The Sovereign Work of God in Global Christian Revivals

In God's style, He has provided for us abundantly in this difficulty. I don't know what this says to us, beloved Easterners, but He's chosen another Westerner to come here and minister to us this morning, indeed from the same state, from California. A man of great stature, I don't even want to read his credentials because it's embarrassing for me to read his credentials; they're so good, they're so impressive. His name is Dr. J. Edwin Orr. Many of you may have read his books. He's authored something in the order of, I believe I'm correct in saying, 35 books or so. Those books have sold millions of copies. I've got some on my shelves; if you don't have any, you can come and borrow mine. He is Professor Emeritus at Fuller Seminary. He's a scholar, a preacher, a teacher, a man of God, a proven man of God, and we are going to be richly blessed by him. He's also a good friend of Jack Avery's, having taught in Jack's church for a series that was very powerful and very good, so I think that's rather significant too.

Dr. Orr, who was here, agreed to come and minister to us, and I think that Jack Hayford wouldn't mind my saying, and I think he would agree, as I said, that we're going to be richly blessed, even beyond perhaps what we would have been blessed had our good brother been here. Because we do not know Dr. Orr personally, most of you don't, and now you're going to know him face-to-face, and he's going to minister to you. As you know, Jack Hayford was scheduled to speak this afternoon also. Well, again, in God's grand style, He has brought to us another man who is the head of the Assemblies of God in Australia. He comes to us from Australia, and he is in this area and has agreed to come and minister to us this afternoon. He's also a young, I cannot say the Korean fellow's name, young, he chose a board. He knows what's going on all over the world, and particularly in the East, the Far East, and he will be here this afternoon at 2 o'clock. His name is David Cartledge, and you're going to be richly blessed by him.

But for right now, I want you to turn your attention to God's special gift to us for this morning, Dr. J. Edwin Orr. My grandfather and grandmother were both converted in the great revival of 1859 in Ireland. I remember my grandfather telling us something about it. Such a movement that when the judge went to hold the quarter sessions of the serious cases, the chairman got up and said, "Your Worship, there are no cases to try, no robberies, no rapes, no murders, no embezzlements, nothing." That was the great revival of 1859. It was my privilege personally to know Evan Roberts, whom God so signally used in the Welsh revival. The same sort of thing happened in Wales, 1904-1905. There were emergency meetings of the district councils to discuss what to do with the police now that they were unemployed. In one case, they sent for a sergeant of the police, and a councillor asked him, "What do you do with your time?" Well, he said, "Before the revival, we had two main jobs. One was to prevent crime, the other was to control crowds at football games, market days, that sort of thing. Since the revival, there's practically no crime, so we just go over the crowds." The councillor said, "What does that mean?" Well, the councillor, he said, "You know where the crowds are. Every church is filled." But do they need police direction to find their own church? "Oh, you must understand, we have 17 police in our station, we've got three excellent men's quartets. If any church wants a quartet, they just notify the police." That was happening all over Wales. There were even slowdowns in the coal mines, not strikes, slowdowns. So many Welsh coal miners were converted and stopped using profanity that the horses that dragged the trucks in the mines couldn't understand what was being said. And transportation slowed down.

I find, especially my Pentecostal friends, have all heard of the Welsh revival, but they don't seem to know that it affected the rest of the world. It swept Norway. The Norwegian Parliament passed special legislation to allow Lutheran laymen to conduct Holy Communion. So many people wanted to take Communion, the clergy couldn't keep up with it. The same revival swept Sweden and Denmark and Finland, broke out in India, swept China and Japan. People talk about Japan being a resistant culture. The churches in Japan that year grew 62.5% in one year. It was called Springtime of God in Japan. And that revival swept the States. You see, I was watching some of the things on 700 Club. They jumped from the great revival to Azusa Street. Azusa Street happened at the end of a great revival in the United States. Maybe a million people converted, but 120 in Azusa Street had a new experience and out of that developed the Pentecostal explosion.

But do you know that 200 major stores in Portland, Oregon, closed each day from 11 to 2 for prayer? Do you know that the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Paducah, Kentucky, took in a thousand new members in two months and died of overwork, and the Southern Baptists said, "What a glorious way to go?" Do you know that they took a kind of census at Atlantic City and discovered only 100 people left that hadn't been converted? That happened at the revival of 1905 throughout the United States and Canada. And it was out of that movement there came the Pentecostal explosion. A lot of people don't know these things, so perhaps I should give you some facts and fallacies about the great awakenings. Have to deal with both facts and fallacies.

Now the last time that the Lord was speaking to His disciples, they said to Him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" They had been told that when Messiah came, He would deliver the people of God from the tyranny of their enemies. Naturally, they said, "Now are you going to deliver us?" Notice His response. "It's not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has kept under His own direction." God did not give the disciples a blueprint or a timetable. I'm always being asked, "Where do you think we are?" I don't keep God's timetable. God is sovereign. Nor do you have a blueprint. I'm the second most senior professor in the School of World Mission to Dr. Donald MacGovern. You've surely heard of Donald MacGovern and Church growth. But notice, when the Lord left the disciples, He didn't give them a blueprint. He didn't say, "Now you must make a study of Church growth and then act this way and that way." Oh, no. He said, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you."

I've been looking at some of the big churches here in downtown Norfolk. I had a week of meetings in Freemason Street Baptist Church some years ago, and some churches are very well organized. But the Lord did not leave an organized congregation behind. He left just a prayer meeting. Just a prayer meeting. Nothing more. It says that they all continued with one accord. Who all were there? Well, we know the eleven disciples were there, two candidates for Judas' place, thirteen. Mary was there, the mother of Jesus, that's fourteen. The half-brothers of Jesus were there, that's eighteen. We know about twenty names, but there were a hundred and twenty in the upper room. They continued in prayer. In other words, our Lord left a protracted prayer meeting and not an organization.

