ibid., pp. 191-192.
[13] Ibid., pp. 192-195.
[14] Ibid., p. 194.
[15] Ibid., p. 191.
[16] Ibid., p. 193.
[17] Ibid., p. 194.
[18] Ibid., p. 194.
[19] Ibid., pp. 229-230.
[20] Ibid., p. 229.
[21] Ibid., pp. 275-276.

Revival begins at a Canadian farm 1853

The first stirrings of revival in what became the Third Great Awakening in America began on a Canadian farm in the province of Ontario. Dr. Walter Palmer was a wealthy physician who had turned evangelist. Both Palmer and his wife Phoebe held evangelistic meetings mostly in the United States but occasionally traveled to Canada. In August 1853, the Palmers preached at a camp meeting on a farm in an eastern township near Nappanee where over five hundred people were converted. They returned to Nappanee in 1854 and saw another great harvest of souls in which hundreds were converted. They came again in 1855 to Barrie and once again saw hundreds converted.[1]

Hamilton was a bustling Ontario community of 23,000 in October 1857. The Palmers were merely passing through Hamilton on their way back to Albany, New York, from Georgetown, Ontario, where three thousand were in attendance. The Palmers had planned to stay only one night but were forced to stay longer with friends because of the loss of their luggage. Two ministers soon discovered the couple’s presence in Hamilton and invited them to tea at which they were encouraged to speak at the Thursday prayer meeting. The three downtown Methodist churches joined together for the prayer meeting at which sixty-five people gathered in the basement of one of the churches. Those gathered were challenged to pray for a revival, and thirty raised their hands in agreement not only to commit to “fervent, personal prayer” for revival but to bring their fellow townspeople with them to church. The first revival meeting was held the next day and twenty-one were converted. Saturday’s meeting yielded another twenty, and Sunday saw an additional seventy conversions. After ten days conversions totaled four hundred. Soon the revival spread to Ancaster. The revivals lasted well into November of 1857.[2]

On October 28th, The Christian Guardian was the first Canadian newspaper to report the unusual events that had been occurring in Hamilton. A week later a New York newspaper, The Christian Advocate, gave the following report on the revival taking place in Hamilton, Ontario.

The work is taking within its range…persons of all classes. Men from low degree and men of high estate for wealth and position, all men and maidens, and even little children are seen humbly kneeling together pleading for grace. The Mayor of the city with other persons of like position is not ashamed to be seen bowed at the altar of prayer beside their humble servants.[3]

Unfortunately, the Hamilton revival was to be almost exclusively a Methodist affair. Hesitant over the “Methodist enthusiasm,” the Baptists and the Presbyterians were generally unaffected and the Anglicans remained indifferent.[4]

Revival stirrings were also happening in the United States well before the Hamilton revival began. On October 1, 1856, the Holy Spirit began to be “especially manifest” at the Stanton Street Baptist Church in New York City. At least five or six persons each week “presented themselves as inquirers to the Christian faith.” Interest increased in December 1856 and January 1857 such that revival meetings began to be held nightly in February. Sixty persons were baptized in March and April. Following a summer lull, revival fervor increased again in the fall and winter months.[5]

The Revival of 1857-1858 (aka The Third Great Awakening)

The Third Great Awakening began in 1857-1858 and has been called by many names including the Businessman’s Revival, the Layman’s Revival, and the Union Prayer Meeting. But it is most widely known as the Revival of 1857-1858. Much like the central theme of the Protestant Reformation, this revival was about personal religious transformation from which society greatly benefited. As noted at the end of the last chapter, the Third Great Awakening was the sustaining moment that prepared the nation to endure the national conflagration of the Civil War and made possible its reunification and survival in the war’s aftermath.

On July 1, 1857, Jeremiah Lamphier became the City Missionary in downtown New York. Converted fifteen years earlier in the Broadway Tabernacle built by Charles Finney, Lamphier was a quiet businessman. He was described as personable, capable, intelligent, and very ardent in his faith. He had been appointed to his lay position by the North Church of the Dutch Reformed denomination which was losing membership in downtown New York because many members had moved away to better residential neighborhoods. As a layman City Missionary, his task was to visit the immediate neighborhoods and encourage church attendance.[6]

The spiritual lethargy of his fellow businessmen weighed heavily on Lamphier’s mind and heart. He believed a weekly noonday prayer meeting would allow various merchants, businessmen, mechanics, clerks, and strangers “an opportunity to stop and call upon God amid the perplexities incident to their respective avocations.” Accordingly, Lamphier distributed a handbill setting the weekly prayer meeting on Wednesdays from 12 to 1 o’clock at the North Dutch Church at the corner of Fulton and William Streets in what is today lower Manhattan. At that first meeting on the 23rd of September, Lamphier anxiously awaited but no one joined him until about 12:30 PM six persons in succession quietly arrived. Two weeks later on October 7th, there were forty in attendance and it was decided to hold prayer meetings on a daily rather than weekly basis. In the same week, Walter and Phoebe Palmer began preaching revival meetings in Hamilton that resulted in extraordinary numbers of converts, but reports of the Hamilton revival would not reach New York until November 5th.[7] But God had an additional means of arresting the attention of a wayward nation consumed with things other than religion.

Financial and commercial prosperity had been building at a dizzying pace for over a decade as the nation rapidly expanded with the addition of new states to the Union. New cities sprang up, and cheap land became available as the frontier was pushed farther and farther to the west. But in 1856 and 1857, there were disturbing signs of financial instability. By fall of 1857, various events coalesced to bring about the third great panic in American history. Much of the speculative wealth of the nation was swept away as banks failed and railroads went into bankruptcy. Factories were shut down, merchants went out of business, and thousands were thrown out of work including thirty thousand in New York City alone.[8] The panic was triggered when a bank holiday was declared on October 14th to prevent a run on the banks. By the time the banks were reopened on December 14th, recession had spread over the nation and to other parts of the world. As a result of the panic, the noon prayer meetings received a significant boost in attendance from those working in nearby Wall Street and others who were unemployed, some seeking salvation while others killed time.[9]

By the end of March 1858 every church and public hall was filled to capacity in downtown New York City as ten thousand business men were gathering daily for prayer. Soon revival was occurring in Brooklyn, Yonkers, and in New Jersey towns across the Hudson River. By February the national press began covering the story.[10] With mass unemployment during the winter of 1857-1858, one would have expected the crime rate to increase, but it actually dropped as the wealthy looked after the physical needs of many of their less fortunate brothers and sisters in Christ.[11] J. Edwin Orr described the impact of the revival on the United States.

The national press from coast to coast carried news of the great awakening in the metropolis, and citizens everywhere were challenged by the movement. The “showers of blessing” in New York had caused a flood which suddenly burst its bounds and swept over New England, engulfed the Ohio Valley cities and states, rolled over the newly settled West, lapped the edges of the mountains in the South, and covered the United States of America and Canada with divine favour.

The influence of the awakening was felt everywhere in the nation. It first moved the great cities, but it also spread through every town and village and country hamlet, swamping school and college. It affected all classes without respect to their condition. A divine influence seemed to pervade the land, and men’s hearts were strangely warmed by a Power that was outpoured in unusual ways. There was no fanaticism. There was remarkable unanimity of approval among religious and secular observers alike, with scarcely one critical voice heard anywhere.[12]

After careful research, revival historian Dr. J. Edwin Orr estimated that approximately one million people were converted in the nation during 1858-1859. In other words, conversions amounted to over three percent of the population which was less than thirty million at that time. This seems a reasonable estimate given that some historians have estimated that conversions were occurring at the rate of fifty thousand per week at the height of the revival.[13]

The two revivals originating almost simultaneously in the United States and Canada also had a worldwide impact including many men and women across Great Britain. This influence led to revivals in Wales (1858-1860), Ireland and Scotland (1859-1860), and England (1859-1860). In 1858, two hundred thousand converts were recorded in Sweden in the first year of a two-year revival. The India Awakening began in late 1859 with the greatest revivals occurring in the south of India.[14]

The long-term consequences in America of the Revival of 1857-1858

The Revival of 1857-1858 influenced many young men who would later spark many revivals among troops on both sides of the Civil War. Large and widespread revivals in both Union and Confederate armies occurred between 1862 and 1865. Conversions during the war were estimated to be between 100,000 and 200,000 among Union troops and as many as 150,000 in the Confederate Army.[15]

One may ask how this can be—brothers fighting and killing each other while both called on God for protection and to save their immortal souls. To answer, we must remember that slavery was an institutional cancer on the national body. Regardless of slavery’s origins and protectors, it was slavery that was being cut from the body, not the Southern soldier and citizen. God was just as concerned for the individual Southerner as he was for those in the North.

As previously mentioned, the efforts to abolish slavery in America began early in the nation’s history as a result of the moral suasion of Christian people who saw slavery as morally unacceptable within the biblical worldview. It was a matter of right and wrong and not a matter of “rights” or equality. However, breaking the chains of injustice sometimes requires the hammer of state in the cause of brotherhood and fraternity. The Civil War cost 600,000 lives, billions of dollars, and loss of unity as the nation was tragically divided with few thoughts of Christian brotherhood on either side of the chasm filled with distrust.

The war years and the years following the draconian Reconstruction Act of 1867 left the South lying prostrate and ravaged. Called the Tragic Era, Sherwood Eddy paints a picture of the dozen years of life in the South following the end of the Civil War.

Often with flagrant disregard of civil liberties, Southern officials, courts, customs, and organizations were removed or swept away, and a government by Northern Carpetbaggers and Negroes was substituted under military tribunals. A Northern army of occupation of twenty thousand was aided by an irritating force of colored militia…The state administrations under Northern carpetbaggers were extravagant, corrupt, and vulgar. The state treasuries were systematically looted…The majority of the legislature and most of the important officers were Negroes and many of the rest were rascally whites from the North, or unsavory characters from the South. Taxes were levied by the Negroes, of whom 80 percent were illiterate, and were paid by the disfranchised whites…the future of the Negro was sadly prejudiced by these disreputable adventures in self-government.[16]

The post-war product of the hammer of state that broke the chains of injustice was dis-unifying, absent Christian principles and brotherhood, and was anything but moral. Should Abraham Lincoln have avoided the assassin’s bullet, his post-war efforts at reconciliation of the divided nation could have forestalled much of the tragedy and anguish experienced during the Reconstruction period. Richard Weaver described the precipice upon which the nation teetered following Lincoln’s death at the end of the Civil War.

There was a critical period when, if things had been managed a little worse, the South might have turned into a Poland or an Ireland, which is to say a hopelessly alienated and embittered province, willing to carry on a struggle for decades or even centuries to achieve a final self-determination…As it was, things were done which produced only rancor and made it difficult for either side to believe in the good faith of the other. It is unfortunate but it is true that the Negro was forced to pay a large part of the bill for the follies of Reconstruction.[17]

Therefore, we must ask how it was possible for the nation to survive the cataclysmic events of the Civil War and the subsequent Tragic Era in the midst of moral degradation and dashed hopes for brotherhood and unity. Once again we must look for the answer in the actions of Christians who originally provided the motivation and drive to end slavery and who, following the Civil War, would provide the motivation for the restoration and unification of the nation.

Restoration and unity would not come easily, and it would be decades before signs of healing were evident. The Northern and Southern churches continued to have different interpretations of the war and its outcome. Northerners viewed theirs as a righteous victory and themselves as guardians of the ideals embodied in the Constitution which were based on the same principles as found in Christianity.[18] Following the war main-stream Northern churches tended toward rectifying other ills of society through a social gospel with a consequent loss of focus as it switched its emphasis from perfecting the inner man to social justice.[19]

In spite of loss of the war, Southern evangelicals comforted themselves with the thought that their goals were spiritual and not temporal which resulted in the rise of an other-worldly mood within Southern Christianity. Thus, Christianity allowed the Southern culture to focus on spiritual victory in the midst of earthly defeat. Religion in the South became the bulwark of Southern culture and “…never appeared stronger than it did at the end of the nineteenth century.” From this détente between Northern and Southern churches during the remainder of the century, old animosities began to wane as reconciliation became a common political, literary and religious theme in both the North and South. “Religion which once played a role in breaking the nation apart, now aided the reunification of the South with the North.”[20]

In spite of differing views of the war and the rampant corruption and immorality that plagued both the North and South for decades after the Civil war, many of the faithful Civil War veterans who embraced Christianity during the war-time revivals returned to their homes with their religious fervor intact, filled the pews, spurred post-war revivals (particularly in the South), and brought healing to the nation.[21] As a result, the unifying common ground of Christianity and faithfulness of individual Christians sheltered the flame of brotherhood amidst the winds of secularism and materialism of the Gilded Age in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Without this unifying Christian faith, the rebirth of national unity would have been still-born which could have easily and likely led to a permanent balkanization of much of the South. Because of the Revival of 1857 and 1858 and its legacy of Christian revivals among the soldiers during the Civil War, the Republic was saved.

