YMCA

The London draper, temperance advocate and devout Christian George Williams was appalled at the degradation of workingmen in London and began a work among his fellow drapery employees. A go-getter in business, too, he rapidly advanced to partnership in his firm (a drapery house) and used his own substantial wealth to support evangelical causes.

Si George Williams

Williams was motivated to form the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) by the terrible conditions and the consequent temptations for sin he perceived in London for young men. The first YMCA meeting was held in Williams’ drapery shop in St Paul’s Churchyard on June 6, 1844 and included 12 young men in total. Their objective was the “improvement of the spiritual condition of the young men engaged in houses of business, by the formation of Bible classes, family and social prayer meetings, mutual improvement societies, or any other spiritual agency.”

George Williams wasted no time in organising YMCA branches throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. Over the next 10 years, YMCA movements also began to develop across Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, India and North America.

The first YMCA in North America was established in Montreal, Quebec in 1851. Later that year, the first YMCA in the United States opened in Boston on December 29, 1851. It was founded by Captain Thomas Valentine Sullivan (1800–59), an American seaman and missionary. By 1853, the Boston YMCA had 1,500 members, most of whom were merchants and artisans.

First YMCA in Montreal By Denis Jacquerye

The idea of creating a truly global movement with an international headquarters was pioneered by Henry Dunant, Secretary of YMCA Geneva, who would later go on to found the International Committee of the Red Cross and win the first Nobel Peace Prize.

Henry Dunant successfully convinced YMCA Paris to organise the first YMCA World Conference. The Conference took place in August 1855, bringing together 99 young delegates from Europe and North America. They met just before the 1855 Paris World Exposition of the same year. The delegates discussed joining together in a federation to enhance cooperation amongst individual YMCA societies. This marked the beginning of the World Alliance of YMCAs.

Emblem of 1881

The similar Young Women's Christian Association or YWCA was founded in 1870.

Long before Williams' death in 1905, the YMCA had achieved a membership of 150,000 in Britain and half a million in America with thousands of branches worldwide.

One of George Williams aims for the YMCA was to promote a muscular Christianity. He wanted to put Christian principles into practice by developing a healthy "body, mind, and spirit". The organisation was very influential during the 1870s and the 1930s in promoting good sportsmanship in athletic contests in gymnasiums and swimming pools. Three sports: basketball, volleyball and racquetball were invented in YMCA facilities.

YMCA Association Men cover, June 1919

Basketball was invented at the YMCA International Training School (later named Springfield College) in Massachusetts in 1891. Its inventor was Canadian YMCA trainer James Naismith.

Volleyball was invented in a Holyoke, Massachusetts YMCA in 1895. Its inventor was a YMCA physical education instructor William George Morgan.

Racquetball was invented in the Greenwich, Connecticut, YMCA in 1950. Its inventor was Joe Sobek a tennis, handball and squash player who worked in a rubber manufacturing factory,

Late 19th century Baseball star Billy Sunday started his evangelist career touring YMCAs. Sunday drew enormous crowds at YMCAs across the USA, who clamored to hear the famous baseball player recall his faith journey.

On January 13, 1979 The YMCA filed a libel suit against the Village People for their "YMCA" hit. It considered the song defamatory. The two sides settled out of court and the YMCA later expressed pride towards the band for their song as a salute to their organization.

Today the YMCA is a worldwide organisation with its headquarters based in Geneva, Switzerland. it now operates in 120 countries and reaches 58 million people.

In its early years, the YMCA organization provided beds and shelter to young men leaving the countryside for work in the cities. Many YMCAs throughout the world still maintain residences as an integral part of the programming. YMCAs in the United Kingdom are known now predominantly as organizations that provide accommodation for vulnerable and homeless young people. Across the UK the YMCA provides over 8,000 bed spaces, and is thus one of the largest providers of safe supported accommodation for young people.

Source YMCA

Charles Wesley

EARLY LIFE 

Charles Wesley was born on December 18, 1707 in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England, where his father was rector.

He was born several weeks before his time and appeared more dead than alive, but was carefully wrapped in warm wool.

He was the eighteenth child out of nineteen of Susanna Wesley and Samuel Wesley.

Charles' father Samuel was a poet and he passed on his poetic gifts to his son.

His older brother, John Wesley, was a leader of a revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism.

Charles survived a fire when he was a few months old that destroyed the Epworth vicarage. A maid courageously carried him out of the burning building in her arms.

Charles was strictly homeschooled by his parents along with his siblings. Later, he attended Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford.