Then when the day of Pentecost had fully come, there came what we call the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. I was asked yesterday by Pat Robertson, "Do you think we're in revival now?" I said, "Well, we're in a revival of interest in revival." That's certainly true. But the word revival is a very controversial word in some respects. I saw a church in the San Fernando Valley that had a sign outside it which said, "Revival every Monday." Five miles away in Burbank, there was another sign that said, "Revival every night except Monday." I was lecturing at Baylor University when a Baptist pastor in Waco told me, "Brother Earl, we had a revival here last fall and we got revived." I said, "Then you didn't have a revival." "Oh, yes we did." He told me the name of the evangelist and the name of the song leader. And he told me how much money they put out in publicity, but he said, "We never got off the ground." I mentioned that when I was speaking to the Southern Baptists at Ridgecrest, the great encampment in North Carolina. And one man came up to me and said, "I'm a deacon in that church. That was the worst revival we ever had." It seemed we weren't talking about the same things.

By the way, you can blame this on a great man of God. I have to be very careful in saying this. Because some people get quite upset when I say it. You can blame it on Charles Finney. Finney said, "Revival," I'm quoting exactly, "is nothing more than the right use of the appropriate means." That's what you call the do-it-yourself school. Now, Jonathan Edwards, about whom we heard yesterday quite a bit, said revival is the work of God. What does Finney mean? Some people say, well, perhaps you're a little hard on Finney, misinterpreting him. He gave the illustration, just as a farmer chooses a day to plow the field, and chooses a day to sow the seed, and chooses a day to reap the harvest, so you can have revival. That was the Finney position.

I think I would say that the scripture takes a different point of view, much as I've benefited from reading Finney in other respects. For instance, Finney said, when the children of God exaggerate the work of grace in their midst, the Spirit of God is commonly grieved. That's certainly true. You get lots of gems like that from Finney. But you couldn't say revival is nothing more than the right use of the appropriate means.

So, how are we going to settle this? What are we going to do about it? Well, first of all, the word revival, in the religious sense, appeared in the dictionary in 1702 for the first time. It was defined as an awakening in or of religion, especially after a period of decline. Now, you'll all understand that definition. You'll find that in every American and British dictionary or encyclopedia. But since about 30 years ago, in American dictionaries, there's a second choice: A, an awakening in or of religion. Evangelical religion is always understood because the word revival was not a Roman Catholic word or a Greek Orthodox word or a Jewish word or a Muslim word. It's definitely an evangelical word. But since about 30 years ago, in American dictionaries, it says, also, B, a week of meetings, especially in the South.

Now, how do you get from one to the other? Well, it's just this. In times of revival, when the Holy Spirit's outpoured upon the whole body of Christ, you go everywhere holding meetings, you experience revival. So they started calling a week of meetings a revival. I was at Asbury College, one of my favorite stamping grounds. And an old professor said to me, you warm my heart. He said, you know, I've been through three revivals here. I said, tell me, were they organized? Oh, he said, quite the contrary. He said, the last one, 1970, the president had left town. I said, maybe he should leave town after. The president was standing with us at the time. He's a good friend of mine. I said, tell me, what happened? Well, he said, we just had our annual revival and nothing much happened. The students were disappointed and they started having half-nights of prayer. And then we really had revival. I said, you just said you just had your revival. He said, I see what you mean.

I didn't have a chance. When you come from California to speak on the 700 Club and get ten minutes, you can't say everything you want to say. That one of the hindrances to revival in the United States is the misuse of the word revival. People are incurable about it. I remember a Southern Baptist coming to me and saying, well, you know, you really shook me up there. I'll never misuse that word again. I said, what's your home state? He said, Tennessee. I said, you're going back there? No, he said, you're going down to Mobile, Alabama to hold another revival. And there you go again.

Now, how can we deal with the subject when the Apostle Peter stood up at Pentecost? He said, this is that which was spoken of by the Prophet Joel, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. Is the outpouring of the Spirit the work of God or the work of man? There's only one answer. The Lord Jesus said, the wind blows where it lifts. You can't tell where it's coming from or where it's going to, so it is with the Spirit. There isn't an organization under heaven, whether it's World Vision or the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association or the National Association of Evangelicals or the Vatican that can say, we have organized an outpouring of the Holy Spirit beginning the 15th of January next year. It cannot be done. I doubt even if it can be predicted unless the Lord puts it into the mouth of one of his prophets. And again, he has to be very sure that he's speaking for the Lord, otherwise he makes a fool of himself.

Now, this is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. What is the effect of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit? First of all, the reviving of the Church. And by Church, I don't mean the organized body, but the body of believers, all those who love the Lord Jesus Christ. The first effect of revival is... The first effect of the outpouring of the Spirit is the reviving of the Church. Now, would you say that's the work of God or the work of man? I'd have to say both. It's the work of God, definitely, but it takes the response of believers. Believers can refuse to be revived. Some do. I've been in meetings where the pastor actually stopped what was going on because confession of sin had begun and he was afraid of being exposed. You can grieve the Holy Spirit. So revival is the work of God with the response of believers.

Now, I used to hold the view, revive the Church and win the world. As a matter of fact, that was one of the slogans that Evan Roberts used. Certainly, you get a Church when you fire for God, you're bound to win souls to Christ. But is it automatic? The Apostle Peter preached on the day of Pentecost and overnight 120 believers became 3,120. That's what Dr. Donald McGavin calls a very satisfactory Church growth. What was the secret? Well, he preached the Word and he was filled with the Spirit. Does that mean if you preach the Word and you're filled with the Spirit, you'll have results like that? Not necessarily so. Stephen was filled with the Spirit. The Scripture says so. And he preached the Word just as faithfully as did Peter. But instead of adding 3,000, they subtracted one. They killed him.