The nature of the Revival of 1857-1858 in America

Historians have debated the impact of the Revival of 1857-1858 as it related to nineteenth century social reform efforts. Some historians such as Kathryn Teresa Long point to the revival prayer meeting practice of avoiding any discussion of controversial topics such as slavery and abolitionism as evidence of little direct social impact caused by the revival.[22]

From this perspective, the 1857-1858 revival marked a shift in the public role of revivals in American life. It signaled a rejection of the combination of religious conversion and community moral reform that had been a part of the New England Calvinist tradition since the colonial revivals. Instead, a more limited, pietistic image of revivals emerged, one focused on prayer and evangelism and in which community meant experiences of shared feeling among middle class people. This shift of urban revivalism in a more inward direction reflected the changing nature of community in a rapidly industrializing society and promised northern evangelicals spiritual harmony in the midst of an increasingly complex society.[23] [emphasis added]

But there was not a shift in the public role of revivals to a more inward direction. The reality was that the 1857-1858 Revival was about personal religious transformation but with which society greatly benefited. It must be remembered that the ordering of society and the addressing of its social ills must begin with the individual through an ordering of his soul in right relationship with God. This must certainly be the greatest impact of the Revival of 1857-1858 as the nation was soon to be immersed in its greatest struggle for survival. As noted at the close of the last chapter, it was the Revival of 1857-1858 that caused men and women, in both the North and South, to be spiritually prepared for the coming struggle in which the nation would exorcize the demon of slavery and recover its national unity.

After the Revival of 1757-1758, the real shift away from revivals as an instrument through which religious, moral, and social reformation of society was periodically accomplished was caused by the rise of increasingly liberal elements within the Protestant church. This was not a retreat to an inward spirituality but an abandonment of the irreplaceable renewing power of revival by much of the liberal Protestant establishment in America. During the last third of the nineteenth century, the Protestant churches came under assault by a rapid secularization of the culture and the emergence of powerful new humanistic forces that sought to replace Christianity as the measure of cultural norms and authority. All of these factors led to a dramatic loss of cultural power by the once dominant Protestant preeminence. This transition will be discussed in the next chapter.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Gerald Procee, “Revivals in North America: The Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Revival of 1857, ReformResource.net.
http://reformedresource.net/index.php/worldviews/the-hand-of-god-in-history/124-revivals-in-north-america-the-hamilton-ontario-canada-revival-of-1857.html (accessed January 16, 2018).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Mathew Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings-Thirty Six Visitations of the Holy Spirit, (ByFaith Media, 2009, 2012), p. 61.
[6] Edwin Orr, The Light of the Nations – Evangelical Renewal and Advance in the Nineteenth Century, (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1965), pp. 102-103.
[7] Ibid., p. 103.
[8] Ibid., p. 100.
[9] Kathryn Teresa Long, “Revival of 1857-1858,” Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America, Vol. 1, A- Z, ed. Michael McClymond, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), p. 362.
[10] Orr, The Light of the Nations, p. 104.
[11] Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings, p. 62.
[12] Orr, The Light of the nations, pp. 107, 109.
[13] Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings, p. 63.
[14] Ibid., pp. 63-67.
[15] Darrell W. Stowell, “Civil War Revivals,” Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America, Vol. 1, A-Z, ed. Michael McClymond, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), pp. 117-118
[16] Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941), pp. 177, 179-180.
[17] Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, Eds. George M. Curtis, III and James J. Thompson, Jr., (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1987), p. 216.
[18] Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., A Shield and Hiding Place – The Religious Life of the Civil War Armies, (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987), pp. 129-130.
[19] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, (New York: Sentinel, 2004), p. 497.
[20] Shattuck, A Shield and hiding Place, pp. 12, 125, 127-128, 130-131, 135-136.
[21] Stowell, “Civil War Revivals,” Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America, pp. 120-121.
[22] Long, “Revival of 1857-1858,” Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America, p. 365.
[23] Ibid., pp. 365-366.

The ripening fruit of the Second Great Awakening

During the first half of the Second Great Awakening from 1794 to the beginning of the second half in 1822, the expansion of Christianity rested on two pillars: revival and the evangelical organizations growing out of them, especially in the United States and Great Britain. It was in the first half of the Second Awakening that these Christian organizations were birthed and nurtured, but it was in the second half that they matured and spread Christianity’s evangelical mandate to a waiting world. Here we note but just a few of these Christian organizations brought about by the Second Great Awakening.

Baptist Missionary Society was founded in England by William Carey in May 1792 and is generally regarded as the beginning of modern Protestant missionary endeavors.

Wesleyan Missionary Society formed in 1817-1818 arose from the work of Thomas Coke’s Methodist mission to the West Indies during the 1780s-1790s.

Anglican evangelical Thomas Haweis led in founding the interdenominational London Missionary Society in 1795.

Church Missionary Society founded in 1799 based on an idea conceived by Charles Simeon and sponsored by the Church of England.

The Scottish and Glasgow Missionary Societies were formed in 1796 but did not send out missionaries until 1824 because of opposition from the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

The interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society was established in 1804 for the purpose of dissemination of the Scriptures. The American Bible Society was founded in 1816.

Religious and Tract Society was established in 1799 at the urging of George Burder, a Congregational minister who had been influenced by George Whitefield. In 1825, the American Tract Society was founded to provide Christian literature to the religiously destitute.

The interdenominational Sunday School Union was formed in 1803 and was a direct result of the earlier work of Robert Raikes of Gloucester, England, who in 1780 organized a Sunday school to give religious and moral training to the poor children of his city.[1]

These organizations and many others supplied great energy and motivation to evangelicalism in America and Great Britain during 1822-1842 as well as to their corresponding missionary efforts around the world.

During the second half of the Second Great Awakening, almost all denominations experienced revivals. However, none were more involved in American revivalism during this period than the Methodists. In 1822, the Methodists participated in over a thousand camp meetings. But as the radical evangelicals had discovered during the First Great Awakening, the real work in all denominations began with the discipling of new converts after the revival fires died down, and none did it better than the methodical Methodists. A Methodist Bishop of the time told his preachers: “We must attend camp-meetings; they make our harvest time.”[2] But the harvest must be understood as being that brief season that stands between the enormous preparations and effort that must precede a bountiful harvest of souls and the great work of discipleship and training of the newly redeemed that must follow.

Even though revival fires burned hot in the years 1822-1842, there were still divisions among the denominations. The Baptists were divided not so much by doctrine or practice but of necessity due to reasons of geographical dispersion. An extensive network of small Baptist Associations comprised of local churches joined together in voluntary cooperation. These churches were usually guided by farmer-preachers with little formal education. The Presbyterians and Congregationalists were divided over the methods and manifestations of revival. Anglicans divided into Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical branches. Likewise, Lutherans were split between confessional orthodoxy and tolerant evangelism. Whatever their internal divisions, the Reformed, Anglican, and Lutheran churches were cautiously supportive of revival but to a degree far less than their enthusiastic evangelical counterparts.[3]

Charles Grandison Finney

As previously noted, revival was widespread among the American churches in 1822-1842.
At the center of this great outpouring of the Holy Spirit was Charles Grandison Finney, born in Connecticut in 1792. He studied law in western New York. As a law student, Finney began studying the Mosaic legal code. His interest and study of the Bible grew to the point that he believed in the authority of the Word. Remarkably, but not surprising, Finney’s conversion came not from evangelism by others but from his private study and prayer. Revival historian J. Edwin Orr described young Finney and his path to the pulpit.

His conversion caused a great stir in his community, for he was already (at 29 years of age) a brilliant fellow, a splendid pagan, impressive in personality, and proudly conscious of his intellectual as well as his physical superiority.

Self-taught, but well-disciplined in theology, Finney rebelled against the rigid Calvinism of his Presbyterian fellows, yet he was ordained by a lenient presbytery in western New York. To the end of his days, he pursued his own way in theology, and adopted methods of evangelism which brought him into conflict with many of the leaders of the Calvinistic churches.[4]

Finney’s ministry virtually spanned the whole of the second half of the Second Great Awakening and extended well into the Third Great Awakening.

Finney began his ministry in 1824 at the age of thirty-two. He conducted a series of meetings in Evans Mills, Oneida County, New York, where he preached at a Congregationalist church without a pastor. Although the congregation seemed pleased with his sermons, Finney became distressed after several weeks of preaching without any conversions. Finally, Finney confronted the people with regard to their seeming obstinacy in not responding to the message of the gospel. Frustrated with their complacency, he challenged the congregation. “You who have made up your minds to become Christians, and will give your pledge to make peace with God immediately, should rise up.” [emphasis added] This challenge would be a milestone at the very beginning of Finney’s evangelical career for it was the first time he had asked for an immediate response. He then instructed those that had not risen and therefore had “no interest in Christ” to “sit still.” When no one stood, Finney pronounced judgement, “You have taken your stand. You have rejected Christ and His gospel.” He promised to preach just once more the following night. Finney spent the next day in fasting and prayer. That night the school house was packed “almost to suffocation” with “deists, nominal believers, infidels, Universalists, tavern keepers, respectable citizens, and a husband so angry with the evangelist for upsetting his wife that he would ‘kill Finney’.” Finney preached with all his might and the power of God fell. “Conversions began to occur, some accompanied with falling, groaning, and bellowing. Many inhabitants made ‘heart-broken confessions’ and ‘professed a hope’ of salvation…”[5]

At one meeting while at Evans Mills, Finney closed his sermon with an invitation to all that would give their hearts to the Lord to come forward and take the front seats. In later years this became a standard practice in all of his meetings and was called the “mourner’s bench” or “anxious seat.”[6]

Following the breakthrough at Evans Mills, Finney perfected his preaching style over the next six years in local awakenings in western New York State.[7] Finney described his evangelistic preaching style as “…simply preaching, prayer and conference meetings, and much private prayer, much personal conversation, and meetings for instruction of earnest inquirers.” Finney also served as his own song leader, but singing was never an important component at his revival meetings.[8]

The completion of the Erie Canal linked Lake Erie with the deep waters of the Hudson River near Albany which flowed into the Atlantic Ocean. As a result of this new pathway to the sea, the towns along and near the canal’s route boomed and grew rapidly. In this setting Finney’s ministry eventually transitioned to more urban settings in western New York.[9] Finney and his wife moved to Utica, New York, in October 1825; to Wilmington, Delaware, in December 1827; and then to other areas in the metropolitan east.[10]

In 1830, against the advice of friends, the Finneys chose to go to Rochester in western New York where they stayed from September 1830 to mid-June 1831. Although Rochester was the fastest growing city in the United States during the 1820s due to the completion of the Erie Canal, for ministry purposes it was still considered a smaller and more provincial town as compared to the opportunity to preach in the largest urban areas of the nation.[11]

The pulpit to which he was called to fill was at Third Presbyterian Church. The building housing the church had severe structural damage caused by dampness from the nearby canal and was dangerously near collapse. As a result, the doors of several local churches were opened to Finney’s message. A significant aid to furthering the Rochester revival was its alliance with the local temperance movement in the city. The symbiotic relationship between revival and the temperance movement “united evangelical Protestants like no other social movement had, and it would continue to do so for almost a hundred years.” 12] It was estimated that in Rochester alone, one-tenth of the city’s ten thousand residents were converted and twelve hundred admitted as members of the local churches during the revival of 1830.[13]

Finney wrote that the Rochester revival “spread like waves in every direction.” Without doubt Finney’s assessment was accurate in that the revival spread throughout the northeast with estimates of new church members ranging from 100,000 to as high as 200,000. Finney wrote in his Memoirs that “the very fame of it was an efficient instrument in the hands of the Spirit of God.”[14] Here again we see that the fame of certain revivals within a broad spiritual awakening tends to identify those revivals as the signature event of the era: Jonathan Edwards and the Northampton revival of the 1730s during the First Great Awakening, the Cane Ridge revival of 1801 during the first half of the Second Great Awakening, and now the Rochester revival that gave rise to the 1830-1831 revivals during the second half of the Second Great Awakening.

Dr. Lyman Beecher expressed his opinion of this remarkable work of the Holy Spirit that spread from Rochester to virtually all states in the nation.

That was the greatest work of God and the greatest revival of religion that the world has ever seen, in so short a time. One hundred thousand were reported as having connected themselves to the churches as a result of that great revival. This is unparalleled in the history of the church.[15]

As a result of the Rochester revival, Finney became nationally known and soon preached revival meetings to large crowds in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and other large cities. He became professor of theology at Oberlin College in 1836 and the college’s president in 1851 where he remained until 1866. Over the years following the Rochester revival, Finney’s theology evolved from a Presbyterian-Congregationalist Calvinism to a middle path between Arminianism and Calvinism. By the end of his life he was a strong supporter of the doctrine of perfectionism.[16] Christian perfectionism was at the heart of John Wesley’s preaching. The essence of this doctrine is that the Christian pursues a life of sanctification or holiness in which one has been separated from a past life of sin and continues to live a life separated from sin and dedicated to God.

Charles Finney was and remains a controversial figure as are almost all who preach revival for to do so is to incur the wrath of Satan and the forces of the reigning world system. One of Finney’s most controversial beliefs dealt with how revivals begin. In his 1831 “Lectures on Revivals of Religion,” Finney wrote:

A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means…

I said that a revival is the result of the right use of the appropriate means. The means which God has enjoined [ordered] for the production of a revival, doubtless have a natural tendency to produce a revival. Otherwise God would not have enjoined them. But means will not produce a revival, we all know, without the blessing of God. No more will grain, when it is sown, produce a crop without the blessing of God. It is impossible for us to say that there is not as direct an influence or agency from God, to produce a crop of grain, as there is to produce a revival.[17] [emphasis added]

Throughout his entire life Finney believed that “regeneration is always induced and effected by the personal agency of the Holy Spirit.” He also believed the Spirit works through natural means and human agency.[18] Unfortunately, and as is often the case in spiritual matters, this reasonable understanding of the centrality and manner of working of the Holy Spirit was frequently reduced to conversational shorthand devoid of Finney’s intent and true meaning of his position. Thus, in the minds of many, “revivals of religion” amount to little more than human manipulation or fabrication resulting in salvation by emotion rather than salvation by faith. Dr. J. Edwin Orr described the consequences of this misunderstanding and misuse of Finney’s path to revival by many ministers and evangelists, both friend and foe.

