Gospel Conversations Reimagined: Understanding Revivalist Roots, A Thoughtful Deconstruction, Part Three

In my last post I provided a quick overview of the First and Second Great Awakening and the revivalist characteristics that emerged. In this post I will provide an overview of the Third Great Awakening (1850–1920) , and focus on D. L. Moody. Then, I take a quick look at the Mid-Century Awakening (early 1940s–1950s) and the profound effect it had on Bill Bright’s life.

I remind my reader again that this post provides only a smidgeon of information available around the Great Awakenings and American Christianity at the time. Also, for the sake of space in this post, I have chosen to leave out the significant and influential fundamentalist/modernist debate, the rise of liberalism, the influence of Darwinism and the Scopes Trial to focus primarily on the Awakenings.*

The Third Great Awakening (1850–1920)

The Third Great Awakening sparked to life in New York City during the Mid-Century Prayer Revival of 1857. This noontime businessmen’s prayer meeting, started by Dutch Reformed missionary Jeremiah Lanphier, attracted only a few participants at first. But, within a short amount of time, hundreds of similar noontime meetings were taking place across the nation and even spread to the northern part of Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.[1]

By 1861 America was once again at war, but unlike during the American Revolution when revivals waned, the Civil War brought large-scale revivals within both the Union and Confederate armies.[2] With these revivals came an increasing number of itinerant evangelists, including D. L. Moody (1837–1899), a prominent revivalist in the fundamentalist movement. Moody, an uneducated shoe salesman, was converted to Christianity at the age of eighteen and received ministry training through the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), a recently formed parachurch organization (of which he would eventually serve as president).

Importantly, Moody preached a millenarian (or dispensational premillennial) eschatology.[3] Premillennial pessimism subordinated concern to soul-saving and practical Christianity, and the revivalist tradition of crisis conversion became all the more urgent. No longer was the emphasis on God’s deep and abiding love but was instead on an impending and horrible judgment. This dichotomized view is evidenced in Moody’s evangelism and epitomized by his oft-quoted phrase— “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”[4]

Moody’s impact on revivalism is evident still today. Notably, he acknowledged a link between revivalism and social reform, evidenced by the number of institutions he founded for impoverished children, such as Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies (1879) and the Mount Hermon School for Boys (1881).[5] However, his primary concern was evangelism. Like other revivalists, Moody preached that an individual’s conversion (the root) would result in social change (the fruit). This unwitting response to controversy, and his seeming unwillingness to acknowledge social or structural sin, produced long-lasting consequences for evangelicalism right up to the present. This helped to inform my argument for a theological framework grounded in the sixty-six-book canon of Scripture, which I introduce here.

The influential Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) was formed as part of Moody’s Northfield Conferences that began in 1895.[6] The SVM in 1902, hastened by the leadership of John R. Mott, chose to include foreign missions under this banner: “The evangelization of the world in this generation.”[7] A call that would later compel Bill Bright.

Mid-Century Awakening (1940s–1950s)

A handful of conservative American Protestant leaders emerged early in the 1940s who were both intent on forming a new evangelical movement rooted in orthodoxy and tilled in the soil of nineteenth-century evangelical revivalism. These neo-evangelicals were committed to Calvinist theology and formed the National Association of Evangelicals around respected leaders who were culturally and socially engaged.

 The NAE, in the true revivalist tradition, remained committed to effective evangelism and evangelistic campaigns and crusades. It believed in the importance of engaging intellectually, of providing a respectable Christian voice, and of taking social and political action. Many of the same leaders who started the NAE had also been praying for revival for years. By the late 1940s, they began to experience what Garth M. Rosell describes as a “veritable downpour of spiritual awakening.”[8]

Bill Bright, then, a senior at the newly formed Fuller Theological Seminary, was at the center of this neo-evangelical resurgence and the Mid-Twentieth-Century Awakening that ensued. One facet of this awakening took place in 1947 when Bright attended a Sunday school teacher’s training at Forest Home Conference Center. There, revivalist Henrietta Mears, having just returned from Europe, shared her firsthand account of World War II’s catastrophic destruction and upheaval. She was devastated by the effects of the war. She declared, “The seeds of decay––atheism and moral expedience had long before created a putrid garden where Hitler Nazism had grown.”[9] She believed that the same thing was taking place in America and believed God was providing an answer during these troubling times.

She urged, “God is looking for men and women of total commitment. During the war, men of special courage were called upon for difficult assignments; often these volunteers did not return. They were called ‘expendable.’ We must be expendables for Christ.… If we fail God’s call to us tonight, we will be held responsible.”[10] Bright, along with several others in attendance, was compelled by this ominous warning and gathered with Mears to pray. Bright, along with those in attendance, formed the Fellowship of the Burning Hearts that pledged “in all sobriety to be expendable for Christ.”[11] From this point on, the expendables recruited hundreds of students to Forest Home’s first College Briefing in August 1947 and attracted 600 students from all over the United States. For many, this unexpected work of God was reminiscent of the First, Second, and Third Great Awakenings. Four years later, on the heels of the Mid-Century Awakening, Bright received a vision from God for what would become Campus Crusade for Christ.

I believe that these Awakenings provide excellent examples of the ways God moves in different ways in different contexts. Importantly, the brief account I provide here is only a fragment of God’s movement across the globe and it also helps us to see how ideas and approaches have consequences—both good and bad. As a missiologist and theologian I want to take a humble posture toward history and seek to learn from those who have gone before.

*Portions of this post are taken from: Monaco, Cas. “Bill Bright’s (1921–2003) Four Spiritual Laws Reimagined: A Narrative Approach to Meaningful Gospel Conversations For An American Twenty First Century Secularized Context,” PhD Diss, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Wake Forest, NC, 2020.

 [1] R. E. Davies, “Revival, Spiritual,” EDT:1028. [2] Davies, “Revival, Spiritual,” EDT:1028.[3] Joel A. Carpenter in, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 248.[4] Timothy K. Beougher, “Moody, Dwight Lyman,” EDWM:657.[5] Marsden, Fundamentalism, 37. [6] Marsden, Fundamentalism, 35.[7] John R. Mott, The Evangelization of the World in This Generation (London: Student Volunteer Movement, 1902), 2.[8] Garth M. Rosell, The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 129.[9] Richardson, Amazing Faith, 35.[10] Richardson, Amazing Faith, 37.[11] Richardson, Amazing Faith, 38. In addition, Richardson notes, “The ‘Fellowship of the Burning Hearts’ was derived from John Calvin’s seal showing a hand offering a heart afire with the inscription, ‘My heart I give Thee, Lord, eagerly and sincerely’” (p. 37).