Charles graduated with a master's degree in classical languages and literature.

Portrait by John Russell

CAREER RECORD

Charles followed his father and brother John into Anglican orders in 1735.

In October 1735, Charles and his brother John sailed for Savannah in Georgia Colony in British America at the request of its governor, James Oglethorpe.

Charles was asked to be chaplain to the garrison and colony at nearby Fort Frederica, St. Simon's Island, arriving there on March 9, 1736. Matters did not turn out well, and he was largely rejected by the settlers.

From 1740 Charles was a regular and itinerant preacher with his brother John. One of his sermons, “Awake Thou That Sleepest,” first preached before the University of Oxford in 1742, became the most frequently published Methodist tract of the Wesleys' lifetime.

After marrying in 1749, Charles made his home in Bristol and supervised the Methodist society, which met at the New Room there.

Wesley moved to London in 1771 and shared the preaching at City Road Chapel.

Charles Wesley preaching, by William Gush

HYMNS

Charles Wesley wrote over 6000 hymns, more than any other male. (Fanny Crosby wrote 8000). He had the ability of expressing faith in simple ways. His motivation in writing his hymns was to teach the illiterate good doctrine. His brother, John, said that Charles' hymnal was the best theological book in existence. It is said Methodism was born in song and Charles was the chief songwriter.

In 1738 Charles Wesley converted from High Church to Evangelical three days before his brother, John, had the same experience. "And Can It Be" was written in 1738 to celebrate Wesley's conversion. The lines "My chains fell off, my heart was free. I rose, went forth, and followed thee" are based on the story of the liberation of Saint Peter in the New Testament.

A year later Wesley wrote the hymn "O for A Thousand Tongues," to celebrate the first anniversary of his conversion. It was inspired by a Moravian friend Peter Bohler, who had remarked to him, "If I had a thousand tongues I would praise Christ with them all."

In 1760 Charles Wesley wrote the lyrics to "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing." He borrowed the 45-year-old tune of "Thus When Mars from Wars Returning," from the English composer John Blow's opera, Venus and Adonis.

The tune we use today was composed by Felix Mendelssohn. Its from the second chorus "Gott ist Licht" ("God is Light"), of the cantata Festgesang ("Festival Song") composed to commemorate Johann Gutenberg's invention of movable type printing, In 1855 Dr. William Cummings, who was an enthusiast of the German composer, put Wesley's words and Mendelssohn's music together.

Worship of the Shepherds by Bronzino

During the awakening, Charles Wesley's most popular hymn was "Jesus Lover of my Soul", which was inspired by Wesley seeing through an open window a small bird pursued by a large hawk. Through the window fluttered the frightened sparrow into Wesley's arms.

He amassed some £175,000 from his writings.

BELIEFS 

At Oxford, Charles formed a prayer group among his fellow students in 1727. They focused on studying the Bible and living a holy life. Other students mocked them, saying they were the "Holy Club" and "the Methodists".

Charles converted to evangelical Christianity on May 21, 1738 through a sister of a contact of his in America, Mrs Turner. As she spoke to him about Christ, he picked up his Bible and opened to “He hath put a new song, in my mouth, even praise unto our God.” Psalm 40 v 3.

His journal entry for May 21 reads:
"I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ...I saw that by faith I stood, by the continual support of faith...I went to bed still sensible of my own weakness...yet confident of Christ's protection."

Early portrait of Wesley

PERSONAL LIFE 

In 1749 Charles married Sarah "Sally" Gwyne, the much younger daughter of a Welsh magistrate who had been converted to Methodism by Howell Harris.

The wedding took place at the small parish church at Llanlleonfel near Garth, which is 6 miles (10 km) west of Builth Wells. The marriage was conducted by John Wesley.

In September 1749 the Wesleys moved into 4 Charles Street in Bristol which remained their main residence until 1771.

Sarah led the singing in Charles' congregation and often accompanied him on his evangelistic journeys.

Despite being on the road a lot Wesley had a way of meeting his wife across the miles. The idea was that they should agree to pray exactly at the same time each day at a certain time on certain other days. Though separated they should at these times meet as if it were God’s mercy seat.

"Sally" Wesley

Only three of the couple's children survived infancy including two sons, Charles and Samuel. Samuel became a Catholic in 1784 and was a celebrated organist and writer of church music. His Uncle John commented: "You can be saved in any church and you can be damned in any church. What matters is how is your heart with Christ."

Due to his sensitive, artistic nature, Wesley frequently became depressed.