[Finney’s] theory of revivals encouraged a brash school of revivalists and evangelists who thought that they could promote genuine revival by use of means chosen by themselves. The use of means was patently successful in the case of so many other Spirit-filled men. In the case of the less spiritual promoters, the theory gave rise to a brand of promotional evangelism, one full of sensationalism and commercialism…[19]

Although Finney fully embraced the religious enthusiasm of the common people, he was steadfastly opposed to fanaticism which damaged the prospects of spiritual renewal by “ranting irresponsible preachers.”[20] In spite of the objections to and misunderstandings of his methods and message, Charles Finney stands alone as the most brilliant evangelist of the nineteenth century. Although Finney was a master revival tactician and the undisputed revivalist leader between 1822 and1842, the footprint of the later years of the Second Great Awakening was far larger than Finney’s and included many other well-known revivals and evangelists of the era.

The decline of religious life in America 1842-1857

Religious life in the United States began a serious decline during the latter half of the 1840s and much of the 1850s as a result of the confluence of several religious, social, and political conditions.

One well-meaning but misguided evangelist of the 1830s and early 1840s brought reproach on the cause of Christ which helped cool the religious fervor of the Awakening. William Miller was a New England farmer, a sincere man, and a zealous leader of many evangelists. In 1831, Miller began preaching a message that the Lord was coming on March 21, 1843. In the dozen years leading up to the projected date, Miller had gathered a following variously estimated to be between 100,000 and one million. As the date approached, many of the Millerites, as they were known, sold their possessions, camped out in fields, or waited in white garments on nearby hilltops for Christ’s return. The date came and went as did two new dates in March and October of 1844 which were predicted for Christ’s return. As a consequence many of the Millerites became embittered and left the church as a result of their misplaced faith. In 1846, a remnant of the Millerites established the Seventh-Day Adventists. The denomination developed several new doctrines to explain the Millerite disaster. Many of these doctrines were blatantly heretical including the assertion that Christ had already come secretly. These doctrines and other beliefs effectively isolated the Seventh-Day Adventists from the rest of evangelical Protestantism.[21] As a result of the Millerite debacle, the Protestant church as a whole was diminished and frequently ridiculed. During the period 1845-1855, faith in religion was greatly diminished, and the church experienced severe losses.[22]

In the social realm, financial and commercial prosperity abounded to the point that the zeal for the material far outweighed the zeal for things religious. “Boom times caught the public fancy, and turned men’s hearts from God.”[23]

However, it was in the arena of politics that propelled the ship of state into uncharted and dangerous waters. The myths of Andrew Jackson as the hero of the common man and Jacksonian democracy as a watershed event in democratic processes is better described as a hypocritical reform movement steeped in corruption, spoils, and patronage. Elected in 1828, Jackson and his successors’ actions “…ensured the dominance of a proslavery party in national politics…” which continued to exacerbate the problem of slavery until the beginning of the Civil War in 1861.[24]

Slavery was an issue that had been a great cause for concern among evangelicals and an institution upon which they had expended great energy in hopes of bringing it to an end. The efforts to abolish slavery in America began even before the nation’s founding as a result of the moral suasion of Christian people who saw slavery as morally unacceptable within the biblical worldview. The case against slavery had been building among many evangelicals since the eighteenth century. But by the 1830s, it was an issue whose time had come, and none were better positioned to press the cause of liberation than Charles Finney and Oberlin College. Finney spoke strongly against slavery in his Lectures on Revivals. He told ministers that “their testimony must be given on this subject” and that failure to speak out implied “that they do not consider slavery a sin.” Finney believed that it would take a national spiritual revival to end slavery and warned that the ideological struggle over the issue of slavery was quickly driving the nation to the brink of civil war.[25]

Just as the Great Awakening was the formative moment in American history preceding the political drive for independence and making it possible, the Second Great Awakening was the stabilizing moment whose effects lasted until the 1840s and saved the new nation from political and moral destruction. The Third Great Awakening was the sustaining moment that prepared the nation to endure the national conflagration of the Civil War and made possible its reunification and survival in the war’s aftermath. The revival of the late 1850s caused men and women, in both the North and South, to be spiritually prepared for the coming struggle in which the nation would exorcize the demon of slavery and recover its national unity.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] . Edwin Orr, The Light of the Nations – Evangelical Renewal and Advance in the Nineteenth Century, (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1965), pp. 40-42.
[2] Ibid., p. 54.
[3] Ibid., p. 56.
[4] Ibid., p. 58.
[5] Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), pp. 36-37.
[6] Ibid., p. 39.
[7] Orr, The Light of the Nations, p. 19.
[8] Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney, p. 38.
[9] Ibid., p. 47.
[10] Ibid., pp. 73-74.
[11] Ibid., pp. 100-103.
[12] Ibid., pp. 106, 110-111, 113.
[13] Orr, The Light of the Nations, p. 59.
[14] Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney, p. 113.
[15] Orr, The Light of the Nations, p. 54.
[16] Ibid., pp. 59-60.
[17] Charles G. Finney, “What a Revival of Religion Is,” Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lecture I, 1835, TeachingAmericanHistory.org. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-a-revival-of-religion-is/ (accessed January 13, 2018).
[18] Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney, pp. 220-221.
[19] Orr, The Light of the Nations, p. 60.
[20] Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney, p. 39.
[21] Orr, The Light of the Nations, pp. 60-61.
[22] Ibid., pp. 99-100.
[23] Ibid., p. 100.
[24] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, (New York: Sentinel, 2004), p. 219.
[25] Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney, pp. 173-174.

Revival historian J. Edwin Orr marks the Second Great Awakening in America as beginning with Isaac Backus’ call to the churches for prayer for revival in 1794.[1] Thereafter, a period of almost continuous revival existed in the United States until 1842 except for the decade beginning with the War of 1812. The early years of revival occurred in the colleges and churches in the east and in the churches and camp meetings of the west. The early years of revival produced many young leaders, but there was no dominant personality that led the revivals. Orr dated the later years of the Second Great Awakening as beginning in 1822 and lasting until 1842. Unlike the early years, this era produced one dominant figure in evangelicalism during the middle third of the nineteenth century—Charles Grandison Finney.[2] This second period will be discussed in the next chapter.

Changes in the American Protestant landscape

Before we proceed further in our discussion, it is important to step back and once again summarize the forces that preceded and later shaped the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century. Thomas Kidd identified several key factors that defined the flourishing American evangelicalism during the last half of The Great Awakening. These changes in the American Protestant landscape greatly influenced the shape and character of the Second Great Awakening at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The first influence was the disestablishment of the dominant moderate evangelical churches of the 1740s-1750s, primarily the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian (Anglican) churches. In 1760, these three denominations accounted for more than forty percent of all American congregations but declined to less than twenty-five percent by 1790. However, the number of populist evangelical churches grew dramatically. The Baptists grew from forty-nine churches in 1760 to 858 by 1790. The Methodists went from having no churches to over 700 congregations during the same thirty year period.[3]

The revivals of the 1760s proved to be a key moment of transition by the former radicals. Much of the leadership of the radicals from the revivals in the 1740s remained in place and had become prominent players in the revivals of the 1760s. These seasoned revival leaders now saw themselves in somewhat of a different, less-radical light. One reason was that by the 1760s the influence of George Whitefield on the radicals had waned. As new churches were birthed from the revivals, the once radical leaders found that they must not only stir revival but pastor the new congregants between revivals. A second reason was that the former radicals sought to carry their populist and egalitarian ideas into mainstream American Christianity. Although liberty of conscience and separation from the established churches continued to be of central importance, the former radicals saw the necessity of presenting new revivals as both “reasonable and enthusiastic.”[4]

A second influence on the America Protestant denominations was a decline in Calvinistic theology. To many in the new populist Protestant denominations during the last half of the eighteenth century, the Calvinist beliefs about predestination seemed doctrinally incompatible with the emerging individualist evangelicalism. The rejection of Calvinism was found among many North American evangelical denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists. The abandonment of Calvinism by the former radical evangelicals was a frequent occurrence during the revivals of the New Light Stir during the Revolutionary War.[5]

A third influence on American Protestantism was that the new birth had become permanently identified as the most significant feature of evangelical Christianity. For the individual, conversion by the grace of Christ became the most important and spiritually significant moment of one’s life. Whether radical or moderate, emphasizing salvation by faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ through personal conversion had forever become the heart of evangelical churches’ reason for being.[6]

Anti-evangelicalism, deism, Unitarianism, Universalism

As a result of disagreement with certain aspects of The Great Awakening in the 1740s and thereafter, many churches become inclined toward formalism and rejected evangelicalism. As the influence of the anti-evangelical churches declined during 1760-1790, these churches eventually became powerful allies of those professing deism. Together, they would counter what they perceived to be the growing threat of evangelicalism. Deism had once again began to grow and expand during the last quarter of the eighteenth century as it had done for a season during the first quarter of the century before being displaced by the birth of evangelicalism. However, the new deism of the late eighteenth century was of a much more poisonous variety for it embraced a large measure of French rationalism which championed human reason over religious teachings. Although deists would not deny God, worship, or Christian ethics as the Enlightenment’s humanists did, the new deism directly attacked revivalism and its emphasis on a personalized heart religion. As a result, the growing influence of deistic rationalism on Protestant thought “had numbed conviction and cooled enthusiasm” in many Protestant churches. The latent deism that had crept into anti-evangelical New England churches which were in decline after 1760 paved the way for the even greater heretical philosophies of Unitarianism and Universalism. Proponents of these philosophies were able to gain control of many strategic and influential Congregational churches which eventually split over these false philosophies. Over time, many churches captured by Unitarian and Universalist philosophies completely abandoned evangelical Christianity as they drifted toward outright humanism.[7]

A call for a “concert of prayer” in the midst of desperate times

The influence of these anti-evangelical forces in the last quarter of the eighteenth century coupled with the spiritual and moral decline as a result of the debilitating effects of eight years of war quickly became a disastrous setback for evangelicals and the Christian cause in general. This general decline was evident in 1796 near the end of George Washington’s second term as president. A friend wrote to Washington of his concerns for the survival of the young nation.

Our affairs seem to lead to some crisis, some revolution; something that I can not foresee or conjecture. I am more uneasy than during the war.

And George Washington replied:

Your sentiment…accords with mine. What will be is beyond my foresight.[8]

Given the dominance of Christianity and revivalism in much of American culture during the middle years of the eighteenth century, many unbelievers may appear baffled by the new nation’s sudden poverty of Christian spiritual and moral fiber. But for Christians who are familiar with the biblical accounts of God’s people through the ages, great victories invariably lead to strong opposition by Satan, man’s great adversary. But Christians also know that when conditions are desperate and defeat is imminent, they must seek God’s face and pray the prayers of desperate men and women for they know that only divine intervention can save the day. On a national scale that means “nothing less than a revival could effectively deal with the situation.”[9] And so it was in 1794 America.

A brief synopsis of Isaac Backus’ life and ministry was presented in the previous chapter. Although he had pastored the Middleborough, Massachusetts, Baptist congregation for forty-six years, by 1794 Backus was a discouraged man because of the widespread personal impiety and blatant corruption of public morals. The churches in America appeared to be powerless in stopping the abandonment of religious principles and consequent declining moral state of the nation. Although many had given up hope, Backus still wavered between hope and despair. In his desperation Backus recruited Stephen Gano, a long-time friend and Baptist pastor, and twenty New England pastors to issue a call for a nation-wide “Concert of Prayer.” The call for prayer for revival went to pastors of every Christian denomination throughout the United States, and the prayer network almost universally adopted and followed the pattern of the British Union of Prayer which set aside the first Monday of each month for prayer.[10]

Whisperings of revival

Soon revival began in the most unlikely of places—the colleges in the longest settled parts of the nation. Although these schools had been founded by godly men for godly purposes, they had become known as brazen centers of infidelity and immorality. Revival began almost imperceptibly among a handful of students who assembled unobtrusively to pray at various colleges. A few students at Virginia’s Hampden-Sydney College, none professing Christians, attempted to conduct a prayer meeting, but ungodly students sought to disrupt the meeting. The president of the college quelled the disturbance and chastised the unruly students. Thereafter he invited the students wanting to pray to meet in his study. Very soon more than half of the students attending professed to have been converted and become Christians. Local churches also began to be roused from their spiritual lethargy by the students’ conversions.[11]

Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, became the president of Yale College in 1795. Dwight soon encouraged his students to attack without hesitation the truth of the Bible. He answered their attacks in chapel with a series of powerful sermons such as “The nature and danger of Infidel Philosophy” and “Is the Bible the Word of God?” He then challenged the students with plain expository preaching regarding the problems of materialism and deism. Interest in religion grew to such an extent that by 1802, one-third of the entire student body had made public confessions of faith in Christ. Several new revivals at Yale College would follow in the years to come.[12]