And I suddenly saw a truth I've never seen before. When we pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the body of believers, we should also pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the masses of people. I used to think that John Wesley was such a genius of an evangelist that when he preached, strong men that never darkened a church door wept and found the Savior. But if you know anything about John Wesley, at the beginning at least he was a rather stuffy high churchman. He was an Oxford bum. Very prim and proper. Very prim and proper. You read about his preaching at Bristol. He said, I made a series of appeals to the conscience and to the will. And the Holy Spirit fell on these people. Was it John Wesley's doing? No. The same Holy Spirit was outpoured upon the masses of the people. And that's something we need to pray for. When he has come, who said that? The Lord Jesus. He will convict the world. Have you ever tried to convict him without the Holy Spirit? Stop someone in the streets of Norfolk and try and convict him of sin. He can tell you where to go. And he'll say a few home truths about your denomination into the bargain. No. It takes the Holy Spirit to convict of sin. Yet in times of great revival, people come weeping to God. In evangelism, the evangelist seeks the sinner. But in the days of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the sinners come running to God. So we need to pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the masses. Then the revived church evangelizes and teaches.

The best definition of evangelism that I know was one written by a dear friend of mine who died about four years ago, Canon Max Warren of Westminster Abbey. To evangelize is so to present Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit that men may come to put their trust in him as Savior and to serve him as Lord in the fellowship of his church and in the vocations of the common life. I'll repeat that. To evangelize is so to present Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit that men may come to put their trust in him as Savior and to serve him as Lord in the fellowship of his church and in the vocations of the common life.

Now, is evangelism the work of God or the work of man? It's the work of man, with God's blessing. Man is expected to organize for it. And if you start having an evangelistic campaign and don't tell anyone about it, do you expect results? Well, you may get two or three gathered around you in the open air, but in evangelism, a certain amount of planning, a certain amount of organization, it's necessary. God has committed that to us. That's the duty of the church to evangelize and to teach. There's the great commission going to all the world to preach and to teach. And then, by many or by few, to engage in social action. I'm adding that because it's scriptural. Inasmuch you've done unto the least of these my brethren, you've done it unto me. We're told to visit the prisoners and the sick. Look how much has come out of the great awakenings. Most people know very little about the social impact of revival. Out of the second great awakening, the one that began 1792, came all the Bible societies, British and foreign Bible societies, American Bible society, and all the others. Out of it came all the denominational missionary societies. The first one was the Baptist Missionary Society, William Carey, but then denomination after denomination. Out of it came the abolition of the slave trade. Out of it came, first of all in the British Empire, emancipation of the slaves came out of revival. Out of it came popular education. I can mention so many things.

Now, there's some people who will confuse social action with evangelism. For instance, I notice that Southern Baptists, by the way, I'm an ordained Baptist minister, Southern Baptists confuse evangelism with revival.

There are some Northern Baptists who confuse social action with evangelism. They say that's evangelism. I remember one of their leaders saying, you really must back some of the great evangelists like Castro. Castro. Well, he's had a revolution in Cuba, and they say that's social justice and that's evangelism. I don't follow the logic of that, but what's the relationship between social justice and evangelism? What's the relationship? Is there any distinction to be made?

Well, I'm going to put it in a very simple way. If we do not engage in social action as Christians, somebody else will. But if we do not preach the gospel, nobody else will. So I find a priority there. Now, I've laid out these points because you can't get anywhere unless you define your terms. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is exclusively the work of God. It's always general. During the great revival of 1858 in Chicago, when Trinity Episcopal Church had 121 members, but two years later built the church for 1,400 members, if the ministers of Chicago had met and someone had said, God has revealed to me that he's going to choose from our midst a world evangelist, I don't think any of them there would have picked a young shoe salesman called D.L. Moody. But the Holy Spirit did.

These outpourings of the Holy Spirit are times of recruitment when God chooses a man for a lifetime. These are the movings of the Holy Spirit. The outpouring of the Spirit is the work of God. It cannot be organized, cannot be manipulated. It results in the revival of the church. That's the work of God with the response of believers. But also the outpouring of the Holy Spirit affects the people, makes them willing to listen or hungry for the word. Then the revived church engages in evangelism at home and abroad and in teaching. You evangelize the inquirers, you teach the disciples, those who wish to follow. And by many or by few, you engage in social action.

For instance, John Wesley, long before it became popular, wrote a tract called "Thoughts on Slavery," in which he said it was an abomination to God and men. He was way ahead of his time. Now Susanna Wesley, his mother, was a very godly woman. If she had done nothing more than give us John Wesley and Charles Wesley, that would have been a contribution to our humanity. But she never made any statements about slavery. Why? She had twenty children to bring up. Twenty! She had her hands full. So God hands these jobs out to different people. He may call on one man to go to Congress or Parliament. And that can be a life work. So I say by many or by few, we engage in social action.

Now, the best way to illustrate this is to illustrate from facts of history. I propose to use the greatest awakening that this country has ever known. But first of all, I have to begin at the beginning. If you take the past 250 years more or less, you can see a series of great awakenings. The first was in the days of Wesley and Whitfield, but it didn't begin with them. What we call the first great awakening, or in Britain it's called the Evangelical Revival, was in 1827, simultaneously in Hernhut, in Germany, among the Moravians. That was the first outpouring. It began in a prayer meeting that lasted a hundred years. And all the time the Moravians were engaged in prayer like that, they were the leading missionaries in the world.

