The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Missionary Century
D.L. Moody
1837–1899AmericanEvangelical
The unschooled Chicago shoe salesman who shook two continents with plain speech about Christ, and left behind schools that outlived him by more than a century.
Summary
- Lived 1837–1899, American.
- Stood in The Missionary Century (1790–1910).
- Hangs on The Awakeners and The Revivalists.
- Read first: Heaven (1880).
- Tradition: Evangelical.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1790–1910
- 1840Livingstone sails, and the Burmese Bible is doneDavid Livingstone, a Scottish mill worker who studied medicine at night, left London in December for southern Africa; he had wanted China, but a war closed it and Robert Moffat's talk of "the smoke of a thousand villages" turned him south. That same year Judson finished revising his Burmese Bible, first completed in 1834, twenty-one years after he landed.
- 1854Hudson Taylor lands at ShanghaiHe was twenty-one, under-funded, and arrived in the middle of a civil war. Within a few years he had done what no missionary did, put on Chinese dress and gone inland, away from the treaty ports and the protection of gunboats.
- 1859The '59 Revival, and Spurgeon's foundation stoneAwakening ran through Ulster and Wales after a season of prayer meetings begun in New York two years earlier; contemporaries counted converts in the tens of thousands, though the figures were estimates made in the moment. In August the foundation stone was laid for Charles Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle, which opened in 1861 and seated around five thousand.
- 1865The China Inland Mission and the Salvation ArmyIn June, walking the beach at Brighton in anguish over inland China, Taylor wrote in his Bible that he was asking God for twenty-four workers, a mission that would ask no one but God for money. The same summer William and Catherine Booth opened a mission in London's East End; it took the name Salvation Army in 1878.
- 1873Livingstone dies on his kneesHe was found on the morning of May 1 at Chitambo's village, kneeling by his bed. His African companions Chuma and Susi buried his heart under a tree, dried his body, and carried it roughly a thousand miles to the coast so England could bury him in Westminster Abbey.
- 1885The Cambridge SevenSeven young men from Britain's most privileged circles, including the cricketer C. T. Studd, gave up sport, money, and careers and sailed for China with the Inland Mission. Their farewell tour of the universities sent a wave of students into missions on both sides of the Atlantic.
- 1904Clouds gathering over WalesIn the autumn a young miner named Evan Roberts began meetings at Loughor, and within months chapels across Wales were full night after night. Reports of about a hundred thousand converts in a year are the era's own estimate, not a count, but the world was watching, and the next era was already breaking.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
- Heaven1880
- Prevailing Prayer1884
- Sovereign Grace1891
Search D.L. Moody at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
A shoe salesman with no ordination and no education who shook two continents with plain speech about Christ.
Hangs on The Awakeners: The preachers of the Great Awakenings, fields for pulpits, nations for parishes. Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed.
Standing beside himThe Missionary Century · 29 on this stretch of wall
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A village cobbler who expected great things from God, attempted great things for God, and opened the missions era.
Survived Burma's death prisons and buried his family there to give the Burmese the Bible they still read.
Housed ten thousand orphans in Bristol and never asked anyone but God for a penny.
Walked Africa open for the gospel, shamed the slave trade in print, and died on his knees.
Wrote 'it is well with my soul' on the deck of a ship crossing the exact water where his four daughters had drowned.
Built an army out of the people no church wanted, with soup, soap, and salvation.