During the summer of 1806, five students at Williams College in Massachusetts met for prayer in a grove of maples as they were accustomed. Caught in the open by a brief thunderstorm, they sought shelter beneath a haystack. There they prayed about evangelizing the heathen for Christ and determined to devise a plan to do so. The small band of five organized a society, met in secret, and recorded their minutes in code. Soon they recruited at least twenty other students who shared their burden. In 1810, the burden for lost souls still burned in the hearts of the students. Samuel J. Mills, one of the original haystack group at Williams College, and three of his closest friends were attending Andover Seminary. The four seminarians met with six ministers of their denomination in the parlor of an interested professor. The students presented their plan to reach lost souls, but it was met with skepticism by several of the ministers who pointed to various obstacles that would hinder their mission. The ministers eventually gave their blessing to the young men after being warned by one minister against trying to stop God’s purposes. From its humble origins under a New England haystack during a thunderstorm in 1806, the “whole modern missionary movement” was birthed.[13]

Small though they may have been, these initial college prayer meetings at several American campuses in the early years of the Second Great Awakening eventually led to revivals of religion in a multitude of colleges and subsequently to the churches. J. Edwin Orr described these revivals as beginning “…quietly and without fanaticism of any kind. There was undoubtedly an appeal to the hearts of the students, but first their minds and consciences were moved.” By the turn of the century the awakenings on the college campuses had produced many powerful revivals from Maine to the southern states and most areas between. This was providential for at that very time there were enormous numbers of people that sought to establish new lives in the unsettled regions west of the Allegheny Mountains. The college campus revivals eventually produced “a generation of evangelistic ministers to serve the opening western states.” But in 1798, the illiterate frontiers west of the Allegheny Mountains would not wait for revival to be brought by these future ministers.[14]

Fourteen states had been admitted to the Union by 1791. In the space of a single generation, ten more states were added, all west of the Allegheny/Appalachian Mountains by 1821. Such was the vast migration of people surging into these new states that Ohio soon had a greater population than all but four of the original states in the Union.[15]

Rogues’ Harbour and Cane Ridge Revivals

The revivals in the east were soon surpassed by revivals in the wilderness regions. Two legendary revivals occurred in Kentucky and set the tone for what was to come. By 1800, revival had reached the western extremities of civilization in Logan County in southern Kentucky. Perhaps civilized is too strong a word for Rogues’ Harbour was known for its wild and irreligious people including escaped murderers, counterfeiters, highwaymen, and horse thieves. Lawlessness was so rampant that local citizens formed themselves into regiments of vigilantes to fight the outlaws, often unsuccessfully, to establish a measure of law and order for the settlements. It was here that Presbyterian minister James McCready settled and became pastor of three small churches in 1797. All through the winter of 1799, McCready and several of his congregants joined the national monthly Monday meetings to pray for revival as well as holding weekly Saturday evening to Sunday morning prayer meetings.[16]

Following months of prayer, revival came in the summer of 1800. Toward the end of a sacramental service at the Red River congregation, Presbyterian McCready allowed Methodist preacher John McGee to address his congregation. This was an unusual occurrence, but McGee was the brother of one of McCready’s Presbyterian colleagues. McGee’s preaching so stirred the audience that “Suddenly persons began to fall as he passed through the crowd—some as dead.” McCready and his fellow Presbyterians were so stunned by the bodily manifestations they “acquiesced and stood in astonishment, admiring the wonderful work of God.” McCready soon began preaching in the Methodist-style of preaching at his other two congregations.[17] The spiritual hunger was so great that eleven thousand came to a communion service. Overwhelmed, McCready called for help from all denominations.[18]

The religious gathering in August 1801 at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, is considered to be one of the most famous religious events in American history. Cane Ridge was located a few miles northeast of Lexington in central Kentucky which at that time was the largest city in the state with a population of 2,000. The unique feature of the Cane Ridge revival was that people came prepared to camp at the site of the revival meeting which allowed a new intensity and level of religious experience. Although camp meetings were a part of several earlier localized revivals, the Cane Ridge revival was different in that people came from great distances and included rich, poor, black, and white who joined in prayer together.[19] Drawing from many recorded accounts of eyewitnesses, historian Ellen Eslinger pieced together a picture of the historic outpouring of the Spirit of God in the Kentucky wilderness for almost a week.

For more than half a mile, I could see people on their knees before God in humble prayer…Individuals, suddenly struck by their spiritual plight, began falling to the ground “as if dead.” At times the effect was awesome, with several hundred people “swept down like the trees of the forest under the blast of the wild tornado…Religion has got to such a height here, that people attend from great distances; on this occasion I doubt not but there will be 10,000 people, and perhaps 500 wagons.”…The meeting was presided over by the Cane Ridge pastor and 18 other Presbyterian ministers, at least four Methodists, plus several Baptist elders…Cane Ridge offered spectators a chaotic scene. When individuals were spiritually stricken and fell, a circle of curious onlookers gathered around them. The huge, unwieldy scale of the event necessitated parallel activities. Several ministers often preached at the same time in different sections of the grounds, and the only event that had been previously scheduled was the sacrament on Sunday afternoon.[20]

The fame of the Cane Ridge camp meeting revival was a pivotal event in evangelism and served as a pattern for other revivals in the early years of the Second Great Awakening much as Jonathan Edwards’ widely published descriptions of the Northampton revival during the First Great Awakening had done in the First Great Awakening over sixty years earlier.

Revival spreads

Soon the Kentucky revivals had swept south into Tennessee, the Western Carolinas, and Georgia and then north into Ohio Territory. The revival movement increased dramatically, and sometimes crowds of thirty or forty thousand illiterate pioneer settlers gathered and at which preachers from Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterians would preach in different parts of the campground. As always, Satan sowed tares in the revivals through extraordinary emotional excesses beyond the work of the Holy Spirit. However, in spite of the bad, far greater good for the kingdom of God was accomplished and was remarkably evident in the general religious awe that pervaded the country as “drunkards, swearers, liars, and the quarrelsome were remarkably reformed.” The college awakenings eventually provided a flood of well-educated Bible scholars for ministry in the western reaches of America.[21]

The War of 1812 slowed the waves of evangelism and revival, but during the years 1822-1842, thousands were added to the churches which far surpassed the results of the early years of the Second Great Awakening. The primary beneficiaries were those churches who were most evangelistic in word and action, primarily the Baptists and Methodists who evangelized the unchurched masses.[22]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] J. Edwin Orr, “Prayer brought Revival”,oChristian.com. http://articles.ochristian.com/article8330.shtml (accessed December 28, 2017).
[2] J. Edwin Orr, The Light of the Nations – Evangelical Renewal and Advance in the Nineteenth Century, (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1965), p. 54.
[3] Gordon S. Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution,” New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.185-188.
[4] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening – The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), pp.286-287.
[5] Ibid., pp. 312-313, 319.
[6] Ibid., p. 323.
[7] Orr, The Light of the Nations, pp. 15, 17, 20.
[8] Ibid., p. 17.
[9] Arthur Skevington Wood quoted by Orr, The Light of the Nations, p. 14.
[10] J. Edwin Orr, “Prayer brought Revival”, oChristian.com.
[11] Orr, The Light of the Nations, pp. 21-22.
[12] Ibid., p. 22.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., pp. 23-24.
[15] Ibid., p. 24.
[16] Orr, “Prayer brought Revival,”oChristian.com.
[17] Ellen Eslinger, “Cane Ridge Revival,” Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America, Volume 1, A-Z, ed. Michael McClymond, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), p. 89.
[18] Orr, “Prayer brought Revival,” oChristian.com.
[19] Eslinger, “Cane Ridge Revival,” Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America, p. 88.
[20] Ibid., pp. 88, 90.
[21] Orr, The Light of the Nations, pp. 25-27.
[22] Ibid., p. 18.

Religious Revivals amid political turmoil and war

To properly understand revivals that occurred during the later years of The Great Awakening, it is important to have knowledge of the contemporary events that impacted those revivals and religious life in general from the 1760s through the end of the Revolutionary War. During the 1750s the British had awakened to the importance to the British Empire of the few American colonies that clung to the eastern edge of a vast wilderness thousands of miles across the Atlantic. This new found interest was kindled by the French and Indian War being fought on the American continent (1754-1763). Britain’s interest and involvement in the affairs of the American colonists significantly increased following the war and ended decades of salutary neglect the colonists had come to expect and enjoy. The war left the British with massive debt, high taxes at home, and a permanent army of paid soldiers in the colonies that was costly to maintain. Accordingly, the British Parliament passed a series of revenue-generating measures which unilaterally imposed on the colonies many very burdensome taxes, duties, and tariffs, the most troublesome of which was the Stamp Act of 1765.[1]

Colonial unrest aggravated by British intransigence continued over the course of the next ten years and culminated with hostilities at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 which marked the beginning of the colonists’ eight-year struggle for independence. The war officially ended in January 1783 with the signing of the Articles of Peace.[2]

Even in war life goes on and so did the colonial revivals. Of particular note was a series of revivals from 1778 to 1782 which are called the “New Light Stir.” Although several evangelical denominations were successful during the Stir, the Baptists led the way with thirty six new churches planted in New England between 1778 and 1782. Isaac Backus had been involved in revivalism since the 1740s and knew well its history. He estimated that two thousand New Englanders received believer’s baptism in 1780 alone. Regarding the New Light Stir, Backus believed that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit “spread the most extensively and the most powerfully through New England than any revival had done for near forty years,” and it “was undoubtedly a great means of saving this land from foreign invasion, and from ruin by internal corruption.”[3]

In spite of the widespread success of the revivals, tensions between the rival moderate and radical camps of evangelicalism continued as it had for forty years. One of the most pronounced developments of revivalism’s New Light Stir was the growing abandonment of Calvinism among the radicals and would become even more common in the early years of the nineteenth century. Although Congregationalism began to decline during the late eighteenth century, it would remain a significant force in northern religious life and reform movements through the end of the Civil War. Moderate Baptist and radical evangelical growth continued during the war, but the bulk of the Methodists’ amazing growth would occur after the war.[4]

Revolutionary Revival

Irrespective of the abundance of primary historical evidence to the contrary, many if not most all early historians gave little to no credit to religion’s role in fostering the American Revolution. Most present-day historians of the American Revolution generally believe that religion was substantially displaced by politics as lawyers replaced the clergy as leaders which effectively “…transformed and secularized the intellectual character of the culture.”[5] They often point to declines in church attendance, number of publications devoted to religious matters, and other such statistics regarding the health of the church. However, a thoughtful response easily brings one to the natural conclusion that these declines resulted from dislocations caused by the war. Based on the appearance of a decline of religion in the public arena during the revolution, historians have leaped to the erroneous conclusion that the American people were significantly less religious. This is a blatant misreading of the mood and character of Americans during the Revolutionary period. Protestantism in whatever form it took remained the principle means by which Americans perceived and explained the world and ordered their lives.[6]

A brief look at the growth in the number of revivals and growth in the number of churches during 1760-1790 refute the historians’ assertions that concern for religious matters and religious fervor declined during the Revolutionary period. The number of church congregations doubled between 1770 and 1790. It is true that the older churches that dominated colonial society—Anglican, Congregational, and Presbyterian—declined or failed to grow relative to other groups. The Church of England which dominated the South and the powerful Puritan churches of New England accounted for more than forty percent of all American congregations in 1760 but declined to less than twenty-five percent by 1790. However, new denominations spawned by the Great Awakening were alive, well, and growing. The Baptists grew from ninety-four congregations in 1760 to 858 by 1790. During the same time period the Methodists grew from no adherents to over seven hundred congregations which nationally rivaled the numbers of the older Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches. American historian Gordon Wood wrote that, “The revolution released more religious energy and fragmented Christendom to a greater degree than had been seen since the upheavals of seventeenth century England or perhaps since the Reformation.” Stephen A. Marini (quoted by Wood) wrote that the extent of the profound changes in religious life and substantial religious growth in America between 1760 and 1790 can be described as nothing less than a “…Revolutionary Revival.”[7]

Spiritual and moral decline in America

History has proven that significant spiritual and moral decline occur during the years of war and for protracted periods thereafter. Even as revivals flourished during the Revolutionary War years, there was a simultaneous beginning of spiritual and moral decline among the general population. This decline continued following the end of the war in 1783 and especially during the last decade of the eighteenth century. Following eight years of war, all denominations and the new nation as a whole began to feel the effects of spiritual and moral decay. Revival historian J. Edwin Orr described the conditions in America.

