Part Three...The notes this week are in three parts. If you would like to print the material out - highlight the text by running your mouse over the text while holding down the "Shift" key. Next hit "Ctrl" plus "c" key - to copy the text. Open your Word Processor and do a "Ctrl" plus "v" key to paste it in. This will make fewer pages to print. Part Three is 7 pages of 8.5 x 11 inch paper.THE 1857 REVIVAL
Which comes first, revival or judgment? In the 1857 Revival, from which issued the awakenings in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England a year or two later, a near socio-economic collapse jolted America away from her apathy into a national cry for spiritual reality. Though in I860 more than five million out of her thirty million people were Protestant church members, and around three million of these evangelical Baptists or Methodists, these numbers (like in our time) seemed to have little effect on the nation. For ten early years (1845-1855) America's spiritual life steadily fell apart. Dr. Orr lists five contributing factors (again, uncannily like our day) which led to a great economic collapse in the country.
The Fall Of A Nation(1) Gain, gambling, and greed. Speculation, spectacular wealth, and prosperity for an elite few widened the gap between the have and have-nots with a corresponding rapid increase in violent crime.
(2) Occult domination. A nation hungry for the supernatural turned to spiritualism which gained a popular foothold over many minds.
(3) Immorality. A playboy philosophy of "free love" was advocated and accepted by many.
(4) Commercial and political corruption.
Bribes, graft, and illegal business practices were ripe in the nation; national laws still legalized the cruel system of slavery.
(5) Atheism, agnosticism, apathy, and indifference to God, to the church and its message abounded on every hand. "The decline was fourfold; social, moral, political and spiritual" (Orr, The Fervent Prayer, p. 1).
And judgment came. Both secular and religious conditions combined to bring about a terrible economic and social crash; thousands of merchants were forced to the wall as banks failed and railroads went into bankruptcy Factories shut down; vast numbers were thrown out of employment, New York City alone having 30,000 idle men. By October of 1857, people were no longer into speculation and gain, with despair and hunger staring them in the face.
Complete Consecration
In Hamilton, Ontario, Walter Palmer, a Holiness Methodist physician, and his talented wife, Phoebe (herself a firebrand preacher), began a series of meetings soon reported in a New York journal as an extraordinary revival" with 300 to 400 converts. Walter and Phoebe, in common with many of Finney's converts of the era, were ablaze with a burning desire to implement the message of personal and social holiness, and from such a practical sanctification to extend the Kingdom of God throughout the whole earth.
Beginning with the premise, "God requires present holiness," and Finney's logic, "God would not require what we cannot do," Phoebe urged a complete consecration to God including spouse, children, possessions, reputation, and (for women) the willingness to preach! From such an act of simple faith and corresponding testimony, she urged a present possession of holiness, rather than the life-long process of Wesley in his initial emphasis. Her preaching, teaching, half-a-dozen books, and her editing of The Guide To Holiness left "an indelible impact on both Methodism and the wider Church" (Nancy Hardesty, Great Women Of Faith, pp. 88-90).
Planting The Seeds
Phoebe was already deeply involved in slum work, prison ministry, missions to the poor (the 9 Five Points Mission), juvenile delinquent homes orphanages (one for 500 black children). a ministry to the deaf, and she was the predecessor to the Y.W.C.A., the Ladies Christian Union. Now the foremost Methodist advocate of Christian sanctification, she spread benevolent responsibility everywhere through home groups, camp meetings, and the churches. Here, the message of personal holiness and social righteousness found its greatest expression of power.
Timothy Smith says in his "Revivalism and Social Reform": "A third and quite utilitarian impulse of the holiness revival, (was) the hunger for an experience which would 'make Christianity work.' Finney, the reformer, Mrs. Palmer, the pioneer of many benevolent and missionary enterprises, and William E. Boardman, organizer and executive head of the United States Christian Commission did not seem like mystic dreamers to their generation. . . .they rang the changes on. . .the theme that the Spirit's baptism was the secret of pulpit power and the fountain of that energy which alone could accomplish the evangelization of the world" (Smith, Evangelical Origins Of Social Christianity, p. 145).
Later the Palmers helped spread the message and fire to Great Britain, preaching there over four years. Eventually, some 25,000 people were reportedly converted, especially under Phoebe's ministry, with many more making commitments to the "deeper life."
The First Fruit
Only twenty-one people were saved when this Canadian revival began, but it grew steadily until anvwhere from twenty to forty-five were converted each day. with all classes kneeling at the altar, from little children to the city mayor. "Laity" leadership here was a key which became true of the whole later awakening. This initial notice was soon followed by increasing reports of local small awakenings in various states. In December of that year, a convention on revival was called by the Presbyterians; 200 ministers and many laymen attended, and much of the time was spent in prayer. Baptist and Methodist pastors in New York set aside a day a week for all-day intercession for an outpouring of the Spirit. By the New Year, messages were preached all over the East on revival.
