They
huddled under a haystack. Ordinarily the five college students met under
the protective branches of a large maple tree and under the cover of night
to read the Word of God, confess their sins, sing a song of
forgiveness
and pray for revival on their campus. Even the minutes of their meetings
were kept in secret.
Tonight
was different. The small, beleaguered company had been driven from their
secret sanctuary by thunder that drowned out their prayers, lightning that
crackled around them and rain that drenched them to the skin. An old barn
with the comfort of a haystack became their refuge. There, with the storm
symbolizing the hostility of their campus against them and their faith,
they intuitively knew that their
moment
had come. God would answer their prayers. With the mysterious wind of his
Holy Spirit, he would bring convicting and cleansing power to Williams
College, a school founded through spiritual revival but now a seedbed for
sin and skepticism. A Great Awakening was on the way!
The
time was 1806, when our American ancestors struggled to establish the democracy
that had been won in the War of Independence. The place was Williams College
in Massachusetts, where Christian
students
had to meet in secret in order to avoid public ridicule. The people were
a non-descript band of five students, who seemed to be too serious for
their own good. As unlikely as the time, place and people may seem, one
of the Great Awakenings in American history can be traced back to 1806
at Williams College when a thunderstorm drove five students to prayer while
huddled under a haystack. In fact:
American
history can be written through its Great Awakenings.
The
First Great Awakening:
Fueling
Our Freedom
Whether
they knew it or not, the students under the haystack were the heirs of
an earlier awakening in our history before independence from England. Although
the colonies of New England had been founded by Puritans, who led a disciplined
life and shared a biblical vision for their new homeland, the natural
erosion
of sin and self-interest took its toll. Spiritually, the oncoming generation
assumed that their salvation was secure no matter how they lived. Socially,
a combination of political oppression, personal degradation and philosophical
skepticism led the nation into a wilderness of despair. Notes of hope had
a
hollow
ring, and the future boded worse than the tormented past.
Out
of that wilderness came a prophetic voice. The Reverend Jonathan Edwards,
a Puritan preacher in the tradition of John the Baptist, put out a call
to personal repentance which eventually cost him his pulpit.
Edwards's
sermon "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God," preached at Enfield, Connecticut,
in 1741, still serves not only as a model of empowered preaching but also
as a turning point in the history of Great Awakenings. With an eloquence
honed by the Holy Spirit, Edwards depicted hell so vividly for his hearers
that sinners, by eyewitness report, hung onto the pews with whitened knuckles
for fear of sliding into the flames of hell that very moment! Revival followed,
not just on the confession of sin, but on the promise of joy that Edwards
also preached. He reported hundreds of conversions sealed by public confession
among the churches of New England.
Awakening
spread, however, under the impetus of a 23-year-old itinerant preacher
from England named George Whitefield. Fresh from the experience of the
Evangelical Awakening in England where he had convinced John Wesley to
take the open fields for his preaching, Whitefield traversed the colonies
-
against
the opposition of the Anglican clergy - to take the gospel to unchurched
people.
Benjamin
Franklin, though an avowed deist, became a fast friend of Whitefield. Almost
in awe, Franklin estimated that Whitefield's voice had the volume and the
resonance to reach 30,000 people in the open fields. More
amazingly,
Benjamin Franklin built Whitefield a "preaching house" in Philadelphia,
which gave him a pulpit for evangelism outside the Anglican Church. The
"preaching house" later became the first building for the University of
Pennsylvania.
For
us, however, it is even more notable that Whitefield had been a member,
with John and Charles Wesley, of the Holy Club at Oxford University in
the early 1730s. And although the Holy Club never left England, it is fair
to say that this small group of Christian students had a share in the beginnings
of the
First
Great Awakening in American history through the agency of its alumnus George
Whitefield.
Thousands
were converted under his preaching. He became identified with Jonathan
Edwards as one of the New Lights, who spoke prophetically of political
freedom from the oppression of England, as well as the spiritual freedom
from the slavery of sin.
The
First Great Awakening came to its culmination when religion served as the
vehicle for a moral consensus which could not tolerate the heavy hand of
George II, king of England.
A Great
Awakening fueled our freedom, and the revolution that followed forever
changed the course of our history.
The
Second Great Awakening:
Ensuring
Our Democracy
Spiritual
awakenings usually take a full generation to work themselves through to
a new moral consensus out of which social transformation is born. Likewise,
the turn of just one generation under the catalyst of
speeding
social change can undo the moral consensus and kill the vitality created
by a spiritual awakening.