The Methodists were losing more members than they were gaining. The Baptists said that they had their most wintry season. The Presbyterians in general assembly deplored the nation’s ungodliness. In a typical Congregational church, the Rev. Samuel Shepherd of Lennos (Lenox), Massachusetts, in sixteen years had not taken one young person in fellowship. The Lutherans were so languishing that they discussed uniting with Episcopalians who were even worse off. The Protestant Episcopal Bishop of New York…quit functioning; he had confirmed no one for so long that he decided he was out of work, so he took up other employment. The Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, wrote to the Bishop of Virginia, James Madison, that the Church “was too far gone ever to be redeemed.”…Tom Paine echoed, “Christianity will be forgotten in thirty years.”[8]

The churches had become almost totally irrelevant in curbing the nation’s downward spiral into immorality. During the last decade of the century, out of a population of five million Americans, six percent were confirmed drunkards. Crime had grown to such an extent that bank robberies were a daily occurrence and women did not go out at night for fear of assault.[9]

Christianity at the universities was just as destitute. Students at Harvard were polled, and not one Christian was found. Two admitted to being Christians at Princeton while only five members of the student body were not members of the filthy speech movement of the times. Few if any campuses escaped the denigration of Christianity and general mayhem. Anti-Christian plays were presented at Dartmouth, a Bible taken from a local church was burned in a public bonfire, students burned Nassau Hall at Princeton, and students forced the resignation of Harvard’s president. Christians on college campuses in the 1790s were so few “…that they met in secret, like a communist cell, and kept their minutes in code so that no one would know.”[10]

But America was not alone in her misery. Although the founding Americans had relied on an order that rested upon a respect for prescriptive rights and customs, the egalitarian notions of French philosophers fueled the bonfires of the French Revolution (1789-1799). The aberrant humanistic philosophies emerging from the late Renaissance and Enlightenment during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries nurtured the egalitarian notions of the French philosophers. These Enlightenment philosophies supplied the framework for the French revolutionists as they fostered societal changes based on the ethereal, imaginary, or invented “rights of man” as well as imposition of an ever increasing number of laws to address the failings of human nature. In spite of the French Revolution’s high-minded chorus of “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!”, the French reality was “monarchy, anarchy, dictatorship” all occurring in a little more than a decade.

However, across the English Channel the course of Western civilization was taking a different turn throughout the British Isles. As noted in Chapter 4, the British Great Awakening over the course of five decades beginning in 1739 had so completely transformed that the character of the nation by 1791 that some historians credit the British Awakening for preventing a revolution in Britain similar to the bloody French Revolution of 1789.[11]

In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, immense social upheavals and change throughout the Western world began to occur during the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution. However, the seeds destined to flower as the Second Worldwide Awakening were being sown by Christians in Great Britain. Recall that it was the providential publication in England during 1737 of Jonathan Edwards’ account of the revivals in American that greatly influenced two key figures of the approaching British Great Awakening—John Wesley in England and Howell Harris in Wales.[12] Forty-five years later the powerful influence of Edwards’ writings would again impact the people of the British Isles.

Jonathan Edwards believed that concerted prayers of Christians would release the power of the Holy Spirit and result in converts which would be followed by worldwide revival. In 1745 Edwards had had heard of a prayer movement for revival that had begun among several Scottish evangelical ministers. This information may have come from John Erskine, a Scottish Presbyterian minister who began corresponding with Edwards in the mid-1740s. Edwards was inspired by the information he had received and felt led to write his own thoughts on the matter and in 1746 published “An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, pursuant to Scripture Promises and Prophecies concerning the last Time.”[13]

John Sutcliffe (1752-1814) attended Bristol Baptist College from 1772 to May 1774. He became pastor of the Baptist church in Olney, Buckinghamshire, England, in 1775 where he began to earnestly study the writings of Jonathan Edwards. In the spring of 1784 John Ryland, Jr., a pastor friend, had received a copy of Edwards’ “An Humble Attempt…” from John Erskine, a Scottish Presbyterian minister. Ryland shared Edwards’ book with Sutcliffe. The book had a profound impact on Sutcliffe, Ryland, and another pastor friend Andrew Fuller. They soon enlisted sixteen other Baptist pastors to “establish monthly prayer meetings for the outpouring of God’s Holy Spirit and the consequent revival of the churches of Great Britain.” By 1789 the prayer meetings among the Calvinist Baptist churches had grown considerably. Sutcliffe decided to reprint Edwards’ “An Humble Attempt…” By 1790 the prayer movement for revival had spread beyond the Calvinistic Baptist denomination and led to “copious showers of blessing” which later historians would mark as the Second Evangelical Awakening (1790-1830).[14]

But the story does not end there. The providential sequence of events beginning with Edwards’1746 treatise on praying for revival, the calls beginning in 1784 by Scottish pastors for concerted prayers, and the unfolding of the Second Great Awakening in Britain in 1790 also influenced an American pastor and allowed the new British Awakening to traverse the Atlantic to America in the late 1790s.

Isaac Backus – God’s agent for revival

Isaac Backus (1724-1806) was born into a “pure” Congregational church by which was meant that it was not part of an association of Congregational churches adhering to the Saybrook Platform. This association linked individual Connecticut congregations and provided for church discipline. Backus’ mother raised him to understand the necessity of conviction and conversion which was later reinforced by the preaching of Eleazar Wheelock and James Davenport. While “mowing alone in the field,” the young seventeen-year-old Backus experienced both conviction and conversion. He joined the Norwich, Connecticut, Congregational Church but later left in the summer of 1745 with about thirty men and a large number of women to become part of the “New Light” revivalist movement.[15] It appears that the principal dividing issues causing their departure were the relaxed standards for full membership as allowed by the Saybrook Platform and a de-emphasis on personal conversion testimonies for full membership. In other words, the Norwich church received people “to Communion who could not testify to a work of gracious conversion.”[16]

On September 27, 1746, Backus sensed a call to preach and did so the next day by “exercising the right of exhortation.” In 1748, after fourteen months of itinerant preaching in a style similar to George Whitefield, Backus was called to pastor a congregation in Middleborough, Massachusetts.[17] Backus was twenty-four when the original sixteen members signed the new church’s covenant in February. By year’s end, membership had grown to sixty-one. However, Backus continued to struggle with the issue of baptism, and by July 1751 he began preaching that he could find no scriptural basis for infant baptism. In August, he and six other members of his congregation were baptized by immersion to demonstrate their commitment to the requirement of believer’s baptism for full communion. Backus’ action threw the church into turmoil because the majority of members were opposed to believer’s baptism. Backus agreed to continue as pastor of the church under a mixed-communion plan that accepted either infant or believer’s baptism.[18]

The church struggled along for another five years, but Backus finally became convinced that infant baptism was not compatible with the requirement that a congregant must be saved by grace. In 1756, Backus and several other congregation members re-constituted the Middleborough church under a Baptist covenant of freedom of conscience and that the Lord’s Supper was only to be taken by those after profession of their faith and having been baptized by immersion. Backus eventually became the principle agent for Massachusetts Baptists’ quest for religious liberty in their struggle against power of the Congregationalists’ legalized religious monopoly. For decades after fully embracing the Baptist covenant, Backus was a tireless writer, spokesman, and defender of religious liberty through separation of church and state.[19] Here the reader must understand that the separation of church and state sought by Backus was that which would eventually be expressed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and not the aberrant modern interpretation of separation of church and state as expressed by humanistic and liberal political orthodoxy.

Isaac Backus was an enormously important figure in The Great American Awakening. His career spanned six decades beginning in the great revivals of the early 1740s. He joined the Congregationalists, became a Separatist, and then founded a Baptist church, all during the moderate and radical conflicts of the 1740s and 1750s. He was a strong advocate of revivalism and participated in numerous revivals from the 1750s through the end of the American Revolution and then into the Second Great Awakening. He was an itinerant evangelist; pastor of one church for fifty-eight years; revival historian; political activist; denominational speaker, debater, and essayist; Revolutionary War Patriot; and perhaps the most important Baptist figure of the entire Awakening. However, Backus’ most important work for the kingdom of God may have occurred after these events and during the last twelve years of his life. During this last chapter of his life which began in 1794, Backus called Christian churches throughout the spiritually struggling new nation to join the Union of Prayer and pray for revival. These prayers eventually ignited the Second Great Awakening in America and changed the course of history.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Richard B. Morris, Encyclopedia of American History, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1953), pp. 67-73.
[2] Ibid., pp. 85, 109.
[3] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening – The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 313.
[4] Ibid., pp. 319-320.
[5] Gordon S. Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution,” New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 174-175.
[6] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods: Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), p. 131.
[7] Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution,” New Directions in American Religious History, pp. 185-188.
[8] J. Edwin Orr, “Prayer brought Revival,” ochristian.com, http://articles.ochristian.com/article8330.shtml (accessed December 16, 2017).
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Mathew Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings-Thirty Six Visitations of the Holy Spirit, (ByFaith Media, 2009, 2012), pp. 29, 32.
[12] Kidd, The Great Awakening, pp. 22, 44.
[13] Jonathan Edwards, “An Humble Attempt to Promote Prayer for Revival,” Revival Library. http://www.revival-library.org/index.php/catalogues-menu/revival-miscellanies/revival-prayer/an-humble-attempt-to-promote-prayer-for-revival (accessed December 22, 2017).
[14] Michael A. G. Haykin, “John Sutcliffe and the Concert of Prayer,” Reformation & Revival, Volume 1, Number 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 66, 68, 73-74, 82-83. https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/ref-rev/01-3/1-3_haykin.pdf (accessed December 22, 2017).
[15] Thomas J. Nettles, “Backus, Isaac (1724-1806),” Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America Volume 1, A-Z, ed. Michael McClymond, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), p. 43.
[16] Kidd, The Great Awakening, p. 182.
[17] Nettles, Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America Volume 1, A-Z, p. 43.
[18] Kidd, The Great Awakening, pp. 184-186.
[19] Nettles, Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America Volume 1, A-Z, pp. 43-44.

The beginnings of revivalism in New England occurred during the late 1600s to about 1720. The early years of The Great Awakening are generally considered to encompass the years from about 1720 to 1740. During both of these periods the characteristics and practices of religious revivals and revivalism grew in importance and frequency and gave birth to evangelicalism with its dramatic and powerful style of preaching, emphasis on personal conversion called the “new birth” often accompanied by outward physical manifestations, personal devotion and holiness, and justification by faith alone (individual access to God) which de-emphasized the importance and authority of church government and its leaders. In many ways the characteristics of the newly-born evangelicalism can be said to mirror many elements found in the early Reformation.

The Great Awakening matures amidst opportunities and challenges

By the end of the 1730s, revivalism in The Great Awakening was beginning to emerge from its youth, strengthen, and expand throughout the colonies. Revivalism’s developing maturity introduced many new and unforeseen opportunities and challenges to churches in the colonies. The essence of this flowering revivalism was best exemplified by the Northampton revival guided by Jonathan Edwards and the other New England revivals that arose from it. In this chapter we shall examine various facets of The Great Awakening that ultimately defined revivalism and established evangelicalism as a dominant force in America to the present day.

As discussed in Chapter 5, the call for revival in the colonies began in 1674 when Samuel Torrey, pastor of the church at Weymouth, Massachusetts, began preaching the need for revival among pastors and congregations because of the perceived general spiritual decline and loss of religious vigor among the Puritans. Torrey emphasized the “Work of Reformation.” He believed that churches would not be revived through moral efforts alone but only through an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.[1]

Torrey’s “work of reformation” easily resonated in the minds of the Puritans of New England for their very presence in their new colonial homeland was the result of their efforts to revive the church and continue the work of purifying the Reformation in America which they believed could not be accomplished among the corrupted brethren in England. So revival and revivalism was a natural fit with a mindset that already existed among most colonists who sought religious freedom from the strictures of authoritarian churches and kings.

In spite of their quest for religious freedom, the colonists still considered themselves English men and women and retained much of the English social order including many of the same ecclesiastical doctrines and practices brought from their former homeland. What the religious colonists sought was spiritual reformation, not extra-biblical innovation. But as every generation of the church must realize, the outworking of reformation and revival produce to varying degrees both the good and the bad. In every revival, the church body and individual Christians must distinguish between the Holy Spirit’s wheat and the tares of sinful human nature and demonic influence.

Historian Thomas Kidd wrote that, “The Puritan colonies had once been godly showcases for the Reformation but had forgotten their first love.”[2] And it was Torrey and other early Puritan church leaders who saw revival as the necessary path for a return to that first love. Prior to 1720, revivals generally occurred in the more formal confines of established local church. Revival spread as pastors heeded the example of other churches experiencing revival and began preaching and encouraging revival in their own churches. This was generally the accepted pattern for most revivals prior to 1740. But that pattern was beginning to change even before the arrival of the “Great Itinerant” George Whitefield.

Over the course of his life Whitefield made seven trips across the dangerous and often storm-tossed North Atlantic until his death in 1770. The first voyage in 1738 was for a stay in Georgia of less than four months which was consumed mostly with efforts to establish an orphanage in Savannah. Whitefield was a larger than life figure whose cultural and religious impact on England and America and the course of their histories is incalculable. Even before he landed in America for the second time, Whitefield’s reputation as an “evangelical superstar” preceded him. Whitefield’s powerful preaching style, outreach to various denominations, focus on the new birth, and effective use of the media would energize the growing revivalist movement throughout the colonies.[3] Whitefield did not invent revivalism or evangelicalism or cause The Great Awakening in America. However, his ministry would eventually personify their essential elements as he energized and hasten their ascendance on the American scene.