DEATH 

On his deathbed he sent for the church's rector, John Harley, and told him "Sir, whatever the world may say of me, I have lived, and I die, a member of the Church of England. I pray you to bury me in your churchyard."

Charles Wesley died on March 29, 1788 aged 80 in London. He uttered his last words, "I shall be satisfied with Thy likeness—satisfied, satisfied!" before dying.

He was buried, as requested,  in the Marylebone Parish church graveyard.

Source Great Christian Hymn Writers by Jane Stuart Smith and Betty Carlson

The Toronto Blessing

In 1994 at the Airport Church in Toronto, Canada, reports emerged of hundreds of people rocking on their feet and rolling around on the floor for hours at a time. Soon this wave of Acts 1- like spiritual phenomena spread to churches all around the world and many believers were caught up in a spiritual wave of laughing, crying, fainting and speaking in tongues. Sadly this Toronto Blessing ended up creating division, as whilst some believed it to be a move of the Holy Spirit others felt it was at best over-enthusiasm, or at worst it came from the devil.

Coincidentally or not "Toronto" is the Huron Indian word for meeting place and originally it was a central spot for the Indians, French, Americans and British where many different languages were spoken.

Televangelism

Evangelists have been using the radio since the early 1920s and the television since the 1950s as a medium to proclaim the Gospel. The word "televangelist" is a made up of television and evangelism.

Televangelist Joel Osteen at Lakewood Church, a megachurch in Houston, Texas

The term was first employed by Time magazine in 1952, when Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen was referred to as the "first televangelist".

On January 2, 1921, two months to the day after its first broadcast, KDKA aired the first religious service in the history of radio. Pittsburgh's Calvary Episcopal Church was chosen to host the event and the junior pastor, Rev. Lewis B. Whittemore, preached because the senior pastor was wary of the new medium. The technicians were outfitted with choir robes in order to keep them from distracting the congregation. KDKA soon offered a regular Sunday evening service from Calvary Episcopal Church. 

One of the first ministers to use radio extensively was S. Parkes Cadman, beginning in 1923. Within five years, Cadman had a weekly Sunday afternoon radio broadcast on the NBC radio network, his powerful oratory reaching a nationwide audience of some five million people. 

S. Parkes Cadman, one of the first ministers to use radio, beginning in 1923. Wikipedia

Aimee Semple McPherson was another pioneering evangelist who soon turned to radio to reach a larger audience. One Sunday morning in April 1922, the Rockridge Radio Station in Oakland California offered McPherson some radio time and she became the first woman to preach a sermon over the "wireless telephone." Radio gave McPherson nationwide notoriety in the 1920s and 1930s and she went on to build one of the earliest Pentecostal megachurches.

In the northern and eastern United States Catholics such as the Roman Catholic bishop, Fulton J. Sheen (May 8, 1895 – December 9, 1979) were using the radio as a vital means for converting the unsaved and ministering to their flock. For 20 years as Father Sheen, later Monsignor, he hosted the night-time radio program The Catholic Hour on NBC between 1930–1950. 

Fulton J. Sheen, successfully switched to television in 1951 after two decades of popular radio broadcasts, presenting Life Is Worth Living for six years. Sheen's final presenting role was on the syndicated The Fulton Sheen Program (1961–1968) with a format very similar to that of the earlier Life is Worth Living show. For this work, Sheen twice won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality.

1952 photo of then Auxiliary Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

In 1960, a Southern Baptist, Pat Robertson, founded the Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach, Virginia. After being converted to the Christian faith by Dutch missionary Cornelius Vanderbreggen, Robertson decided against a career in law and instead he devoted his life to Christian broadcasting. 

One of the CBC's mainstays is The 700 Club, a religious variety program that mixes sermons, interviews, and religious music. The 700 Club, which debuted in 1966,  is the longest-running program in the variety format.

When the American evangelist Oral Roberts decided to embark on a new television ministry in 1954,  he needed $42,000 to finance a revivalist television program. To raise the funds he entered in a blessing pact with 420 people who gave $100 each and Oral Roberts then prayed that the money be returned. If it wasn't returned he promised to refund the $100. 

The prosperity teaching Roberts expounded became increasingly prevalent as evangelists found the need to raise large sums of money to finance television programs where the Gospel could be preached to large audiences. They made increasingly unrealistic promises of material prosperity to people who chose to finance their shows.  

Oral Roberts Wikipedia

By the 1970s and 80s, evangelists were dominating the religious channels. Sadly, a number were involved in controversial scandals with their emphasis on health and wealth prosperity and various sexual and financial improprieties. Tragically evangelists such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart are now known as fallen men rather than the successful evangelists they were in the 1970s and 80s. 

