D.L. Moody

Dwight Lyman Moody was born at Northfield, Massachusetts, on February 5, 1837. His father, a bricklayer, died when Dwight was four, leaving nine children and debts; creditors came and took the firewood off the pile. His mother kept the family together. He had perhaps a fifth-grade education, and his spelling proved it for the rest of his life. At seventeen he went to Boston to sell shoes in his uncle's store. The uncle made him promise to attend the Mount Vernon Congregational Church. On April 21, 1855, his Sunday school teacher, Edward Kimball, walked into the shoe store, found him in the back stacking boxes, and told him plainly that Christ loved him. Moody was converted there. The church board thought him too ignorant of doctrine and made him wait a year for membership. He moved to Chicago in 1856 and turned out to be very good at selling shoes — he set out to make a hundred thousand dollars. Instead he started renting pews and filling them with boys off the street, then began a Sunday school in a derelict saloon in a slum district known as Little Hell. Within a few years he had over a thousand children coming. In 1860 he gave up business altogether and lived on almost nothing. He worked for the YMCA, served with the Christian Commission among Union soldiers during the Civil War, and built a church that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 burned to the ground along with his house. The turning point came around that fire. Two women in his congregation had been telling him for months that he needed power from the Spirit. In New York, soon after the fire, he had an experience he would never describe in detail except to say that God filled him — and that he afterward preached the same sermons and saw entirely different results. In 1873 he sailed for Britain with the singer Ira Sankey. The men who had invited them had died before they arrived; they went anyway. The two-year campaign that followed filled halls in York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, and London, where they held meetings for months and were heard by crowds counted in the millions. Moody preached; Sankey sang solos at the organ, which was itself controversial. He came home famous and used it to build. Northfield Seminary for young women (1879), Mount Hermon School for boys (1881), and the Chicago Evangelization Society (1886), which after his death took his name as the Moody Bible Institute. He founded the Northfield summer conferences, out of which came the Student Volunteer Movement and its watchword, "the evangelization of the world in this generation." He was never ordained and held no degree. He preached plain speech about sin, the cross, and heaven, and he told stories. He collapsed while preaching in Kansas City in November 1899, went home to Northfield, and died there on December 22, 1899, at sixty-two. His last recorded words: "Earth recedes; heaven opens before me." Sources: W. R. Moody, The Life of Dwight L. Moody; Lyle Dorsett, A Passion for Souls: The Life of D. L. Moody; John Pollock, Moody: A Biographical Portrait; the published records of the Moody and Sankey British campaigns, 1873–1875.