“New Light” Revivalists and “Old Light” Anti-revivalists in America

There were elements of the established American churches that opposed revivalism from its very beginning. Opposition centered on several issues including the operations of the Holy Spirit particularly as concerning physical manifestations that occurred during revivals. Jonathan Edwards was the foremost apologist for the “New Lights” who favored increased numbers of converts through revivals. “Old Lights” such as Rev. Charles Chauncy of Boston’s First Church thought revivalists to be misguided sensationalists who promoted powerful, passionate preaching and demonstrative conversion experiences to the detriment of true religious growth.[4]

The essence of the divide between evangelicals and traditional clergy was a disagreement as to the path to conversion or how does one receive divine grace. For evangelicals conversion was an immediate personal experience that occurred through repentance and acceptance of God’s grace which brought one into personal relationship with Him. For the traditional clergy, the path to conversion was gradual, progressive, and subtle which occurred within the “stabilizing” influence of the local church through “rational guidance of learned ministers.” Revival preaching was acceptable to the traditionalists and established clergy, but revivalism as practiced by Whitefield and the New Lights was in their view “the great abandoning” of the true path to divine grace.[5]

Although the conflict between the Old and New Lights revolved around the theology of conversion, three subsidiary issues would draw the battle lines: the growth of unrestrained itinerancy, the subject of unconverted ministry, and disagreement over bodily manifestations resulting from revival fervor. Within the New Light wing, disagreement on these issues eventually led to Separatism between the moderate and more radical elements of revivalism.[6]

Calvinist and Arminian differences among the Revivalists

Even though Solomon Stoddard and his grandson Jonathan Edwards were staunch Calvinists, there were many aspects in their Reformed theology that were compatible with the beliefs of many emerging evangelicals who held or at least were in sympathy with an Arminian understanding of salvation. However, there were certain fundamental doctrines developed by the leaders of the Reformed churches after Calvin’s death that continued to provoke conflict with those who held Arminian beliefs.

Briefly, the two camps’ points of agreement were: humankind is in need of salvation, God alone can provide that salvation, and Christ is God’s provision for man’s need. The principle differences between Reformed and Arminian believers dealt with the role of God and humans in salvation. Those of the Arminian view disagreed with the Reformed churches’ beliefs of unconditional election by God of those he will save, limited atonement in which Christ paid the price only for the sins of the elect, irresistible grace which meant that those whom God has determined to save will inevitably come to saving faith, and perseverance of the saints, that is, all who have been chosen by God (the “elect”) will continue in the faith (once saved, always saved).[7] To summarize, Arminians agree with the Calvinist on the need for repentance and the new birth but could not accept Calvinist predestination and its other accoutrements.

It was those differences that would ultimately cause a break in the relationship of the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield. Although the Wesleys’ Methodist theology generally mirrored that of orthodox Protestantism as practiced by the Anglican Church, John Wesley rejected and openly opposed the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and election which he believed would hinder the call to repentance and conversion. In its place Wesley embraced the Arminian doctrine of freewill or freedom of choice as the means whereby people accepted Christ.[8]

The break came in 1740 when Whitefield was in America and Wesley was preaching in England. While at Bristol, Wesley was offended by certain teachings of pointedly Calvinist doctrines which Wesley assumed represented Whitefield’s view that “God arbitrarily predestined (or ‘elected’) some to salvation and some to damnation (or “reprobation’) by an irreversible decree.” Wesley struck back against this teaching by preaching on “Free Grace.” All through 1740 Wesley and Whitefield exchanged letters across the Atlantic regarding their differences. The conflict remained unresolved, and Wesley eventually published his sermon on “Free Grace.” Whitefield received a copy and sent his reply which he saw as an attack by Wesley on the New Testament doctrines of God’s sovereign grace, foreknowledge, and electing love. In late 1740 Whitefield’s reply was sent to in London to be published on Christmas Eve.[9]

By March 1741, Whitefield was back in London and went to hear Wesley preach having heard of many unkind remarks made by Whitefield since his return from Georgia. Wesley wrote of the disagreement in his Journal, “He told me, he and I preach two different gospels; and therefore, he not only would not join with, or give me the right hand of fellowship, but was resolved to publicly preach against me and my brother, wheresoever he preached at all.” There were efforts to bring the two together, a meeting was held, and other exchanges made. Over time there was a softening of the hostilities between the men, but it would be a decade before Whitefield and the Wesleys were restored to their former unity. In January 1750, Wesley wrote, “I read prayers and Mr. Whitefield preached. How wise is God in giving different talents to different preachers.” Upon the death of Whitefield in 1770 and at the request of his executors, Wesley preached a memorial sermon in London.[10]

The public break damaged the ministries of both men and diminished the cause of Christ. Wesley was a brilliant organizer and better theologian, but Whitefield was a much better preacher. Whitefield’s biographer John Pollock wrote of the consequence of the separation of once close friends and laborers in the Christ. “Two streams would therefore flow from the evangelical revival, often crossing and coalescing, instead of one mighty river watering the land.”[11]

Moderate and Radical Revivalists

Division was also occurring between the revivalists’ moderate and more radical wings. As early as 1741, some members of the clergy in Connecticut called on civil government to prevent disorders and punish offenders without trial. This was an attempt by anti-revivalists and some moderate evangelicals to stop ministers and itinerant preachers from preaching and administering the seals of the covenant “without the consent of, or in opposition to, the settled minister of the parish.” To do so would cause disorder and require punishment. In May 1742, the legislature passed “An act for regulating abuses and correcting disorders in ecclesiastical affairs.” Soon arrests were made and fines imposed on those deemed to have violated the ordinance.[12]

Almost immediately a serious riff developed between the radical itinerants and most of the established powers in Connecticut and Massachusetts including moderate evangelicals. Radical itinerant James Davenport conducted a revival at Groton, Connecticut, in the winter of 1741-1742 and then went to Long Island where he led significant revivals at two churches. With concerns about the growing complaints of excess in the revivalist movement, the moderates latched onto accounts of Davenport’s “wild enthusiasm” as being “beyond legitimate evangelical limits.” They saw Davenport a sacrificial lamb that could separate the moderates from the perceived excesses of radical itinerants. In May, Davenport returned to Connecticut where he was promptly arrested and brought to court which banished him from Connecticut for violating the newly passed provincial law that prohibited itinerants from preaching in churches without the resident pastor’s permission and outlawed all non-Connecticut itinerants.[13]

Revivals continue to increase in number in spite of the growing conflict between the Anti-revivalists, moderate evangelicals, and radicals over the legitimacy and manifestations of revivals. Between 1740 and 1742 there were enormous numbers of revivals and conversions throughout New England. By the time the great numbers and intensity of revivals began to decline following 1743, evangelicalism had become a powerful movement in its own right.[14] No longer would the evangelical spirit rise and fall with revivals. The revivalist style of preaching, emphasis on immediate and recognizable personal conversion, personal devotion and holiness, and individual access to God that characterized evangelicalism during revivals would now sustain the church in those times between periodic revivals. Originally birthed by revivalism, evangelicalism had become the incubator from which revivalism would be encouraged over the years to come.

Evangelicalism’s divergent paths

Largely due to the aggravating effects of Davenport’s abrasive tactics in confronting non-radical revivalists, the evangelical movement in New England and the Middle colonies had publicly split by March 1743. But the radicals would continue to be a serious presence through the remainder of The Great Awakening as many New Englanders eventually believed that fulfillment of radical awakenings could only be achieved by starting separate illegal congregations.[15]

New England was the epicenter of church separations during the middle and late eighteenth century. Hundreds of Separate or Separate Baptist congregations were formed, and the rallying cry for radical evangelicals was liberty of conscience. In spite of numerous laws to curtail the activities of radical itinerants and the congregations formed by them, the momentum of the continuing radical evangelical revivals was difficult to contain.[16]

The split between the Separates and the established churches aggravated the split between the moderate and radical evangelicals. However, not all radicals left their churches and became Separates, and not all Separates became Baptists. Issues that united the Separates were commitments to immediate and discernable conversions and the right of uneducated laypeople to become involved in ministry (exhortation, itineration, and ordination). Baptists rejected both infant baptism and the halfway covenant. Both Baptists and Separates would challenge the legalized monopoly of religious life held by the established Congregational churches of New England.[17]

In time only a few of the hundreds of Separatist churches that began in New England survived, and many that did survive would become Baptist. Although the New England Baptist churches had great influence on the northern colonies, their most enduring achievement was exportation of the Separate Baptist movement to the middle and southern colonies. Eventually, the Baptists along with the Methodists and Presbyterians would utterly dominate the South.[18]

Following the public break between the moderate and radical evangelicals in 1743, revivals continued to occur throughout the colonies in the 1750s, 1760s, and during the revolutionary war years. The radical evangelicals were the most vigorous and productive arm of revivalism. Its maturation in the 1760s was reflected by their efforts to articulate a radical definition of revivalism in the public square. The key tenets of this narrative were freedom of private judgement and power to establish independent churches free from the dictates of competing ecclesiastical and legislative authorities. The revivals of 1762-1765 were particularly important in continuing the radical tendencies of the evangelical movement, furthering evangelical populism, and aligning the movement with the Patriot cause in separating from Great Britain.[19]

The conflict between moderate and radical evangelicals that emerged in the 1740s continued into the 1780s. The greatest area of disagreement was with regard to manifestations of the Spirit during revivals. Thus, evangelicalism remained deeply divided between moderates and radicals at the conclusion of the Great Awakening and foreshadowed the eventual abyss separating the liberal churches and conservative evangelicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evangelicalism grew in spite of the conflicts between moderates and radicals which, according to Thomas Kidd, “hinted toward the contemporary global evangelical expansion that remains split between Pentecostal and non-charismatic believers.”[20]

Perhaps one of the best and most succinct descriptions of the broad panoply of The Great Awakening was written by American historian Paul Johnson.

It crossed all religious and sectarian boundaries, made light of them indeed, and turned what had been a series of European-style churches into American ones. It began the process which created an ecumenical and American type of religious devotion which affected all groups, and gave a distinctive American flavor to a wide range of denominations. This might be summed up under the following five heads: evangelical vigor, a tendency to downgrade the clergy, little stress on liturgical correctness, even less on parish boundaries, and above all an emphasis on individual experience. Its key was Revelations 21:5: “Behold, I make all things new”—which was also the text for the American experience as a whole.[21]

The influence of The Great Awakening on America’s war for independence

How do we determine the extent to which The Great Awakening influenced the character and worldview of the colonists leading up to America’s war for independence? Here we turn to the words of two distinguished American historians. Sherwood Eddy in his 1941 The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, wrote, “No country on earth was ever founded on deeper religious foundations. This was America’s priceless heritage.”[22] Eddy captured the importance of the eighteenth century American religious awakening on the Revolution and later writing of the Constitution.

Throughout the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, the religious and the secular life of America could not be separated. The very ideals of political freedom had grown out of the principle of religious liberty of the Reformation and out of the experience of the Pilgrims, Puritans, and protesting colonists. It was in the churches of Boston and Virginia that revolutionary meetings were held. The clergy of the free, dissenting, and popular churches were preaching liberty as a religious principle. The pulpit inspired the Revolution and summoned the faithful to patriotic service and to the realization of the American Dream.[23]

In A History of the American People, Paul Johnson again distills the essence of The Great Awakening and its importance in the founding of America.

…There was a spiritual event in the first half of the 18th century in America, and it proved to be of vast significance, both in religion and politics…The Great Awakening was the proto-revolutionary event, the formative moment in American history, preceding the political drive for independence and making it possible…The Revolution could not have taken place without this religious background. The essential difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is that the American Revolution, in its origins, was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event.”[24]

Following the American Revolution (1775-1783) and efforts to form a new nation, there was a second ebb-tide of religious fervor and an increase in secularism and irreligion, especially in the decade of 1790s. America’s spiritual and moral decline threatened the survival of the new republic. The conditions that preceded this decline will be examined in the next chapter as we move toward the Second Great Awakening at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening – The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 1-2.
[2] Ibid., p. 3.
[3] Ibid., p. 54.
[4] “‘Old Lights’ vs. ‘New Lights’ Debating the Great Awakening 1742-1743,” National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/ideas/text2/clergymendebate.pdf (accessed December 13, 2017).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Kidd, The Great Awakening, p. 116.
[7] “An Assemblies of God Response to Reformed Theology,” (Position Paper – Adopted by the General Presbytery in Session August 1 & 3, 2015), General Council of the Assemblies of God. https://ag.org/Beliefs/Topics-Index/Reformed-Theology-Response-of-the-AG-Position-Paper (accessed December 2, 2017).
[8] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 294.
[9] John Pollock, George Whitefield – The Evangelist, (Geanies House, Fearn, Ross-shire, Great Britain: Christian Focus, 1973), pp. 173-175.
[10] Mathew Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings-Thirty Six Visitations of the Holy Spirit, (ByFaith Media, 2009, 2012), pp. 33-34.
[11] Pollock, George Whitefield – The Evangelist, pp. 192-193.
[12] Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening – A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield, Public Domain. Facsimile edition reproduced from original documents, pp. 302-304, 307-309. Originally published in Boston, Massachusetts by Tappan and Dennet, 1842.
[13] Kidd, The Great Awakening, pp. 138-141.
[14] Ibid., p. 162.
[15] Ibid., p. 155.
[16] Ibid., p. 174.
[17] Ibid., p. 188.
[18] Ibid., p. 187.
[19] Ibid., p. 268.
[20] Ibid., pp. 319, 323.
[21] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 116.
[22] Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), p. 77.
[23] Ibid., p. 115.
[24] Johnson, A History of the American People, pp. 110, 116-117.