The only people who actually got rich with the prosperity gospel, was of course the televangelists. Their people who send money get little in return but phony promises - and as a result, many of them turn away from the Truth completely.

The teaching of prosperity gospel televangelists is not biblical (though they hand pack selected biblical verses to support their doctrines). However there is a historical precedent. Tetzel was a a German Dominican friar and preacher whose high-pressure selling of indulgences - phony promises of forgiveness for sin - outraged Martin Luther and touched off the Protestant Reformation. Like Tetzel, prosperity gospel televangelists prey on the poor and ply them with false promises.

Televised church services continue to attract large audiences to this day. In the USA, televangelists such as Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn and T. D. Jakes are popular names and in Nigeria, pastors such as TB Joshua, Enoch Adeboye and Chris Oyakhilome are all prominent on the small screen.

Sources Christianity, Los Angeles Times

Sunday school

A young Methodist lady, Hannah Ball, started the first ever Sunday School in 1769 at High Wycombe, England. However the idea didn't catch on until 1780 when a newspaper editor and Anglican layman, Robert Raikes (1735-1811), concerned by the religious ignorance of poor children in his native city of Gloucester who worked all the week in industry, opened a "Sunday school". 

Sunday School. Pentecostal

Raikes had been pondering the fate of the poor children of Gloucester. Visiting the local prisons, he saw how easy it was for the young ruffians to slip into crime as their parents were so steeped in sin themselves they had no intention of training them to do better. He was convinced that the best way to help the poor children was by giving them education and religion.

In 1780 Raikes organised a school that would run on Sunday, the only day the poor children of Gloucester weren't working. He hired four women to teach and with the help of Reverend Thomas Stock, he enrolled one hundred boys, from six to fourteen years old. 

The teachers gave the children reading lessons from ten to two, with an hour break for lunch. Then they marched them to church, after which the boys were taught the catechism until 5:30 P.M. Good behavior was rewarded with small prizes.

Raikes' "Sunday school," which initially met in the home of a Mrs Meredith was originally just for boys. Soon girls were attending and with a few years several Sunday schools had opened in the Gloucester area. 

Robert Raikes Statue , outside Shell Mex House, in Victoria Embankment Gardens. From geograph.org.uk

Impressed by the Sunday school work of Robert Raikes which tallied with ideas he had earlier tried to implement, a Baptist deacon named William Fox called for an association to assist and promote Sunday schools. On September 7, 1785, Fox headed up a meeting at 4 PM at Paul’s Head Tavern in London. Several prominent philanthropists took part. The result was the first Sunday School Society for Britain. Its innovation was to form Sunday schools under volunteer teachers and to focus on Bible studies rather than secular subjects.

In 1805, the interdenominational Stockport Sunday School was built on London Square to accommodate 5000 children. Up until the Education Act of 1870 it would be the only source of education for many children and in the late 19th century it was the largest Sunday school in the world.

By April 5, 1811, the day of Raikes' death around half a million children in England and Wales were attending Sunday school providing basic lessons in literacy alongside religious instruction. Twenty years later Sunday schools in Great Britain were attended weekly by 1,250,000 children, or about 25 per cent of the eligible population. 

The American Sunday School system was first begun by Samuel Slater in the 1790s. After migrating to the United States at the age of 21, Slater designed the first textile mills in the US in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He also brought the Sunday School system from his native England to his Pawtucket textile factory using college students to teach the children reading and writing.

Sunday school, Indians and whites. Indian Territory (Oklahoma), US, c. 1900.

The words for "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear," the first well-known Christmas song to be composed in the United States are based on a poem written by a young Unitarian minister in Massachusetts, Reverend Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810-1876). They were written at the request of his friend and fellow minister, W.P. Lunt and first presented at Lunt's 1849 Sunday School Christmas celebration.

The words and music for "Jingle Bells" were written by James S. Pierpont, a popular American composer in 1857, with the title of "One Horse Open Sleigh." It was originally penned for a local Sunday school entertainment on Thanksgiving Day in Savannah, Georgia. 

The British film production and distribution company, Rank Organisation, was the major force in the British movie industry during the mid 20th century. It had its origins in 1933 when J. Arthur Rank, a prosperous flour-miller and Methodist with no great interest in cinema, thought of showing religious films at his regular Sunday school lessons. Finding few that were any good, he resolved to try making them himself.