Prayer was such a key in this 1857 Awakening that it has been called The Prayer Meeting Revival. God laid a call on Jeremiah Lamphier, an upper New York born businessman converted in 1842 during a revival in the Broadway Tabernacle built by Finney a decade earlier. Seeing the terrible need in the city for God, he gave up his business in order to be a city street missionary. With social collapse staring the city in the face, Lamphier walked the streets, passing out ads for a noon-day prayer meeting to be held Wednesday at the Dutch Church on the corner of Fulton Street in downtown New York. For five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes he waited alone, his faith tried. But then, at 12:30, six men came in, one after another. The next week, there were twenty; by the first week in October they had decided to meet daily instead of weekly.
Within six months, over 10,000 businessmen were meeting every day in similar meetings, confessing sin, getting saved, praying for revival. Most of the organizers of the prayer meetings were businessmen; people had meetings in stores, company buildings, and churches. With hardly an exception, churches worked together as one, with no time for jealousy. By common consent, doctrinal controversies were left alone.
Great Ministries Arise
America began to live again. In just two years, over a million converts were added to churches of all denominations. The social and ethical effects continued for almost half a century. Geographically, the blessing spread to Great Britain which had over 27 million people, of whom a third attended State and Free Church services. It first touched Ireland then Scotland, Wales, and finally England There were 100.000 converts in Ulster, 100.000 additional in Wales. 300.000 in Scotland, and more than half a million in England by 1865 (300,000 joined Methodist, Baptist, and congregational churches.) Over a million converts were ultimately added to the churches of Great Britain.
Some of the great ministries of more recent history developed during this awakening. The revival saw the flowering of the ministry of D.L. Moody and Ira Sankey, the world-changing influence of William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Arrav Hudson Taylor's revival-based concept of interdenominational missions, the China Inland Mission, which in due time became the largest Protestant or Catholic missionary body.
A large number of philanthropic societies developed and prospered, concerned enough about the hurt and lost and unwanted to care for children, reclaim prostitutes and drunks, and rehabilitate criminals. City Missions expanded evangelism into theaters, open-air meetings, slum visitations; the Open Air Mission founded in 1853 flowered under evangelistic teams directed by Gawin Kirkham (Orr, The Fervent Prayer, p. 120-127). The Awakening was primarily an urban rather than a rural movement. The "English-speaking world was fast becoming one of ever-enlarging cities with huge concentrations of population that had left forever the influence of rural churches behind" (Orr, The Fervent Prayer, p. 128).
An Intensity Of Compassion
One of the first effects of the revival was a new and intense sympathy for the poor. "God has not ordained," protested Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury), "that in a Christian country there should be an overwhelming mass of foul, helpless poverty" (Orr, The Second Evangelical Awakening, p. 99). As a boy of fourteen, he watched with horror as a drunk burial party, shouting a lewd song, dropped the coffin of the pauper they were carrying to burial. The drunks fell in a heap in front of him cursing and swearing. "Good heavens!" he muttered, "can this be permitted because a man is poor and friendless?" From that day on, this teenager (who would grow to become a tall, young aristocrat, full of fun and life, and described by one woman as "the handsomest man I ever saw") purposed to give his life to the poor and oppressed.
He wrote in his diary at 26: "Time was when I could not sleep for ambition. I thought of nothing but fame and immortality. But I am much changed. I desire to be useful to my generation, and die in the knowledge of having advanced true happiness by having advanced true religion." He faced terrible times and conditions, and he fought for justice with tireless, passionate determination. Children "sometimes four or five, but generally between seven and thirteen were shipped by barge load" to other cities to do the work of men, bound by "apprenticeship until they were 21. And completely at the factory owner's mercy, they were employed at cotton mills thirteen, fourteen fifteen or even sixteen hours a day; during rush periods sometimes twenty-four hours a day with only half an hour off for dinner. Their whip-wielding overseers paid by each child's output" (Garth Lean, Brave Men Choose, p. 45).
Lord Shaftesbury attacked terrible social evils such as these and many others like them in public and in Parliament; to those "who said of London's 30,000 naked, wandering, homeless children 'what will you do with them when educated?' he replied 'What will you do with them if left where they are?' " (Lean, Brave Men Choose, p. 46).
Marxism
The industrial conditions Lord Shaftesbury fought and suffered over were the same ones observed by another would-be world changer, who for thirty-four years lived within a few miles of him and was also in London during the years of the great revival—Karl Marx. With a sister-in-law active in the evangelical Lower Rhineland Revival which accomplished some tremendous social improvements while Marx was growing up in Germany, he was certainly not ignorant of Christian things. The sad thing was that Marx lost three of his own children through malnutrition during his early years in London. He blamed it on the failure of a "sneaking and hypocritical" Christianity to change the system, and with Engels (whose family was part owner of one of the cotton mills), he set out to destroy it and everything around him.