At the same time, in New Jersey, the first sign of revival occurred at a place called New Brunswick, not far from where Princeton is today, in the ministry of a man called Theodore Frelinghuysen. The revival was seven years underway before it broke out in Northampton, Massachusetts under Jonathan Edwards. Before it affected the Congregationalists in New England, it had begun to affect the Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and the Baptists in the South. At the time of the first great awakening there were only 500 Baptists throughout the colonies. Today in the United States they claim 21 million. The Baptists got their running start in that first great awakening because theirs was a church polity adapted to the frontier. It appointed or ordained farmers to preach and travel with the population moving west where the Episcopal and Presbyterians and others had to act through Presbytery or through the Bishop and so forth.

That was the first great awakening. You know that it was in the Holy Club at Oxford? By the way, some student, California Polytechnic, asked me the other day at Oxford, this Oxford, is it accredited? He said. And he was very surprised when I told him no. He said, how come? Well, I said, 1123 when they started there was no one to accredit them so they never bothered. But in the Holy Club at Oxford John Wesley read to the group extracts readings from Jonathan Edwards' book "The Life of the Surprising Work of Grace at Northampton, Massachusetts." There were nearly always links between these things. Then revival began to spread through the ministry of George Whitfield who was the first to be awakened over there. But the movement had already begun among the Germans in the Moravian camps in Saxony in Germany. And it was already underway in New Jersey in the ministry of Theodor Frelinghuysen. And they logged college just north of Philadelphia which today is Princeton University.

Now that revival lasted about 50 years. The excitement didn't last 50 years. The effects lasted 50 years. Some people seem to think that you only have revival when you have the excitement. No, no. The definition of revival in the dictionary is bringing a new life again. But the state of being revived. Moody was caught up in the revival in Chicago in 1858 but he was still preaching in 1899. The revival lasted 41 years with him. And we can illustrate that many, many times.

That revival, of course, died down and the churches got worldly. Not only that, but the country got divided. After the American Revolutionary War we mustn't forget that about one-third were revolutionists. About one-third were Tories. A lot of them emigrated to Canada. And about one-third didn't care one way or the other. But when people are so badly divided they don't start prayer meetings about the political convictions. Sometimes they used to burn each other's churches down and that sort of spoils the revival. The Baptists and the Methodists and the Lutherans and the Presbyterians supported the revolution. Excuse me, not the Methodists. The Episcopalians and the Methodists supported the old country, largely speaking. So the country was divided.

1792 came the next great moment. We call it the second great awakening. It did not begin in the camp meetings of Kentucky and Tennessee. That's very popular with the skeptics and the critics. They like to talk about the extravagances, the barking and the jerking and the dancing up and down and all the rest of it. If they can give a revival a black eye they'll do it any time. Actually the revival began in Yorkshire in 1792, the year after John Wesley died. It began through what was called the Napoleonic Wars. I won't give you details because you wouldn't be able to follow them all, but it swept Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Then it broke out in Boston. The Baptist minister called Isaac Bacchus wrote to every denomination.

At that time the churches were losing out. Take a typical example. Samuel Shepard, the pastor of the Lenox Congregational Church in Lenox, Massachusetts, complained that he hadn't taken anyone into fellowship for 16 years. It was like being chaplain of an old people's home in a funeral parlor. He was just burying them up. That was the congregation's largest denomination. The second largest were the Presbyterians. In General Assembly they met the Methodists, who were the most aggressively evangelistic in those days, and they were losing more members than they were gaining in spite of immigration. The Baptists said they had the worst winter. The Lutherans discussed uniting with the Episcopalians to prop each other up. Samuel Provost, Episcopal Bishop, New York, quit functioning. He lost all employment. The Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, wrote to the Bishop of Virginia and said, the Church is too far gone ever to be redeemed. Voltaire said, Christianity will be forgotten in 30 years' time, and Tom Paine was re-echoing that. They took a poll at Harvard and in the whole student body only five believers that didn't belong to the filthy speech movement of that day. Conditions were desperate.

In the United States we had a rough time in the 1960s, but nobody suggested that churches were about to close. But it looked as if Christianity was about to be wiped out. Isaac Bacchus, they called it the Concert of Prayer. That's what brought the nation back to God. The revival began on the east coast in the Connecticut Valley, actually. Some people teach that revival is a frontier phenomenon. You find this in many of the history books. This doesn't make any sense. Even in Whitefield's day, when Whitefield came across the Atlantic, he didn't start on the frontier. He headed for the biggest town, Philadelphia. He missed it. He landed in North Carolina because navigation wasn't very exact in those days. But he went up by horse and visited Philadelphia. Do you think, for instance, if believers in Paducah, Kentucky wanted Billy Graham for a crusade, that would be the first place he would go to? Of course not. These world evangelists head for the centers of population and even treating evangelism as a frontier revivalism is a lot of nonsense.

Now, the revival did not begin in Kentucky and Tennessee. That was the last place it reached. It began in the Connecticut Valley and spread throughout the east coast.

Three quarters of the population of the United States lived east of the Alleghenies in those days. But Kentucky and Tennessee were a law to themselves. Congress reported that in five years in Kentucky they wouldn't bring criminals to trial. Peter Cartwright, the Methodist evangelist, said that when his father settled in Kentucky, Logan County was called—I'm just trying to think of the peculiar word that he used. It will come to me. You must excuse me. I'm just about five years younger and my mind will go blank on a name. But if anyone committed a murder in Massachusetts or a robbery in Rhode Island and wanted to get away from the police, all they had to do was get to Kentucky. The decent people formed vigilante regiments to fight the outlaws, fought a pitched battle, and lost. The result was Kentucky had completely transformed communities.

Now, that was a second great awakening, and as I said, out of that came the abolition of the slave trade throughout the world and the emancipation of the slaves throughout the British Empire and so many other social reforms. I heard Pierce Beaver, professor at the University of Chicago, say that the missionary thrust in those days lasted as long. Then there came a decline. Now, my main emphasis today will be on this subject of the greatest awakening this country ever experienced.