William Hoover, founder of the Hoover vacuum cleaner company was a Sunday school teacher for 50 years.

Sunday school at a Baptist church in Kentucky, US, 1946

In the UK, Sunday school attendance saw a gradual decline during the 20th century. It dropped from 55% of the eligible population in 1900 to 4% in 1999. 

Benedict Arnold's tomb is currently embedded in the wall of a Sunday school classroom at St. Mary’s church in the Battersea section of London, next to a tropical fish tank.

Source Christianity 

Lord Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury KG was born on April 28, 1801 at 24 Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London. He was styled Lord Ashley from 1811 to 1851 and then Lord Shaftesbury following the death of his father.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, by John Collier (died 1934),

Though Ashley was born into wealth, his loveless childhood gave hi an insight into the miserable lives of the children of the Victorian poor. He made it his life's work to improve their lot.

Ashley was elected as the Tory Member of Parliament for Woodstock (a pocket borough controlled by the Duke of Marlborough) at the age of 25 in June 1826. Before he had completed one year in the House of Commons, Ashley had been appointed to three parliamentary committees. He received his fourth such appointment in June 1827, when the 27 year old was appointed to the Select Committee On Pauper Lunatics in the County of Middlesex and on Lunatic Asylum.

Ashley was an evangelical Anglican with a strong conviction of eternity and hope for the Second Coming of Christ. His beliefs underscored the urgency of immediate action and horrified at the treatment of the mentally ill, the young MP seconded a bill to change the law.

Fired by evangelical zeal, Ashley was instrumental in introducing Acts to alleviate the hard lot of factory workers, many of them children, who had been forced to work long hours in severe working conditions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1833 he championed the Factory Act which limited teenage children to working no more than 12 hours a day and nine years later Ashley succeeded in getting through Parliament the Coal Mines Act, which stopped women and children under the age of 13 from working in coal mines.

It took Ashley fourteen years to achieve his principal objective of the ten-hour work day for adult factory workers before he succeeded in getting passed by Parliament the 1847 Ten Hours Act.

Ashley was an early proponent of the Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. In January 1839, he published an article in the Quarterly Review, which provided the first proposal by a major politician to resettle Jews in Palestine. His "Memorandum to Protestant Monarchs of Europe for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine" was published in the Colonial Times in 1841 (see below).

In 1863 The English clergyman and social reformer Charles Kingsley wrote a children's story, The Water -Babies. The book was intended in part as a satire, a tract against child labor including chimney sweeps. For twelve years after the publication of Water-Babies, Lord Shaftesbury campaigned vigorously for the banning of employing young boys who climbed into and cleaned chimneys. Eventually, the MP persuaded Parliament to pass the Chimney Sweepers Act 1875 which ensured the annual licensing of chimney sweeps and the enforcement of the law by the police.

Due to his constant advocacy for the better treatment of the working classes, Shaftesbury became known as the "Poor Man's Earl."

Lord Shaftesbury by George Frederick Watts.

Shaftesbury was President of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) from 1851 until his death in 1885.

Lord Shaftesbury founded with his money Shaftesbury homes where orphans could be trained to earn a living.

Like many men of God, in his old age Lord Shaftesbury found new moves of God difficult to understand. He concluded, for instance, that the newly formed Salvation Army was a trick of the devil.

Lord Shaftesbury died on October 1, 1885 aged 84 at 12 Clifton Gardens, Folkestone, Kent, England.
Although he was offered a burial at Westminster Abbey, Shaftesbury wished to be buried at the parish church on his estate at Wimborne St Giles, Dorset.

A funeral service for Lord Shaftesbury was held in Westminster Abbey during the early morning of  October 8, 1885 and the streets along the route from Grosvenor Square and Westminster Abbey were thronged with factory workers, coal miners and their like who waited for hours to see the Poor Man's Earl's coffin as it passed by.

Revival meetings

A revival meeting is an event organised by Christian evangelists with the purpose of inspiring people to convert to Christianity. It is most common in American Protestant churches.

In 1801 Presbyterians and Methodists joined together at Cane Ridge in Kentucky to hold a 'camp meeting' whereby believers spread across the mid west trekked days before setting up camp to hear a series of circuit preachers expound the Gospel.

So popular was this gathering that similar camp meetings were held throughout the century and when word spread that a religious meeting was to be held, both believers and non believers would attend, (the latter being glad of a break in routine and hearing the Gospel many would consequently be converted.)

