The History of Revivals

It began quietly, after the sudden death of two young people and a series of sermons on justification by faith. Edwards wrote that the town seemed to be full of the presence of God, taverns emptied, and people talked of little else. Deep conviction of sin came first, then a settled sweetness that Edwards took pains to test rather than trust on sight. He kept careful notes, including on a four-year-old girl, because he wanted the work examined, not just admired.

Edwards reported around three hundred added to the Northampton church in about half a year, in a town of roughly eleven hundred. The awakening spread to dozens of surrounding towns before it cooled. His written account of it circulated in Britain and America and became the pattern by which later revivals were described and judged.

Whitefield preached outdoors to crowds the churches could not hold, and Benjamin Franklin, no believer, measured the carrying power of his voice and defended his honesty. Preaching aimed straight at the conscience: you must be born again. In some meetings people cried out, wept, or fell down, and Edwards wrote a whole book sorting the real work of the Spirit from the froth around it. In Britain the same fire ran through the Wesleys’ societies and the Welsh fields under Harris and Rowland.

Church membership rose sharply across the colonies and new congregations were planted by the hundreds. It crossed the lines between denominations and colonies and gave scattered settlements a shared experience for the first time. It also produced hard opposition and lasting splits, and it seeded the Methodist movement, whose class meetings held converts long after the crowds went home.

Families came by wagon and camped for days; estimates of the crowd run from about ten thousand to twenty-five thousand, in a state whose largest town held under two thousand. Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist preachers spoke at the same time from stumps and wagon beds. Witnesses described falling, weeping, shaking, and shouting on a scale that alarmed even sympathetic ministers. Stone, who was there, defended the work as genuine while admitting the excesses were real.

Cane Ridge made the camp meeting the standard tool of frontier religion for the next fifty years. Church rolls in Kentucky and Tennessee rose steeply in the years that followed. It also split churches: the revival helped birth the Stone-Campbell movement and hardened others against anything that looked like it.

Finney, a young lawyer, was converted in a wood outside Adams, New York, and described being met that evening by waves of the Holy Spirit. He preached like a lawyer addressing a jury, direct, plain, demanding a verdict now. He used what he called new measures: naming sins from the pulpit, meetings on consecutive nights, an anxious seat at the front, and women praying aloud in mixed meetings. Ahead of him went Daniel Nash, who would arrive in a town weeks early and do nothing but pray.

The Rochester meetings of 1830–31 are the best-attested: Finney reported around a thousand converts, and Lyman Beecher, who disliked his methods, called it the greatest work of God he knew of. Finney’s converts fed the abolition movement and the temperance societies; Weld came out of them. His Lectures on Revivals set the pattern for American evangelism, for better and for worse, and remains argued over.

A teenage girl named Florrie Evans stood up in a New Quay meeting and said she loved the Lord Jesus with all her heart, and the room broke. Evan Roberts, a young collier and blacksmith, had been praying for years and began holding meetings with four plain points: confess every known sin, put away every doubtful thing, obey the Spirit promptly, confess Christ publicly. There was almost no preaching, the meetings ran on singing, testimony, and open prayer, and often went past midnight. Roberts refused to control them, saying the Spirit was leading.

About one hundred thousand converts within a year is the figure widely reported at the time and repeated since, it comes from contemporary press and church counts, not an audit. Newspapers reported taverns closing, debts repaid, and magistrates handed white gloves for sessions with no cases to try; the story that pit ponies stopped working because the miners had stopped swearing is much loved and hard to verify. The revival’s reports circulated worldwide and helped prepare the ground for what happened in Los Angeles two years later.

William Seymour, a one-eyed black preacher and son of former slaves, had learned the message in Texas while sitting in a hallway because the classroom was segregated. The outpouring began in a house on Bonnie Brae Street in April 1906 and moved to the Azusa Street building when the porch collapsed under the crowd. Meetings ran nearly around the clock for three years with no set order, no offerings taken by force, and no name on the door. Speaking in tongues, healings, and prophecy were reported constantly; the Los Angeles Daily Times covered it in April 1906 under the headline “Weird Babel of Tongues.”

Black, white, Hispanic, and Asian believers worshiped together in the Jim Crow era, Bartleman wrote that the color line was washed away in the blood, though the unity did not hold for long afterward. The mission’s free paper, The Apostolic Faith, reached a reported fifty thousand subscribers and sent workers to more than twenty-five nations within two years. Azusa is the single most influential source of the modern Pentecostal movement, and most American Pentecostal bodies trace their line back through that building, though historians now describe the movement’s birth as having several centers rather than one, counting Topeka, Chicago, and the 1905 outpouring at Mukti in India alongside it.

It grew out of missionaries’ prayer meetings begun in 1903, where Robert Hardie confessed his own coldness in front of the Korean believers first. At the January 1907 meetings the confession spread to the congregation and became a flood, men naming theft, hatred, and adultery out loud in front of their neighbors. Missionaries who were present described audible weeping across a thousand people at once and simultaneous prayer, and admitted they were frightened by it. Restitution followed the confessions: stolen money returned, enemies sought out.

Korean Protestant membership grew several times over in the following years, and the practice of daybreak prayer meetings born here still marks Korean churches worldwide. The Korean church took on a habit of Bible study, tithing, and lay leadership that carried it through Japanese occupation and later persecution. Kil Sun-joo, one of its converts, became a leading pastor and later a signer of the 1919 Korean declaration of independence.

A Ugandan civil servant, Simeoni Nsibambi, and an English doctor, Joe Church, met in 1929 and prayed together over what was missing in the mission churches. What came was called balokole, “saved ones”, marked by open confession of sin in small fellowship groups, walking in the light with one another, and singing Tukutendereza Yesu. It was led largely by Africans, and it made converts confess to and repay the people they had wronged, including across tribal lines. Mission authorities were often uneasy with it, and some early leaders were disciplined or expelled.

The revival spread across five countries and continued in waves for decades rather than months, unusually long for a movement of this kind. Its fellowship groups became the backbone of Anglican church life in East Africa. Its people stood out during the Mau Mau years and under Idi Amin: Archbishop Janani Luwum, martyred in 1977, came out of this stream, and Kivengere’s I Love Idi Amin was written from it.

Two elderly sisters, Peggy and Christine Smith, one blind, one bent with arthritis, prayed in their cottage for their parish twice a week through the night, holding God to the promise of Isaiah 44:3. Seven young men in a barn covenanted to do the same. Campbell was called to Barvas and found meetings that would not end; people gathered outside the churches, at crossroads, and at the police station, unable to sleep. Campbell’s accounts describe whole communities gripped at once, sometimes far from any meeting, the details come mainly from his own telling and from local memory, and later historians have questioned some of them.

Churches on Lewis and Harris filled and stayed full, and the parishes touched by it kept a marked seriousness about Scripture and Sabbath for a generation. Many converts entered the ministry or the mission field. The strongest claim about it is also the most modest: it never had big crowds or big numbers, and it is remembered instead for what praying old women started.