By the 1850s, the country was in decline again. You might say, why? They were in a boom financially speaking. Railroads would be built everywhere. When D.L. Moody, as a young man, moved from Boston to Chicago, being a thrifty New Englander, he saved his money. They paid him 18% interest. You don't get that sort of rate of interest unless it's artificially maintained. That shows you what a demand there was for money. Everyone was making money hand over fist, and people's hearts were broken.

Second, the country was seriously divided over the slavery issue. Not the North against the South. That's too simplistic. You need a fourth Presbyterian church in Chicago being split over the issue: can a man be a member of this church and hold slaves? Throughout the whole country, the country was much more seriously divided than during the Vietnam War.

The third thing was John Miller had rediscovered the doctrine of the second coming but made the mistake of fastening it on a date, 1844. And when Christ didn't come in 1844, lots of people were disillusioned. There was a great deal of ridicule made of Christians. So for various reasons, the churches were emptying again. I discovered recent research that the Baptists in New York state, in spite of immigration...

Now, you'll find two explanations of the great revival of 1858. First of all, the secular explanation from Professor William McLaughlin of Brown University. He said it was caused by a bank panic. In 1857, there was a bank panic. He said that panic-stricken businessmen, in their distress, turned to God for religious awakening. Evangelicals said no, no, no, it wasn't that. It was a man called Jeremiah Lanphier. He started a prayer meeting in New York. Only six people came to it, but it grew and grew and spread all over New York and all over the country, and about a million people were converted, and that's how the revival started.

McLaughlin says yes, but he started that prayer meeting, and the secular explanation and the secular explanation are wrong. Actually, the movement began in Canada, which didn't have a bank panic. It began in Hamilton, Ontario. A phenomenal movement of God's Holy Spirit. It was utterly unplanned. A godly Methodist couple, Walter and Phoebe Palmer, used to visit Canada in the summertime to visit the camp meetings. They were on their way back, hoping to get to Albany, New York, before the snow came. They stopped in Hamilton because their baggage had gone astray. Nowadays, when baggage goes astray, it ends up in Hawaii or somewhere like that, but they decided not to cross the American frontier without their baggage, which was a good idea. So they waited for three days. In the middle of a week, no time to announce. Only 86 people came to the first meeting, but that night Phoebe Palmer had a conviction from God that the Holy Spirit was going to move in an extraordinary way, and the following night the revival movement began. It was largely led by the laypeople. Actually, the Palmers only preached once.

The second thing I discovered that's not known—I've never seen it in print, and I'm hoping to publish it this year—was that the first community to be revived in the United States were the black slaves of Virginia and the Carolinas. Now, in those days, the black Christians met in the same churches with the white. They occupied a gallery or sat to one side, but they met in the same buildings with their masters. So many of them wanted to pray; God's Holy Spirit was moving upon them that they took over and packed them out. You don't read about this in American history. I discovered it in Canadian papers. They spoke of the slave revivals. Who ever heard of the slave revivals of 1857?

You say, well, how did it happen? In South Carolina, there was a very godly Presbyterian theologian called John Gerardo. I was over in Alexandria, Virginia, and the theological seminary there, the Episcopal one for the Christians of the South. He could have had any church, any white church he wanted in South Carolina. He was a great preacher as well as a great theologian. But he loved black people. He started what was called a mission church meant for black people. They had 48 black members and 12 white members. No doubt the white members were the office bearers, but it was meant for black people. He started a prayer meeting, and he said we won't have any preaching until we feel the power of the Holy Spirit present. The church got full. The elder said to him, why don't you preach, pastor? He said we'll wait for the Holy Spirit.

One evening, while he was sitting in the pulpit while some black brother was praying, he felt as if he was hit by an electric bolt. He trembled to his toes. He got up and then he sat down again, and then he got up again. It was an order of service, so he was quite confused. Finally, he got up and he said, I believe the Spirit has come. We will start preaching tomorrow evening. Like a good Presbyterian, he wanted to prepare for it. He pronounced the benediction, but nobody moved. Then he said, like a gentle rain, people began sobbing and crying all over the church. Then he began exhorting the Lord. He didn't wait to prepare. That was the beginning of the revival. White people came in to see what was happening in this black church. Some came to scoff but remained to pray. The revival spread all over South Carolina.

I was telling Ben Kinslow yesterday that in 1857 there was an underground army of blacks called the Knights of Tabor. Drilled men. They were arming for an insurrection. Well, you've all heard of John Brown. Why did John Brown rob the United States Armory at Harpers Ferry? To get guns for the blacks. Of course, the South was very alarmed about this. They had planned an insurrection to march on Atlanta in 1857 in the fall. I got this from Moses Dixon, who became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, I should have said. But during the revival, in which about 100,000 black people were converted, the chief, whose name was not mentioned, had a revelation from God that he was not to do anything. It was as if God said slavery is a sin for which there will be a blood atonement. 600,000 young Americans died in the Civil War. He said it's not your fault. I mean, neither the slave owners in the South nor the abolitionists in the North could say it was the fault of the blacks that they were slaves. So stand aside and God will deliver you. That's actually what happened.

It was utterly amazing that Confederate soldiers marched off to fight the Yankees and left their women and children in the care of the black servants. I've come across a lot of the wife of the owner called together all her slaves, and she said we've got to have some prayer because the Yankees are getting closer. We don't know what will happen to the plantation. The master is gone fighting with General Lee. So they all got together to pray and did a wonderful praying, Lord spare this plantation, and so forth. And as soon as the mistress had to go back home, then they said, Lord bless the Yankees. They sort of divided loyalty there.

Do you know if it hadn't been for that revival before the Civil War, perhaps what happened among the blacks in Brazil or in Haiti—Voodoo, cannibalism—would have happened. Instead of that, once the blacks were liberated, Christianity came upon them. Now, this was the first community to be revived in the United States. Not Jeremiah Lanphier's prayer meeting in New York, but the movement among the blacks.