1839 Methodist camp Meeting

In similar vein, evangelists such as Charles Finney, who pioneered the altar call, held evangelistic campaigns in urban settings. They emphasized the idea of a personal encounter with God, which appealed to the democratic ideals of the 19th century American.

In 1860, five years after his conversion in Chicago, Dwight L. Moody became a lay preacher and evangelist working among the wild and depraved young men of the city. Eleven years later, Dwight Moody met the powerful gospel singer Ira D. Sankey at an International Sunday School Convention in Indianapolis, with whom he soon began to cooperate.

Moody and Sankey began to collaborate and they held evangelistic campaigns both in America and Britain. Moody and Sankey collected together a selection of hymns for their revivalist meetings, which they published in a sixpenny pamphlet Sacred Songs and Solos. This collection sold by the bucketload and proved uniquely suitable for evangelistic campaigns in both America and Britain at which people flocked  to hear Sankey sing and Moody preach.

Crowds at a Moody and Sankey revival meeting

The format of the meetings with Sankey acting as song leader and singing while accompanying himself on an chapel-like organ became a template for many evangelists in the 20th Century including Dr. Billy Graham. Moody's evangelistic innovations were in large part systematic recreations of techniques from the 1857-58 Great Awakening, refined through years of practice preaching to the down and outs in Chicago.

Billy Sunday was a gifted professional baseball player with the Chicago White Stockings when, in the summer of 1886 after leaving a bar, he and his friends came upon a street preacher. Inspired, Sunday soon dried up and converted, leaving his life of vice behind him. He also became a passionate advocate for the faith. At YMCAs across the nation, Sunday drew enormous crowds who clamored to hear the famous baseball player recall his faith journey.

Sunday preaching by George Bellows, Metropolitan Magazine, May 1915. By BPL

As the 19th century went on dynamic "hell-fire and brimstone" preachers came to the fore, preaching to their congregations with mass "call and response " services.

In 1949 Billy Graham scheduled a series of revival meetings in Los Angeles, for which he erected circus tents in a parking lot. The crusade drew record crowds and after being originally scheduled for three weeks the missions proved so successful that they continued for almost two months.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Billy Graham remained a evangelist who drew the crowds with his revival meetings. In 1957, Graham planned a week-long crusade in New York City, which ultimately extended from May 15 to September 1. A total of more than two million people went to New York's Madison Square Garden to hear him preach.

Until the last quarter of the 20th century revival meetings frequently run for a week or more, especially in the Southern United States. They now tend to be of shorter duration, generally being held for a period of three or four days.

Revival (Christianity)

A Christian revival is seen as the restoration of the church itself to a vital and fervent relationship with God after a period of moral decline. Mass conversions of non-believers are seen as well as an increased spiritual interest or renewal in the life of a church congregation or society.

During the 18th and 19th centuries American society experienced a number of "Great Awakenings." Many Christians in the English-speaking world believe that evangelical revival first began in 1734 among the young people in Jonathan Edwards' church at Northampton, Massachusetts, and then spread up and down the Connecticut River Valley in New England.

Jonathan Edwards

In 1740 George Whitefield (1714-1770), the English evangelist, visited Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) in America. Together, the two men started the Great Awakening revival that soon engulfed all of New England.

Edwards had already experienced one move of the Holy Spirit in 1734 but during Whitefield's six week tour of the American colonies they set off the most momentous religious revival the colonies had yet experienced. For eighteen months there were widespread conversions whereby people's faith became personal and they started to study the Bible for themselves and hold services in their homes. The converted were drawn to Spirit-filled Protestant churches, which stressed personal holiness, Calvinist interpretations of the Bible and a missionary zeal in particular for the American Indians.

The two preachers were powerful speakers who attracted a large following, and Whitefield's farewell address in the open air at Boston was preached to a congregation of 20,000.

Whitefield preaching. 1857 engraving

Other itinerant preachers criss-crossed the colonies to ensure all of the American colonists experienced the religious revival of the early 1740s. Their dramatic messages of the terrors of eternal damnation and repentance from sin worked their audiences into a frenzy of confession and conversion.

A Second Great Awakening began in the United States in the late eighteenth century and gained momentum by 1800. After 1820, membership rose rapidly among Baptist and Methodist congregations whose preachers led the movement. It lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century.

One of the offshoots of this Second Great Awakening was that slaves were inspired to create gospel songs, which incorporated their own folk traditions. These were called Negro spirituals and was the forerunner of gospel music.