The
worst happened after we won our independence in 1776 and wrote our Constitution
in 1879. In the aftermath of revolution, out forefathers forgot the spiritual
roots from which their freedom sprang. Instead of returning to the biblical
vision of the moral community which Governor Winthrop proclaimed to the
Pilgrim band in a sermon just before they left the Mayflower, the new generation
of Americans identified
with
the seething caldron of infidelity and deism in prerevolutionary France.
To say the least, the future of American democracy teetered in the balance,
with the scales tipped toward anarchy.
Colonial
colleges, in particular, took the brunt of moral corruption and philosophical
despair. Harvard, Princeton and Yale, schools which were founded to prepare
Christian leaders in religion, government and
medicine,
became seedbeds of atheism and anarchy. One historian of American higher
education likened the climate of the college dormitories to "secret nurseries
of every vice and the cages of unclean birds."
Blasphemy
followed heresy. In one college, students performed a mock communion with
a parody of the sacred ritual at the chapel altar. In another, a deck of
playing cards fell out of a hole cut in the pages of the president's Bible
as he stood to address the students. In still another college, the students
organized a
drinking
society with the name H.E.O.T.T. in parody of Isaiah's promise, "Ho, everyone
that thirsteth."
No
wonder that any student who professed to be a Christian became the target
for open ridicule and subtle discrimination. Quite in contrast with the
evangelistic beginnings of the colleges, small bands of Christians now
met in secret to pray.
Into
this climate of corruption God called Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan
Edwards, to be the president of Yale in 1795. Fearlessly, Dwight chose
his first baccalaureate sermon to invite all students to
an
open forum on the Christian faith. After hearing their attacks, he followed
with a chapel series in which he spoke the "truth with love" - so much
so that one-half of the Yale student body professed Christ before the year
was out. One by one, spontaneous stirrings of the Spirit took place on
college campuses.
Williams
College, however, remained a hard-core center for heresy, blasphemy and
ridicule - until the five students prayed under a haystack in 1806. With
the mystery of the wind, the Spirit of God swept over the
campus
bringing repentance and redemption to scores of students who, in turn,
took the witness of revival from campus to campus, church to church and
city to city until "Awakening" became the watchword for
the
struggling nation. No one contests the genuine nature of that movement
as infidelity gave way to vigorous faith and deism when bankrupt against
the revelation of a personal God who loves and redeems all humankind.
Francis
Asbury stands in rugged contrast to the image of the scholarly president
of Yale or one of the cultured priests of the Anglican Church. Sent to
America by John Wesley with the mandate "Offer them Christ," Asbury took
his charge seriously by becoming a traveling Methodist preacher on the
fast and ever-moving Western frontier. Enlisting impassioned and unusually
unlearned men, he created a mobile system of circuit-riders.
Pastors
on horseback, these men made the frontier their parish, establishing evangelistic
outposts with camp meetings that reached thousands of people at a time.
Although
Francis Asbury died in 1816, the momentum of his ministry was carried on
by such a rough-and-tumble circuit rider as Peter Cartwright. In the book
The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch describes the
genius of Asbury on the frontier as leading a "military mission of short-term
agents" - itinerant preachers armed with the gospel. Critics of Asbury
scoffed when he built a church for Methodists, saying that the movement
could be "contained in a corncrib."
Later
they had to eat their words. Between 1820 and 1830 alone, Methodism doubled
in size to become one of the most formidable forces for spiritual
regeneration and social reform on the American frontier.
Once
again, the ideals and morals of the American people were turned upside-down.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French historian who chronicled our history
in his classical work Democracy in America, expressed serious doubts that
democracy could survive in the American experiment because freedom
requires
a moral base. He observed what we must not forget: Democracy depends on
a moral foundation of revealed truth mediated through religious institutions.
In
1831 de Tocqueville visited the United States to observe first-hand our
experiment in democracy. He found a transformed nation. The moral foundations
of revealed truth were strong and the religious institutions were vigorous
- evidence of a Great Awakening. At a bbarn-raising in Pennsylvania de Tocqueville
saw the symbol of transformation. Neighbors from far and near voluntarily
came to help
another
neighbor build a barn in one day. In the evening, they celebrated their
achievement with supper and song. To de Tocqueville, the event represented
democracy at its best. He went home to write, "America is a nation with
the soul of a church." What began on a college campus became the energizing
force that transformed a nation. It took a Great Awakening to ensure our
democracy.