Then I discovered, to my amazement, that revival began breaking out all over the state. In Waco, Texas, all businesses closed. All schools closed. Churches full. Revival in Iowa. And then in February of 1858 came the third phase of the revival, what we call the businessman's revival. Jeremiah Lanphier had a prayer meeting going from September, started with six people, but he had a full church by February. And Horace Greeley, you've heard of Horace Greeley, the man who said go west, young man. He sent a reporter around at noon. In one hour, he could only visit 12, but he counted 6,110.

He must have just rushed from one to the other, whipped up his pony, and got off to the next one, counted them, and made his report cause a landslide: 6,110. Then they began really to pray. They took over not only every church in downtown New York but every theater. Every street was packed from pit to roof with 5,000 people. You say, what kind of people? There were 50 ministers of different denominations, about 200 women, and the rest would be 4,750 men. A feminist got after me the other day and said, why were there only 250 women? Well, women weren't in business in those days. Some of them worked in the pipe or something like that in those days. These 200 women had come down specially for the meeting. But this packed out New York. Every church packed every night.

You say every church? Oh yes. Roman Catholics got excited. They went to their own churches, and the priests put on special preaching missions with Redemptorist, the leading light among Unitarians that day. They said to expect revival among Unitarians is like expecting sparks when you rub ice blocks together. I didn't say that, but he said that. But it did some good. The professor of religion at Harvard, which was a Unitarian institution at that time, started prayer meetings on Wednesdays for undergraduates as a result of revival. This was the revival of 1858. It went up to Hudson, down to Mohawk. The Baptists had so many candidates for believers' baptism that they couldn't get them into their churches. They marched them down to the river Ohio, cut a big square hole in the ice, and baptized them in the cold water or in the Mohawk River.

In Kalamazoo, Michigan, the first businessmen's prayer meeting was convened by an Episcopalian. The town hall was packed. He said, I see our rector is here. We'll ask him to lead in prayer. We'll ask the Methodist minister to read the scripture. Then the meeting is open for prayer. The first request he read was, a praying woman asked the prayers of this company for the conversion of her husband who is far from God. Immediately, a burly blacksmith stood in his apron and said, I think my wife wrote that note because I'm far from God. Would someone help me? A lawyer got up and said, I think it was my wife who wrote that. I need some counsel. I'll be back in the first five minutes. That's what was happening during that revival.

The revival swept. For instance, did you know that the mayor of Chattanooga called for Thanksgiving in February instead of November? He said, why wait until November? They said, well, what will we announce? What are we celebrating? They thought the millennium had begun. It was interesting; so successful was this revival, it encouraged what you call post-millennialism, that we're going to win the world first, then Jesus will come. Western Union, or I should say the equivalent of Western Union, they hadn't formed a union of the telegraph companies. The telegraph companies gave free telegrams to converts. Free. After 5 o'clock in the evening before 8 o'clock in the morning. He said, how could they afford to do that? Well, they decided to make a list of what kind of message you'd like to send. A would be, mother, your prayers have been answered. I've given my heart to Christ. That was A. C was, tell our minister that I've given my heart to Christ and so forth. Free telegrams, you know, weddings and all that sort of things. This was all in the days of telegrams.

The population of the United States was a million, 30 million. There were 4 million active church members, and in one year they increased 25% across the board to 5 million. 5 million, 25% increase in 18 months across the board. You say, how long did the revival last? About 40 years. Not the excitement. The excitement didn't last that long, but the effects lasted that long. I used to suppose that because the revival broke out in 1858 and the Civil War broke out in 1861 that the revival must have come to an end. Oh, no. I've been re-researching this again. Do you know that 150,000 under General Robert E. Lee? A professor at Washington wrote to me and said, how could you explain a religious revival, then these people would not fight each other? I said, don't ask me to explain it, but it happened.

Any of you who are patriotic southerners, you know that General Robert E. Lee would get off his horse sometimes and pray with a man on his back. Yet they were fighting on the wrong side, as we would say. Who would make a brief for slavery today? But those who have written books about the Confederate revivals among the soldiers said there was no such movement among the Union armies. I decided, well, this is worth looking into, so I looked into it, too. Someone came to, by the way, I was in a meeting where I heard Milton Sheen turn to President Jimmy Carter and say, Mr. President, there was only one president of the United States in all of our history who ever admitted there was anything wrong with the country. And he said that was President Lincoln. He said the official American religion is, we are such a good people, God can't help but bless us. But President Lincoln called upon the nation to engage in a day of prayer to confess our national sins.

Well, actually, what happened was someone showed President Lincoln a copy of a Southern paper which said, the Yankees are trusting in their superior numbers and industry and armaments, but God is on our side. Lincoln was always a very truthful man, you know, and he said, well, I'll say this, he was praying more than our boys. That's why they called for a day of prayer. Two months later, Gettysburg. You know the Confederates were running rings around the Union troops for two years. Defeat after defeat, Lincoln had to replace general after general, and it wasn't until Gettysburg the tide turned, and that was just after the day of prayer, about two months after the day of prayer. At the same time, he put forth a statement.

However, was there a revival among the Union troops? I came across a report from, do any of you know what Ringgold, Georgia is? Well, in Ringgold, Georgia, there were 10,000 troops, Northern troops, poised for the march through Georgia. Sherman's Army. I saw a request from four young Indian soldiers. I said, you know, we're getting a request from four young evangelists from Illinois to visit the front. And General Sherman wrote by endorsement on the application, certainly not. We have no need of gunpowder and oats than moral teaching. Sherman was quite a rough, he was the general pattern of his day. But he changed his mind and let them in. In Ringgold, Georgia, they had such a revival that one Sunday afternoon, they marched 150 soldiers down to the river to be baptized according to preference, some by immersion, some by pouring, some by sprinkling. They had a communion service of 400 new converts. And that night, Major General Oral Howard, who was killed in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain a month later, preached the gospel and 86 more soldiers were converted. That was a revival among Sherman's troops.