The origins of the Third Great Awakening can be traced to a lunch-hour prayer meeting held at North Dutch Church in Manhattan, just a five-minute walk from Wall Street. Former businessman turned missionary Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier hosted the sparsely attended first meeting on September 23, 1857. Yet week by week the gathering grew, spawning copycat prayer meetings around New York City. Within six months, businessmen across the country met during their lunch hours to pray that God would work among them in a special way. The prayer meetings sought the conversion of drunkards and prostitutes but had less regard for slavery.

The awakening lasted a year in northern cities but was interrupted by the looming threat of war. In the South, on the other hand, the American Civil War stimulated revivals, especially the Confederate States Army revival in General Robert E. Lee's army.

The events of 1857 and 1858 left behind a lasting legacy. Evangelist Dwight. L. Moody, who turned 21 in 1858, longed to relive the events of his youth. He made revivalism the centerpiece of his activities in Chicago by founding the Moody Bible Institute.

Later, Moody began to hold evangelistic campaigns both in America and Britain with the powerful singer Ira Sankey. The format of the meetings with Sankey acting as song leader and singing while accompanying himself on an chapel-type organ became a template for many evangelists in the 20th Century including Billy Graham.

Dwight L Moody

More recent revivals in the 20th century include those of the 1904–1905 Welsh Revival, the 1906 Azusa Street Revival, the 1909 Chile Revival which spread in the Americas, Africa, and Asia among Protestants and Catholics, the 1970s Jesus people movement and the 1990s Toronto Blessing. 

The 2023 Asbury revival began at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky on February 8, 2023, after a regular chapel service ended and a small group of students decided to stay and worship further. It organically evolved into a continuous worship session characterized by extended periods of singing, prayer, testimonies, and spontaneous preaching. Described as having a deeply emotional and spiritual atmosphere, the revival drew people from different denominations and backgrounds. It lasted for 17 days, officially ending on February 24, 2023.

Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism is a renewal movement within Evangelical Christianity. Pentecostals believe in a personal experience with God that places special emphasis on a direct personal experience of God through the baptism with the Holy Spirit. This empowerment includes the use of spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues and divine healing.

Pentecostals at an Assemblies of God church in Cancun, Mexico. By Rayttc 

The term Pentecostal is derived from Pentecost, the Greek name for the Jewish Feast of Weeks. For Christians, this event commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the followers of Jesus Christ, as described in the second chapter of the Book of Acts.

On January 1, 1901, during a prayer meeting at Charles Fox Parham's Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas one of the students, Agnes Ozman received the gift of speaking in tongues. Not long afterwards, Parham, who was a minister of Methodist background and other students received the same gift.

Charles Fox Parham

Parham formulated the teaching that speaking in tongues in unknown languages in the same way early Christians did on Pentecost day was evidence that a person was baptized in the Holy Spirit. Within a few years this Pentecostal doctrine was spreading throughout the southern states of the United States.

The Pentecostal Movement was bought to the attention of the world when members of the black congregation of the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles started meeting under the leadership of their pastor, William Seymour, a former holiness preacher and pupil of Parham, in a private house. On April 9, 1906 they experienced baptism in the Spirit and started speaking in tongues.

The Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street, considered to be the birthplace of Pentecostalism

As word spread, many Christians from all over the world visited Azusa Street and returned home fired up by the Holy Spirit. Many Pentecostal churches were formed.

The Pentecostal Movement was introduced to Europe in 1907 by Thomas Ball Barratt, an English-Norwegian Methodist Minister. He was influenced by Seymour during a fund-raising tour of the United States and was baptised in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues in November 1906 while staying in New York City. Barratt is credited with beginning the Pentecostal movement in Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and England.

Barratt introduced the Pentecostal Movement to England in 1908. There was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in an Anglican Church in Monk Weirmouth, in north England, when the congregation, whilst meeting together in prayer and worship, begin speaking in tongues.

In 1913 a Pentecostal publication, The Word And Witness, called for the many autonomous Pentecostal churches that had sprung up to unite. The following year at Hot Springs, Arkansas, around 300 church leaders, agreed to form a loosely knit fellowship of independent churches, which became known as the Assemblies of God.

The Assemblies of God based their theology on the teachings of William H Durham of Chicago's "finished work" theory. This doctrine stressed sanctification as a progressive work following conversion with baptism in the Holy Spirit following as the second blessing.

By the middle of the twentieth century when the Pentecostal influenced Charismatic Movement began to flourish, teachings originating from Pentecostal Churches began to infiltrate mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches.

Today there are an estimated 279 million Pentecostals world-wide with the largest make up 4 percent of the total world population and 12.8 percent of the world's Christian population.