Bitter, covered in boils, and full of hate, Marx sat in the British Museum writing Das Kapital when Moody came to London to preach. He hated Christians—not because he failed to see any real power to transform society, but because of his own counterfeit conversion and subsequent failure. He believed they had to be, like himself once, nothing but self-deceived hypocrites. Having already written off Christianity, Marx now had nothing but spite for their doing good, and in this way delaying the day of violence which would usher in his own proud and perverse dream of a new world in his image.
False Assumptions
Christian meekness, humility, steadfastness, obedience, and kindness he put down as cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, and slavish subjection. It must have been hard to live with his rage when a godly revolutionary like Shaftesbury contradicted Marx's false assumption every day. Later, Marx's disciples were to confront another awesomely holy radical in the person of Catherine Booth, whose own fiery spiritual and practical attacks on corrupt society disturbed them so much that to this day the Salvation Army is the only religion officially banned in the Soviet Union.
Shaftesbury. believing "what is morally right cannot be politically wrong and what is morally wrong cannot be politically right" (Lean, Brave Men Choose page 48) originated more Royal Commissions of social investigations than any Parliamentarian in all British history—extending benefits to all classes of working people—pushed through more change than Marx ever did, and eventually earned the beloved nickname "The People's Earl." The Hammonds, economic historians critical of his entire approach, nevertheless admitted the relevance of his social reforms: "He did more than any man or government to check the power of the new industrial system" (Lean, Brave Men Choose, p. 39).
Social Reform Spreads
Nor were Shaftesbury or Booth the only ones of social compassion. Tom Barnardo, the youngest of a brilliant Dublin family, after attempting to explain away examples of conviction as "emotional hysteria," became a Christian and founded the famous Dr. Barnardo Homes in London's tragic East End and later throughout the whole country. George Mueller's orphanage had of course been in operation many years, keeping up to 10,000 children happy and alive through his work of faith. But something more needed to be done for young working people.
George Williams, converted at sixteen one Sunday winter evening in 1837, launched the Teen Challenge of his generation, the Young Men's Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.) on June 6th, 1844. He, with some of his new converts, had "looked with deep concern and anxiety upon the almost totally neglected spiritual condition of the mass of young people engaged in the pursuit of business. . .we regard it to be a sacred duty, binding upon every child of God to use all the means in his power and to direct all his energies in and out of season toward the promotion of the Saviour's Kingdom and the salvation of souls" 0.E. Hodder Williams, The Life Of Sir George Williams, p. 114). Two men's messages helped give him heart for this vision: Finney of America and Binney of England!
Williams was deeply stirred to evangelism, revival, and prayer through Finney's Lectures On Revivals and To Professing Christians which he gave out to his new converts. He was also highly influenced by the English preacher Thomas Binney who preached stirring, contemporary sermons against cant and hypocrisy, calling on young men to rise up and do battle for character and honest work. "Probably no man of his time developed so preeminently in the pulpit the tendency of the thinking and reading of the age. (Binney) preached the reality of the battle that is life, and as he pictured it, the fight was glorious, the victory sure" (Williams, The Life Of Sir George Williams, p. 38). The Y.M.C.A., helped by men like D.L. Moody, reached out both in the U.S. and Britain and mobilized thousands of young men for evangelism.
A Revival Of Mission Work
Men like David Livingstone held out the challenge for Africa during the revival; Mary Slessor, converted in Dundee in I860, joined the United Presbyterian mission in Nigeria and did extraordinary work among the tribes. The seed of the Keswick Conventions5 of London, Oxford, and Brighton in 1873-5 was laid by Evan Hopkins, a newly converted young clergyman, who had read William Edwin Boardman's hugely successful treatise, The Higher Christian Life, published in I860 at the height of the Awakening. He joined with Canon Harford Battersby (active in the Carlisle Awakening) to begin the conventions which gained a unique leadership position in the Christian world.
A majority of the Keswick Convention leaders were either evangelists or converts of the Revival. Henry Varley ministered there; D.L. Moody, Reuben Torrey, A.J. Gordon, A.B. Simpson, J. Wilbur Chapman, and Handley C.G. Moule all supported it or spoke there; Andrew Murray and F.B. Meyer became its public voice. In Britain, Armenians and Calvinists got along well together over Boardman's writings, discussing differences "fraternally." But in the United States, Holiness churches splintered in debate and "heated defense" over opposition from church officials, fanaticism, and attacks on Holiness doctrine—a situation that sadly persisted for 100 years.
5 Keswick Conventions: Famous "deeper" life teaching conventions.
(Taken from Revival by Winnkie Pratney)
Further reading
http://bpf.gospelcom.net/layman.htmlTHE PROBLEM: WHY NO REVIVAL?
1. Visionless - Amos 6:1; Psalm 137
a. Powerless religion - II Timothy 3:1-5
b. Lethargy - Revelation 3:14-19
(from
http://counselme.truepath.com/Reviv1.htm)