Sherman's name is not very popular in the South. He was the man that burned Atlanta. But I also found revival in Northern Virginia. When the Union troops were attacking Fredericksburg and were driven back in a storm of hail and sleet and the bitterness of defeat, every hillside was a prayer meeting. I found to my amazement that the revival of 1857-58 continued in the armies and in the Presbyterian records, that in 1868, ten years after the revival, it said, Revival is reported from 75 presbyteries out of 92, in some ways greater than 1858. That surely must have been the greatest revival of all time.

Well, there is so much one could say about this. By the way, Dr. McLaughlin, who said it was all history, said it was all caused by a bank panic, isn't going to be too pleased when I publish this book showing that it was due to an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But I enjoyed debunking the debunkers. That set the pace for the next 40 years.

Well, I'll tell you something else interesting. I remember I was very close to the end of the war. I remember I was very close to Billy Graham at the time he had anointing from God at Forest Home, 1949. And when God poured out his spirit upon that great crusade in Los Angeles, I said to Billy, Billy, if you're going to model yourself on any previous evangelist, model yourself on D.L. Moody. Well, actually, I said rather than Billy Sunday. Billy Sunday was somewhat sensational. You know, he used to break up furniture on the platform to emphasize a point. He wanted to denounce the devil, he'd pick up a chair and smash it on the platform. Great effect, of course. But Billy Sunday wasn't quite of the same order as D.L. Moody who became a world evangelist. So I urged Billy Graham to model yourself if you need a model on D.L. Moody. He was a great evangelist. Moody was willing to work with anyone who would accept his preaching. I think you could say the same for Billy Graham. But Moody preached for 41 years after that. But I discovered that no more people converted in the 1858 revival than all of Moody's ministry for the next 40 years. That's something worth thinking about, what God wants us to do. And that's what we're praying for. Not organized crusades. God bless the evangelists. They're the harvesters. But a movement of the Holy Spirit to prepare the church for this. That same movement broke out in Northern Ireland.

That's where my grandparents were converted. It swept Scotland, 300,000 converts out of 3 million people. It swept the British army in the China Inland Mission. It became so many social reforms. This country was engaged in the Civil War, and there isn't much chance to do any reforming during that except, of course, the abolition of, I should say, the emancipation of the slaves. That was a great step forward. Worldwide, it touched every place there's an evangelical cause.

I've written all these things up. Pat Robertson said when he introduced me that I'd written 35 books on revival. I didn't want to correct him right away then, but I've written more than 35 books, but at least 10 of them are documented works dealing with the great revolution.

I was in Nagaland not so long ago. The secretary of the church council there is one of my students from Fuller. You all know where Nagaland is. It's just due north from Mizoram. It's northwest of Burma, northeast of Bangladesh, and it's a self-governing Indian state. In 1972, they celebrated their 100th anniversary. The Nagas were headhunters when the missionaries got among them. After 100 years, they had 100,000 converts. 100 years, 100,000 converts. They decided to celebrate, so they wanted Billy Graham to come and hold a crusade. The Indian army wouldn't let him in. They said it's too sensitive an area towards Muslims. They will not give India a bad image by refusing a permit to a man so highly regarded as Billy Graham. I will instruct the Indian army to give him a permit. So they gave him a permit for two days. Billy had a huge rally, but no campaign.

It was a bit like the man who said to the meeting, I lost my mind, but tomorrow I'll be better prepared, he said. The Nagas had to depend upon the Lord, so they devoted all of 1973 to prayer meetings for revival. Every church, every week. 1974, consular training in anticipation. 1975, the missionary outreach, studying the peoples all around them that were still heathen. 1976 came the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at a little village called Wamakin. I'm a little out of touch with Nagaland, I haven't had a letter from them for a couple of years, but after seven years, 100,000 have become 217,000. That's out of a population of 600,000. That means that they're unbaptized members of families. But when you count all the families in, it's about 90% Christian today. It has charismatic, I was going to say overtones or undertones, whatever you like to say, but everyone, shall we say, is brotherly with everybody else. In times of revival, it's almost a honeymoon as far as relationships with people.

It's the same thing going on in Papua New Guinea. Same thing going on in Solomon Islands. I've seen revival in Brazil. I remember seeing streets packed from wall to wall, the buses couldn't run, people sitting at the tops of the buses listening to the messages. We're not seeing that in the States yet. It's a whole body of Christ.

Now, I'd meant to give perhaps a doctrinal message as well, but time is limited. I have to be back for an appointment in Los Angeles this evening. And if I may, I could take 15 minutes of questions, providing they're on the subject. I'm sometimes a little nervous about taking questions. Last time I was asked that, I said, certainly not. Well, why not? I said, Andy Christ will have no regard for women. Couldn't say that of Kissinger. Well, any question on the subject?

Do any of you know the name of David Bryant? He's with InterVarsity, and he's one of the mainsprings behind this concert of prayer. I've directed a conference of scholars at Oxford for about ten years. The sponsor was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, a very evangelical man. And David Bryant came there and sort of caught the spark there. We studied the great evangelical awakening. There's a movement on. Dick Halverson, the chaplain of the United States Senate, says there's a revival of interest in revival. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal said if we're in the midst of a great evangelical awakening, it's the first one on record that hasn't affected the morals of the people yet. They say, if my people called by my name shall humble themselves and pray, but they don't finish the verse, turn from their wicked ways. There has to be a repentance, not only of the masses, but a repentance of the church. The word repent occurs seven times in the letters to the churches. And the word repent doesn't mean to feel sorry.