Moravian Church

Sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century in central Europe a man named Gregory, who followed the teachings of Jan Hus, was put in a torture rack along with several others for his allegedly heretical beliefs. Refusing to recant he passed out and saw in a dream Jesus standing by a flowering tree with three men. The interpretation of the dream was that Christ would form them into a church.

Jan Hus

A few years later some of the Bible-believing successors of Jan Hus including Gregory met together in Moravia, a crown land of Bohemia within the Holy Roman Empire (today the Czech Republic).They determined to seek God as to whether they should form their own church as their radical beliefs excluded them from the Catholic church. They drew lots to enquire of God is it yes or is it no and their answer was a definite yes.

At the introductory meeting of this pioneering church three elders were appointed and Gregory recognized their faces-they were the same persons he saw in his dream. This pre-Protestant gathering,was the first truly reformed church, 50 years before Martin Luther. The Moravian Church's heritage dates back to this Bohemian Reformation.

The Bohemian Reformation had a strong influence to the education of the population. Even in the middle of the 16th century there was not a single town without a Protestant school in the Bohemian crown lands.

In 1617, Emperor Matthias had his fiercely Catholic brother Ferdinand of Styria elected King of Bohemia, but in 1618 Protestant Bohemian noblemen, who feared losing their religious freedom started the Bohemian Revolt. The Revolt was defeated in 1620 in the Battle of White Mountain near Prague. The local Protestant noblemen were either executed or expelled from the country while the Habsburgs placed Catholic nobility in their place. The war, plague, and subsequent disruption led to a decline in the population from over three million to some 800,000 people. By 1622 the entire education system was in the hands of Jesuits and all Protestant schools were closed.

The Moravian Protestant Brethren were forced to operate underground and eventually dispersed across Northern Europe as far as the Low Countries,

In 1722 Nikolaus Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf (1700-1760), a nobleman who had been brought up in the traditions of Pietism, granted refuge on his estate in Herrnhut, Saxony to a group of persecuted members of the Bohemian Brethren. They had been living in northern Moravia as an illegal underground remnant surviving in Catholic setting of the Habsburg Empire for nearly 100 years. The community became a refuge for other persecuted Protestant believers.

After the coming of the Holy Spirit in 1727 the Moravian refugees living on Count von Zinzendorf's land commenced a round the clock prayer watch. On August 27, 1727, 24 men and 24 women covenanted to spend one hour each day in scheduled prayer. They continued this non-stop for more than a century with at least one person in the community praying every minute of the day.

In 1731 Count Zinzendorf met converts of the Danish-Halle mission including a native West Indian called Anthony whilst attending the coronation of King Christian VI of Denmark. As a result, the following year 600 of these Moravian Protestant refugees organized the Moravian Missionary Church, which was to become one of the pioneers of the modern missionary movement, sending out and in the succeeding 150 years over 2,100 missionaries.

Zinzendorf preaching to people from many nations

A potter Leonard Dober and a carpenter David Nitschmann were the first two Moravian missionaries. At the Moravian church's farewell service for them close to 100 hymns were sung so intense was the feeling. In Copenhagen trying to find a ship to take them to the West Indies, people warned them that they have no hope in succeeding in preaching the Gospel to the slaves. Dober answered that they themselves would be willing to become slaves in order to reach them.

It was a sacrificial commitment to become a missionary in the mid eighteenth century. For instance of the first 27 missionaries sent by the Moravians to the West Indies, 22 died within a year.

Within the Moravian community were bands of between eight to twelve people who regularly met to exhort, reprove and pray for one another, share matters concerning the state of their hearts and encourage evangelism. These were the first cell/prayer groups.

Portrait of a group of Moravian Church members with King George II of Great Britain, attributed to Johann Valentin Haidt, 

In 1737 Count Zinzendorf was consecrated a bishop by the Moravian church, who sought to determine God's will by the lot. They chose elders, affirmed the appointment of missionaries and even decided marriage partners by this means. The lot was only used after long discussion, consideration and prayer and when no consensus could be reached, the community agreed to be bound by the lot. At times rolled pieces of paper were used with either a "ja" or "nein" printed on them, at other times directive scripture verses were written on scraps of paper.

The slogan of Zinzendorf's Moravian church was:  "In essentials unity. Non essentials diversity. And in all things charity."

Friedensthal Moravian Church Christiansted, St Croix, USVI founded in 1755

The modern Moravian Church has about 750,000 members worldwide, It continues to draw on traditions established during the 18th-century renewal.