The dates of the beginning of the Great Awakening in America and its conclusion are a matter of supposition. If the long view is taken and includes the revivals in the early 1720s and concludes with the waning of the Awakening’s long-term effects on society, then The Great Awakening can be said to span from about 1720 to the conclusion of the American Revolution in 1783.[1] Other historians date the Awakening as beginning with the 1735 revival in Northampton, Massachusetts, under the ministry of Jonathan Edwards and ending with the conclusion of the powerful and unprecedented season of revivals that occurred during 1740-1743.[2] A third view dates the Awakening as occurring between 1735 and 1760 which is considered by many to be the period of greatest frequency and intensity of revivals in eighteenth century America.[3]

The Great Awakening is a massive subject that covers decades and involves a host of revivals, participants, and consequences which are far beyond the scope of this book. Our purpose is to obtain a general understanding of these revivals, how they came about, what occurred during those revivals, and the long-term consequences after the revival fires had subsided. To do so we shall briefly look at some of the major revivalists of The Great Awakening, the conflicts and issues that arose between revivalists and anti-revivalists and between moderate and radical evangelicals, and the long-term consequences for the Protestant churches and the colonies both before and during the fight for independence from British rule.

Renowned revival historian J. Edwin Orr believed that The Great Awakening actually began with a revival among the Pietists in New Jersey. This revival occurred eight years earlier than the general consensus that the Awakening began in Jonathan Edward’s Puritan church at Northampton, Massachusetts, in the latter part of December 1734. The 1727 Pietist revival in New Jersey sprang from the preaching of a Dutch Reformed minister named Theodorus Frelinghuysen who arrived in New York City in the early 1720s. Through Frelinghuysen’s influence, revival spread to Scots-Irish Presbyterians under the leadership of Gilbert Tennent and then to the Baptists in Virginia.[4]

However, Thomas Kidd points to the beginning as an extraordinary series of revivals in towns along the Connecticut and Thames Rivers from 1720 to 1722. The Connecticut revival was “the first major event of the evangelical era in New England” which “…touched congregations in Windham, Preston, Franklin, Norwich, and Windsor.” One of the largest of the Connecticut revivals occurred in the Windham church during 1721 with eighty people joining the church in six months. Over the three-year course of the revivals, several hundred new members and possibly more conversions were reported. The significance of this revival has been generally forgotten because of its lack of publicity through the print media which may also account for the revival not spreading beyond its regional borders.[5]

The Tennent Brothers – Gilbert, William, Jr., John, and Charles

William Tennent, Sr. and his family left Ireland in 1718 and arrived in Philadelphia where he joined the Presbyterian Synod of that city and soon established the “Log College” in which he trained candidates for the ministry. The Log College became the well-known forerunner of the College of New Jersey which later became Princeton University. His four sons followed their father into the ministry. Gilbert and William, Jr. along with the graduates of the Log College became a powerful revivalist force in the Scots-Irish Philadelphia Presbyterian Synod of Northeast Pennsylvania and east New Jersey.[6]

While at New Brunswick, Gilbert’s work was described as one of steady success that resulted in a considerable number of conversions. At one revival on Staten Island in 1728, the Holy Spirit was “suddenly poured down upon the Assembly.” The congregation was initially passive or complacent, but after a while several fell to their knees and prayed for mercy. Others “cried out ‘both under the Impressions of Terror and Love,’ depending on their stage of conversion.” John Tennent, the third son, showed great promise as a powerful revivalist but died at young age in 1732. William, Jr. recalled that as a result of his brother John’s preaching at Freehold, several congregants began “sobbing as if their Hearts would break, but without any public Out-cry; and some have been carry’d out of the Assembly (being overcome) as if they had been dead.”[7]

During the 1730s there began a debate among the Presbyterian ministers of the Philadelphia Synod with regard to itinerancy and licensing. Disagreements arose between the pro-revivalists (“New Side”) and the anti-revivalists (“Old Side) Presbyterians. The conflict escalated in 1738-1739 over the appointment of John Rowland, a graduate of the Tennents’ Log College, by the New Brunswick Presbytery which was controlled by the Tennent camp. The Philadelphia Synod revoked Rowland’s license because of “disorderly” and “divisive” conduct. Some believed that Rowland’s preaching encouraged emotional outbreaks which “led not to solid piety but to dangerous enthusiasm.”[8]

In March 1740, the division between the two sides intensified with the publication of Gilbert Tennent’s controversial sermon, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry, in which “he called supposedly unconverted ‘hireling’ ministers just about every bad name he could use in religious company.” Tennent believed that as a result of their un-renewed Nature they preached “easy, human-centered doctrines.”[9] The conflict between the New Side and Old Side Presbyterians was a preview of the deep divisions to come between evangelicals and the leaders of the more formal, institutional wings within other Protestant denominations. Those festering divisions eventually resulted in several denominational separations at various times during the Awakening and which continued to periodically occur over the next two hundred and fifty years.

Irrespective of the conflicts between the New Side and Old Side Presbyterians, the Tennents became the “single most influential family of the revivalist movement in the Middle Colonies”[10] generally considered to be the mid-Atlantic colonies (Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York) that lay between the New England and Southern colonies.

Jonathan Edwards

Although not the first, largest, or most widespread revival of the Great Awakening, the revival led by Jonathan Edwards at Northampton in 1734-1735 is perhaps the best known and most influential revival of the Awakening. Edwards had an impressive background. He was the grandson of the venerable Solomon Stoddard who led the Northampton congregation for sixty years until his death in 1729. Born in 1703, Edwards had a brilliant mind. At Yale University he earned his B.A. in 1720 and M.A. in 1723. Already an assistant in his grandfather’s church, the twenty-six year old became the pastor of Northampton Church in 1729 upon the death of his grandfather.[11]

The young Edwards was no stranger to revivals and was taught to expect seasons of revival characterized by special outpourings of the Holy Spirit. Timothy Edwards, Jonathan’s father, pastored the East Windsor Church and had led four or five revivals before 1734-1735. Two of these revivals occurred in the 1710s and had a great influence on the young Edwards. The Northampton Church had experienced six significant “harvests” as the revivals were called under Stoddard’s tenure (1679, 1683, 1687, 1690, 1712, 1718, and 1727). The 1727 revival occurred on the occasion of a major New England earthquake. This was the first revival to be highly publicized.[12]

When Edwards took the pulpit of Northampton in 1729, the spiritual state of the young people of the congregation was a cause for concern since they would not abandon their “carousing for the holy ways of the Lord.”[13] Thomas Kidd described Edwards’ efforts to curtain the continued waywardness of the young at the Northampton Church.

In 1733 Edwards began to notice the congregation’s young people had adopted a new “flexibleness” in their attitudes toward his preaching. He insisted that they give up their “mirth and company-keeping” on Sunday evenings, and he began to see in them a willingness to comply. At the time Edwards also organized neighborhood meetings (the settlements encompassed by the Northampton congregation were far-flung) of fathers concerning the governance of their children. Surprisingly, the fathers reported that their children needed no extra chastening to get them to remain faithful to the Sabbath. The youths themselves were convinced by Edwards’ preaching.[14]

It was the occurrence of two untimely deaths of young people that broke the complacency with regard to the young Northampton congregants’ dismal spiritual state. In Pascommuck, three miles from Northampton but in Edward’s parish, a young man had fallen ill with pleurisy and died in two days. Soon thereafter a young married woman fell ill and died but only after assuring those around her of her salvation. Edwards used the shock of those deaths to encourage the distraught young people to gather into small groups for “social religion.”[15]

But preaching and gatherings for “social religion” were not the primary impetus by which the Holy Spirit was poured out on the Northampton congregation. For several years Edwards and his wife had prayed day and night for revival of their church. In the latter part of December 1734, there were five or six people who were wonderfully converted which created considerable excitement in the congregation. On the evening preceding the day the revival broke out several “Christians met and spent the whole night in prayer.”[16] Prayer was the kindling that set ablaze the Northampton revival of 1734-1735. Edwards reported the events that caused the revival to break forth.

…the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in and wonderfully to work among us; and there were very suddenly, one after another, five or six persons, who were, to all appearance, savingly converted, and some of them wrought upon in a very remarkable manner.

One of these converts was a young woman who had been notorious as a leader in scenes of gayety and rustic dissipation. Edwards was surprised at the account which she gave of her religious exercises, of which he had heard no report till she came to converse with him, apparently humble and penitent.[17]

Edwards was at first concerned that the conversion experience of a person with such questionable character would hinder the progress of the conversion of others. However, he was happily surprised when the news of her conversion became a great encouragement to other young people who went to talk with her and observed her remarkable transformation.[18]

Many miraculous and ecstatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit were present during the Northampton revival. These manifestations included emotional ecstasies and mysterious signs and wonders such as visions and healings. This was not unusual for these manifestations accompanied most of the major revivals that occurred during the eighteenth century. Edwards approved of emotional expressions in revivals, but he also knew the importance of balance because too much spiritual passion could lead to excess. Even though he did not understand some of the mystical experiences that occurred, Edwards did not condemn them when they were accompanied by “a great sense of the spiritual excellency of divine things.” Edwards believed that such ecstatic expressions in worship could be tested: “…did they lead the worshipper to a greater appreciation of God’s glory? Or did they encourage self-glorification?” If it was a greater appreciation of God’s glory, then “the expressions were likely to be incidental operations of the Holy Spirit in persons receptive to them because of their particular mental constitution.” He cautioned that worshippers must not “mistake the vain and imaginary for the truly spiritual.”[19] Within five years these manifestations would become the source of great conflict between the revivalists and anti-revivalists and between the moderate and more radical evangelicals.

Three hundred people were saved during the first six months of the Northampton revival including children, adults, and the elderly. Eventually, 220 families totaling 620 people were entitled to take communion at Edwards’ church which included almost all adults in the town. At the revival’s peak in March and April of 1735, an average of thirty souls were saved each week. During 1735 Edwards wrote, “The town seemed to be full of the presence of God…There were remarkable tokens of God’s presence in almost every house.”[20] The revival that began at Northampton in late December 1734 spread to the north and south along the Connecticut River to thirty-two communities about evenly divided between Massachusetts and Connecticut.[21]

By mid-1735, the revival at Northampton was coming to an end, but the effects of the awakening would reverberate for centuries afterward through the medium of print. Edwards’ account of the Northampton revival was published under the title Faithful Narrative. The publisher printed an abridged version in 1736 and a full edition appeared in London in 1737. Although the Northampton revival was just one in a series of earlier revivals that began in the 1720s, Edwards account of the revival “became the model revival of evangelicalism. It dramatically heightened expectations in Britain and America for new awakenings, and it provided a framework for local pastors to use to promote revival in their own congregations.”[22]

As the revival in Northampton and the other communities to which it spread began to subside, the effects would continue on as churches remained strong in numbers and piety. In 1739, the instances of revival once again began to increase in other parts of the country and also at Northampton. The church at Newark was originally established by New Englanders. Religious life in Newark was in a low state and exhibited little evidence of godliness among its people during the 1730s. This began to change in August 1739 when a revival began among the young people and spread to the whole church body by March 1740. The church at Harvard, Massachusetts, followed the same pattern. In September 1739 there began a spiritual stirring among the people who exhibited a noticeable increase of seriousness about spiritual matters, church attendance, and attentiveness to the preaching of the Word and sanctity of the Sabbath. From that beginning until June 1741 over a hundred came into communion through a steady procession of conversions.[23]

The effects of the Northampton revival had a lasting beneficial effect on the religious and community life of its citizens. However, compared to the conditions at the close of the revival in 1735, Edwards later wrote that there had been “…a very lamentable decay of religious affections, and eagerness for prayer and social religion.” But this began to change in the spring of 1740 as the church moved toward a renewed seriousness with regard to matters concerning religion and spiritual life, especially among the young people. This move of the Holy Spirit continued until October 1741 when George Whitefield arrived at Northampton.[24]

Theology of salvation: Debating who and how one may be “born again”

Much of the theology of conversion held by Solomon Stoddard was held by his grandson Jonathan Edwards. Stoddard believed that it was through the Holy Spirit that God drew sinners to salvation. Without the Holy Spirit conversions would not take place. He also considered powerful preaching as a tool used by God to draw sinners to God. The power in this preaching was a result of the Spirit who allowed ministers to effectively preach God’s judgment. Like other revivalists, Edwards believed there would be seasons of revival in which there would be special outpourings of the Holy Spirit.[25]

Although Solomon Stoddard and his grandson held similar views on revival and the theology of conversion, Edwards would significantly differ on two points embraced by his grandfather. Recall that in the last chapter the half-way covenant emerged from the Synod of 1662 which allowed the children of parents who were avowedly unregenerate and excluded from the Lord’s table to be baptized if the parents were otherwise qualified. Stoddard agreed with the halfway covenant. In 1707, Stoddard also began preaching that sanctification (to set apart, make holy) was not a necessary qualification for participation in the Lord’s supper and that “the Lord’s supper is a converting ordinance.” However, during his tenure at the Northampton Church, Edwards opposed these all-inclusive policies of his grandfather and preached that only the children of parents who were full communicant members of the church should be allowed to be baptized. This doctrinal stance was very unpopular compared to the beliefs preached by his grandfather. Edwards’ stance eventually led to his dismissal as pastor of the Northampton Church in 1750 and “signaled his own church’s bitter repudiation of his evangelical ideal of a pure church of converted saints.”[26]

The “heart religion” of evangelicalism

In Chapter 5 it was noted that first generation New England Puritans believed that a man must be “born again,” and this transformation was observable by both the person and others. They also believed there was a difference between the unregenerate and regenerate in which the latter would exhibit good qualities through their thought, feeling, and conduct. But these desired qualities are not a matter of works but flowed from a heart change which must invariably testify to the transformative power of true salvation. This was the central issue of the Reformation: justification by faith alone. And it was this same justification by faith alone that was at the core of evangelicalism’s “heart religion” which propelled the Great Awakening in America. However, there would continue to be differences with regard to the meaning of salvation and its related doctrines among the revivalists of The Great Awakening and thereafter as will be seen in the next chapter.