I just wrote to Nancy DeMoss the other day. Are you a friend of the one America Lives Again or something like that? Yes. It's a beautifully illustrated thing. I find that popular writers often mix up a few points, you know. I once heard a very famous soloist, I'd better not mention his name, who said on TV, I'm going to sing a song for you that was written by Charles Wesley for the coronation of Queen Victoria. He said the Queen invited him to a coronation to sing, but he wrote, Your Majesty, not only will I sing, but I'll write a song for the occasion. So this good man sang all for a thousand and I find people get mixed up in some of their facts. I wrote to Nancy about some minor points, but the book is quite, I congratulated on the production of this. But Nancy, Nancy DeMoss, the young lady who was the back of that, she came to our conference at Oxford also.

Any other questions? Yes. The president of the World Council of Churches used to say, we can't win Latin America with the five points of Calvinism. And he wasn't at all surprised the Pentecostals were running away with the job. There's one reason for it. People in Latin America are conditioned to believe in the supernatural. When Harry Strachan, the good come here now, our Catholic friends are having a 25th anniversary of the Winking Virgin. A statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary was noticed 25 years before to wink. And they were having a great celebration of this. Well, as far as people in Latin America are concerned, no problem about believing in miracles. If you came along and demonstrated them, you could understand the response. So I would say that, like, for instance, the Assemblies of God in Brazil, about maybe 4 million members today, only started in 1912.

Yes, the charismatic renewal, I believe, is part of God's plan for this century. I said before the Pentecostal movement didn't arise in a vacuum. Now, the Welsh Revival was not glossolalic. A certain famous Pentecostal scholar, and I talked about this on the phone, he said, well, I was told that speaking in tongues came to Azusa Street from Wales. I said, I've read every report I can find and translations of Welsh. I can't find speaking in tongues in the Welsh Revival proper. Then he said, when did speaking in tongues begin in Wales? As you want to know exactly, he said, yes. I said, it was in the home of Thomas Maddock Jeffreys in a town called Llanfluid in the Ebble Vale in South Wales on the 23rd of December 1907 about 8.30 in the evening. I said, as a scholar, I wouldn't commit myself further than that. He said, who told you that? I said, Donald G. Donald G. was known Mr. Pentecost before David de Plessis got that title. Donald G. was a secretary of the Pentecostal World Alliance. Now, the speaking in tongues spread from, he said, well, how did it begin in Wales? Well, I said, it was through a list of a Pentecostal missionary family. You know Paul Crouch? I know some of the Crouch family, one that was in the Bible school and Bible college in Springfield. But the Welsh revival, the general revival, was not glossolalic, nor did it stress healing in particular. No doubt there were incidents of healing. But it was all sorts of things that the British Psychical Association examined. Remarkable movement. But out of that came, I should say rather, that the Pentecostal movement spread on the heels of that revival. People were praying for someone greater. And at Azusa Street they began to pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit with signs following. Even back to 1830 in the Irvingite movement. But the Pentecostal movement was a particular development of a general revival. Just as the Baptists came out of the Puritan movement. Some Southern Baptists here won't agree with me. They think they started in the banks of the Jordan under John the Baptist. But the Pentecostal movement was a general movement affecting all sorts of people. The Baptists emphasized Believer's Baptism and other things that Baptists are strong about. So you get my idea. The Pentecostal movement arose out of a general revival in 1905 all around the world. And used a lot of the same personnel.

I asked him to talk to us in Afrikaans because he was a bit homesick and he knew that I knew South Africa quite well. But the Charismatic movement is a particularized revival with emphasis on the person and work of the Holy Spirit. But it has not yet caused the conviction of sin that we need to turn this nation around.

This issue of church growth and revival. I have a little booklet I wrote some time ago, The Outpouring of the Spirit and Revival and Awakening and its issue in church growth. It's written academically and it was really written to share with my colleagues at Fuller who are strong in church growth. I'll illustrate. I was in New Zealand in 1956. Corrie Ten Boom was a member of our team at that time. And I met a Presbyterian minister who had no use for mass evangelism in general and no use for Billy Graham in particular.

I said, well, don't you believe in any kind of evangelism? You know, you have to speak nicely and not be too obtrusive and so forth. Refer any difficult cases to the pastor or try and get them to come to church at least and so forth. He explained the whole thing. So I said, that sounds good. How are you getting along? He gave an uncomfortable laugh. I can't get them to do it, he said.

I've said in faculty and I've said in the last time I spoke to an assembly of our School of World Mission, sharing the platform with Donald McGavern, Ralph Winter, and all the other—Peter Wagner was there and all these other people. I said, you know, I've always had an odd view that the Holy Spirit knows more about church growth than even Dr. Donald McGavern. And Dr. McGavern smiled at me. God raised him up to emphasize a truth. And church growth is a very useful study for technique. But you see, the Jehovah's Witnesses could use church growth techniques too, yet they deny the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. So there should be no clash, except that if you want to see an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that will turn this nation around, it should be done.

Just one more request. Back there. I can't hear you. The decline of the Moravians, I suppose you could say they lost their vision, but one reason why they lost their vision was that all the other denominations took up their vision, and they were nothing special after a while. Nobody else had missionaries out like that. But after the Second Great Awakening, Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and Brisbaneians and others all had missionaries on the field. There was nothing so special about the Moravian emphasis. And then, of course, the Moravians were a German group, and sometimes they are in a cultural cocoon, if I use that expression. I would say they last as long as the generation revived. But each generation needs a new experience.

Could I suggest that we sing a hymn in conclusion? 425. I wrote this 50 years ago. I wrote this 50 years ago. I wrote this 50 years ago. I wrote this 50 years ago.