The
Prayer Revival of 1858
After
the Great Awakening at the turn of the nineteenth century, another generation
passed and America was in trouble again. As the new nation grew by spreading
south and west, the unity of the 1820s was torn apart by the deepening
hostility between the industrial North and the agricultural South. Slavery
became
the issue of freedom on which our democracy would again rise or fall. Not
since the tumultuous days preceding the Great Awakening of the 1740s had
the division been deeper and the conflict more volatile. The threat of
secession by the southern states in the nineteenth century more than matched
the
threat
of those who sided with the English king in the eighteenth century.
An
expanding network of intercessory prayer among businessmen, particularly
in cities such as Philadelphia and New York, is usually cited as the source
of the 1858 revival. Skeptics, of course, suggest that the fervency of
the prayers equaled the panic over a crumbling economy which threatened
to
bankrupt
their businesses and lower their quality of life. Such skeptics fail to
recognize the extension of those prayers beyond individual self-interest.
Out of those prayer groups came the Young Men's Christian
Association
(YMCA), an organization founded to take the gospel to the campuses of the
developing system of state universities and to serve the social, educational
and spiritual needs of young men in the burgeoning cities of the nation.
Again,
the stir of awakening on college campuses preceded the revival of 1858.
In the 1840s Charles Finney, an educator-evangelist, spoke as the president
of Oberlin College, where students were in the midst of a campus revival.
President Finney, not unlike Timothy Dwight of Yale, used the chapel platform
to condemn the institution of slavery as antithetical to the spiritual
freedom that the students found in Christ.
The
message and the spirit of revival sped from campus to campus and fueled
the abolition movement with biblical meaning and evangelistic fervor. If
a revival requires social reform to qualify as an Awakening, the Emancipation
Proclamation leaves no doubt about the lasting impact of the Great Awakening
that began on a college campus in the midst of revival. Gilbert Barnes,
an historian of the anti-slavery movement, concludes: "In leadership, in
method and in objective, the Great Revival and the
American
Anti-slavery Society now were one."
The
World Missions Movement
In
the 1890s another turn of the generations brought with it another time
of decline and conflict in American culture. While we euphemistically remember
the Gay Nineties as a decade of hedonistic happiness, the truth is that
we were a troubled people.
A second
line of spiritual movement can be drawn from campuses in England to America
in the 1890s and on into the twentieth century.
In
1882 D.L. Moody spoke at Cambridge University in England. The evangelist
might have been disheartened by the ridicule he received from the student
body, but out of that
meeting
seven students responded to the call to give themselves wholly to the will
of God.
Gathering
together, they called themselves the Cambridge Seven and can rightfully
be linked with the Holy Club, the Haystack Prayer Meeting and the YMCA
of earlier years. God answered their prayers by a visit of his Spirit,
who gave them a vision of the unevangelized world and its multiplied millions.
Providentially
their vision connected with students at twenty state university campuses
in the United States who had also banded together in prayerful submission
to the Holy Spirit. As their forces convergedand connected with students
on other campuses, the Student Volunteer Movement came into being as the
forerunner for such groups as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and the
Student
Mission Association. The list of student leaders who came out of a revival
spirit on those campuses reads like a "Who's Who" of world missions: John
R. Mott, E. Stanley Jones, Robert Wilder,
Samuel
Zwemer and Robert Speer. No one laughed when they spoke of their watchword,
"The evangelization of the world in this generation."
Mott
himself wrote, "Next to the decision to take Christ as the Leader and Lord
of my life, the watchword has had more influence that all other ideals
and objectives combined to widen my horizon and enlarge my conception of
the kingdom of God." His words were backed by the evidence that the watchword
served as a motivating and mobilizing vision. To him and his college friends
goes the credit not only for offering Christ to millions of people overseas
but also for breaking the protective isolationism of America by the 1890s
by making the connections with spiritual awakening around the world.
The
Welsh revival in 1904 is the best example. When the Spirit of God moved
through the masses of that nation of poor and illiterate miners, the conversions
were so complete that the pit-ponies in the mines did not respond when
given orders without the profanity of their masters. Even more notable,
the Welsh
revival
illustrates the fact that whenever there is a true spiritual awakening,
the leaders and the people become advocates for the poor by founding institutions
to serve them and initiating legislation to protect them.
What
conclusion can we draw from this hasty journey through two centuries of
awakenings in American history? In the beginning we learned that the history
of America can be written through the turning points of spiritual awakenings.
Now we know that those awakenings often began and came full cycle among
Christian students on college campuses. Especially in the Great Awakenings
in the closing decade of each century, college students led the way in
moral reform and world evangelism.
Is
it too much to expect that God will pour out his Spirit on all flesh in
the 1990s? Will he begin with Christian students on the college campus?
Will he bring the stirrings of the Spirit which we have seen in the last
half of the twentieth century into the full cycle of a Great Awakening?