Before we leave the early history of The Great Awakening, we must once again clarify and better understand the core elements that precipitated the revivals. As previously discussed, revivals are necessary when the spiritual and moral conditions of the church and society at large are in various stages of decline or decay. However, it must be remembered that revival of the culture can never precede revival of the church. Revival of the culture is made possible only through the influence of a revived church (individual Christians who comprise the body of Christ). Therefore, revival is ultimately a matter of renewal of the hearts of individuals—both renewal of the hearts of the spiritually languishing Christians and the dead hearts of lost sinners.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening – The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. xix, 9-10.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Mathew Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings-Thirty Six Visitations of the Holy Spirit, (ByFaith Media, 2009, 2012), p. 27.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Kidd, The Great Awakening, pp. 9-10.
[6] Ibid., pp. 31, 35.
[7] Ibid., pp. 32-33.
[8] Ibid., p. 37
[9] Ibid., pp. 59-60.
[10] Ibid., p. 31.
[11] Ibid., pp. 13-15.
[12] Ibid., pp. 6-7, 9, 10, 15.
[13] Ibid., p. 15.
[14] Ibid. p. 16.
[15] Ibid., pp. 16-17.
[16] Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings, p. 26.
[17] Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening – A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield, Public Domain. Facsimile edition reproduced from original documents,
p. 12. Originally published in Boston, Massachusetts by Tappan and Dennet, 1842.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Kidd, The Great Awakening, pp. 19-20.
[20] Backholer, Revival Fires and Awakenings, p. 26.
[21] Kidd, The Great Awakening, p. 18.
[22] Ibid., pp. 21-23.
[23] Tracy, The Great Awakening, pp. 18-21.
[24] Ibid., pp. 21-22.
[25] Kidd, The Great Awakening, pp. 6-7.
[26] Ibid, p. 194.

What occurred among the New England Puritans between 1620 and 1660 is a remarkable story that began with a rag-tag band of beleaguered separatist Puritans (Pilgrims) that landed on the shores of a vast wilderness in 1620. By the end of that decade many of the prosperous, well-educated members of the Church of England also began immigrating to New England. Unlike the Pilgrims, they still considered themselves to be members of the Church of England, although separated from their corrupt brethren that remained in their homeland. Known as Puritans, they formed the great migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony which by 1640 had grown to a population of twenty-six thousand. For these Protestant Puritans who strongly followed the teachings of John Calvin, religion was the beginning, center, and end of all social and political life. The Puritan adventure in their New England colony began as a theocracy, but the Massachusetts Puritans were not alone in their religious affections. Religion and religious liberty were the fundamental reasons for the founding of most of the original thirteen colonies, and nearly all were founded upon various social and religious experiments.[1]

However, none were so well organized or advanced in their religious practices as the New England colonies, particularly the Puritans of Massachusetts. Not only was New England the most studied portion of early colonial America history, the region was also the foremost center of revivalist activity prior to and at the beginning of The Great Awakening. As early as the 1670s, Puritan leaders recognized the need for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit because churches and towns were spiritually languishing and in need of corporate renewal.[2]

The seeds of the Puritans’ early spiritual decline were found in both the Catholic and Reformed churches’ practice of infant baptism. If one had not been baptized and confirmed or had been excommunicated, they were excluded from the Lord’s Table. In early New England, excommunication meant the loss of certain civil rights (e.g., voting and holding office) and could lead to punishment by the civil government. “Under such laws, the Lord’s table must be open to all who have been baptized, who have learned the creed and catechism, and have not committed any crime which a civil court would judge ‘scandalous’.” Although the bishop could require additional evidence of regeneration, this practice was rarely followed. Subject to the foregoing conditions, all young people and adults baptized as infants were considered to be members of the church in full communion.[3]

Clergymen were reluctant if not loathed to withhold participation in the Lord’s supper for to do so would inflict civil injury. Claims of wrongful denial of church membership or participation in the Lord’s supper made the clergymen liable for prosecution and, if found guilty, subject to punishment.[4] The only safe option for clergymen was to treat every one as a real convert and hope that regeneration had occurred even if no apparent change was present in the life of the professing Christian. Because of such a mindset within the clergy, their preaching was greatly restricted and diminished. As to the unconverted, they could only hope that somehow the heretofore undetected regeneration would mysteriously occur through participation in the Lord’s table.[5]

But the New England Puritans would have none of this. Irrespective of their baptism of infants, they still believed that if a man was “born again,” a change occurred which was observable by both the person and others. There was a difference in the unregenerate and regenerate in which the latter would exhibit good qualities through their thought, feeling, and conduct. All who did not give evidence of Christian piety would be considered unregenerate, and they would admit none to their communion unless considered regenerate. These beliefs were very different from those of their English cousins. So strong were these beliefs and practices that they were set forth in the preface to the Puritans’ Cambridge Platform published in 1648.[6]

Puritan church records of that time contained a list of those considered to be on the road to heaven and therefore full participants in the ordinances of the church. It also contained a list of those names who by common consent were “…to be regarded and addressed as persons in the road to hell.” Consequently, the New England clergy were not hesitant to assail their listeners with argument and entreaty aimed at prompting regeneration of those in the church known to be in a spiritually lost condition.[7]

But erosion of the high standards of the Puritan churches of New England began at the Puritans’ Synod of 1662. It was decided that the children of parents who were avowedly unregenerate and excluded from the Lord’s table could be baptized if the parents were otherwise qualified. Those other qualifications and requirements were that the parents had to have been baptized in infancy, understood the doctrine of faith and publicly confessed their assent thereunto, did not lead a scandalous life, agreed to give themselves and their children to the Lord, and submitted themselves to the government of Christ in the Church. This practice was immediately adopted over vehement protests and became the new standard for many churches.[8] This new practice was called the Halfway Covenant of 1662 and allowed New England churches to be filled with “substantial numbers of pseudo-members waiting for their conversion.”[9] Sherwood Eddy describes the inevitable outcome of this fateful decision.

There was a gradual loss of the sense of sin, and the idea of God’s sovereignty became a means of oppression by the ecclesiastical oligarchy…The children of the hardy pioneers became softer and more worldly. The unregenerate second generation was allowed to remain in the church as members though not in full communion. Thus originated the halfway covenant with a mixed membership of a more all-inclusive church that had lost the purity of a separated regenerate sect. The genteel churches turned from the difficult gospel of election and regeneration to “societies of Christians by mutual agreement” who avoided “scandalous sin.”[10] [emphasis added]

Other compromises followed. Solomon Stoddard, the pastor of the Northampton church, published a sermon in 1707 whose message stated that sanctification (to set apart, make holy) was not a necessary qualification for participation in the Lord’s supper and that “the Lord’s supper is a converting ordinance.” In other words, those desiring the full advantages of church membership, even though they did not have “a Saving Work of God’s spirit on their hearts,” were eligible to partake of the Lord’s supper. This practice at Stoddard’s Northampton Church was vigorously opposed by some, but given the general high esteem held for the prominent pastor and the general desire of many halfway covenanters to enjoy the benefits of church membership, the practice was adopted and spread extensively to churches in other parts of New England.[11]

The outworking of these practices adopted by the New England churches tended to destroy church discipline. Why should the unconverted be concerned with conversion when they are not held accountable by the church for their unregenerate heart and disobedient ways?[12] These beliefs and practices must inevitably lead to confusion as to the true meaning of conversion and thus undermine the redemptive work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and minds of the lost. Writing over 175 years ago, Joseph Tracey described the eventual course that the resulting confusion would take after the loss of a biblical understanding of conversion.

What must it teach the unconverted church member to think of himself, and of his prospects for eternity?…And what must he suppose conversion to be? Not a change by which a man begins to obey God; for he had already begun to obey him, as he supposed, and yet was unconverted. Not a change righteously required of him at every moment; for God had given him something to do before conversion, and he was doing it. He must have thought it some mysterious benefit, which God would, in his own good time, bestow on those for whom it was appointed…Being thus deceived with respect to the very nature of conversion, all his desires and prayers and labors for it would be misdirected.[13]

Stoddard and other New England pastors hoped to counteract the dangers of their beliefs on conversion and sanctification by faithfully and forcefully preaching the Word so as to compel conversion. But as Tracey so ably points out, “…in the end, the doctrines on which a church is seen to act, will prevail over those which are only uttered; and the state of feeling among the members, and ultimately the preaching itself, will conform to the theory on which the church is governed and the ordinances are administered.”[14] Put another way, doctrines which are observed and practiced will inevitably prevail over those that are merely preached.

There were a number of revivals that occurred before the recognized beginning of The Great Awakening in America. One of the first to preach the essence of true revival was Samuel Torrey, pastor of the Weymouth, Massachusetts church. Torrey may be considered the first evangelical in New England for by 1674 he had begun preaching the need for revival among pastors and congregations. Torrey emphasized the “Work of Reformation.” He believed that the churches’ would not be revived through moral efforts but only an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. This would occur only when each person experienced a “Heart-reformation, or making of a new heart.” This would occur when God would pour “out [an] abundance of converting grace, and so revive and renew the work of conversion.” Torrey preached his greatest sermon on revival in 1695. In “Mans Extremity, Gods Opportunity,” Torrey preached that the sin of New Englanders had grown to such an extent that an ordinary reformation was not possible. God must unilaterally intercede, but that “We must follow God mourning…Such a mourning is the certain effect of the saving dispensation of the Spirit and converting grace.”[15]

Covenant renewals had begun occurring in the late 1600s. Typically, in covenant renewal ceremonies, pastors reminded all church members of their promises to God and to each other. Full covenant members could consider if their relationship with God was truly right. Halfway members could seek conversion and admission into full membership in the church. These ceremonies were generally followed by preaching on salvation for a period of several weeks. Samuel Willard led a covenant renewal in 1680 at Boston’s Old South Church. Early in the renewal, several children publicly embraced their responsibilities of their baptismal covenant. This sparked the whole church to go through renewal and recognition of their baptismal covenant with many becoming members in full communion.[16]

A covenant ceremony was led by Samuel Danforth Jr. in 1705 at Taunton, Massachusetts. Thomas Kidd in his book The Great Awakening – The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America gave an account of the events that occurred.

Danforth reported in February 1705 that “we are much encouraged by an unusual and amazing Impression, made by GOD’S SPIRIT on all Sorts among us, especially on the young Men and Women.” The young people had become sober as a result of the meetings and some “awful Deaths and amazing Providences.” He hoped that their sobriety was not temporary and asked for “Prayer that these Strivings of the SPIRIT, may have a saving Issue.”…“We gave Liberty to all Men and Women Kind, from sixteen Years old and upwards to act with us,” and three hundred people added their names to a list forsaking sin.” Later that month Danforth reported that he had no time for his regular pastoral duties because of his constant visits from young people seeking salvation.[17] [emphasis in original]

There were many such outpourings of the Holy Spirit in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and the frequency of these revivals grew in New England during the 1710s and 1720s. Out of these early stirrings came a renewal movement called evangelicalism that fundamentally changed many churches and denominations and helped birth the First Great Awakening. Those churches that embraced evangelicalism emphasized a revivalist style of preaching, personal conversion, personal devotion and holiness, and individual access to God which de-emphasized the importance and authority of church government.[18]

Heretofore, our emphasis has been on Puritan revivals that preceded The Great Awakening. However, in addition to the English stream of evangelicalism there were two other streams that fed the rising river of revival fervor: Scots-Irish Presbyterianism and Continental Pietism.[19]

Pietism contributed an intense focus on the heart, often in conflict with the decayed state of formal, established religion. Scots-Irish Presbyterianism supplied legions of pious immigrants, who often came expecting revival to occur…The Pietists and Presbyterians of those colonies had begun striving for awakenings well before the Grand Itinerant George Whitefield came on the scene.[20]

Pietism stressed Bible study and personal religious experience and was a reaction to formalism and intellectualism. Reformed Pietism primarily focused on heart religion and Christian practice whereas Puritanism focused on doctrinal and ecclesiastical purity.[21]
______

We have examined the dire circumstances and conditions that led to the various revivals throughout the American colonies prior to the beginning of The American Great Awakening during the late 1720s. In the next chapter we shall examine the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in various revivals that comprised The Great American Awakening, the course of these revivals, and their long-term consequences for both the nation and the churches therein after the revival fires had subsided.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941), pp. 48-49, 74.
[2] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening – The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), p. xvi.
[3] Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening – A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield, Public Domain. Facsimile edition reproduced from original documents, pp. 1-2. Originally published in Boston, Massachusetts by Tappan and Dennet, 1842.
[4] Ibid. p. 2.
[5] Ibid., p. 3.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., p. 4.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Kidd, The Great Awakening, p. 3.
[10] Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, p. 55.
[11] Tracey, The Great Awakening, pp. 4-5.
[12] Ibid., pp. 5-6.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., p. 6.
[15] Kidd, The Great Awakening, p. 1-3.
[16] Ibid., p. 4.
[17] Ibid., pp. 4-5.
[18] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), pp. 253, 256-257.
[19) Kidd, The Great Awakening, p. xvi.
[20] Ibid., p. 39.
[21] Ibid., p. 25.