In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of organizing and planning for evangelism. He states that it is the duty of the Church to evangelize and teach others about God's word. The speaker also mentions the need for social action, as Jesus taught that helping others is equivalent to serving Him. He shares a humorous anecdote about a famous soloist who mistakenly claimed to have written a song that was actually written by Charles Wesley. The sermon concludes with a discussion about the decline of the country in the 1950s and the need for a revival.

is that in God's style, he has provided for us abundantly in this difficulty. I don't know what this says to us, beloved Easterners, but he's chosen another Westerner to come here and minister to us this morning. Indeed, from the same state, from California. A man of great stature. I don't even want to read his credentials because it's embarrassing for me to read his credentials. They're so good. They're so impressive. His name is Dr. J. Edwin Thor. Many of you may have read his books. He's authored something in the order of, I believe I'm correct in saying 35 books or so. And those books have saved millions of copies. I've got some on my shelves. If you don't have any, you can come and borrow mine. He is Professor Emeritus at Fuller Seminary. He's a scholar, he's a preacher, teacher, a man of God, proven man of God, and we are going to be richly blessed by him. He's also a good friend of Jack Avery's, having taught in Jack's church for a series that was very powerful and very good. So I think that's rather significant too. But Dr. Orr, who was here, agreed to come and minister to us. And I think that Jack Hayford wouldn't mind my saying, and I think he would agree, as I said, that we're going to be richly blessed, even beyond perhaps what we would have been blessed had our good brother been here. Because we do not know Dr. Orr personally. Most of you don't. And now you're going to know him face-to-face, and he's going to minister to you. As you know, Jack Hayford was scheduled to speak this afternoon also. Well, again, in God's grand style, he has brought to us another man who is the head of the Assemblies of God in Australia. He's come to us from Australia, and he is in this area and has agreed to come and minister to us this afternoon. He's also a young, I cannot say the Korean fellow's name, young who chose a board. He knows what's going on all over the world, and particularly in the East, the Far East. And he will be here this afternoon at 2 o'clock. His name is David Cartridge, and you're going to be richly blessed by him. But for right now, I want you to turn your attention to God's special gift to us for this morning, Dr. J. Edwin Orr. My grandfather and grandmother were both converted in the great revival of 1859 in Ireland, and then my grandfather telling us something about it. Such a movement that when the judge went to hold the court of sessions of the serious cases, the chairman would often say, Your Worship, there are no cases to try. No robberies, no rapes, no murders, no embezzlement, nothing. That was the great revival of 1859. It was my privilege personally to know Eben Roberts, whom God so singularly used in the right revival. Same sort of thing happened in Wales, 1904, 1905. There were emergency meetings of the district councils to discuss what to do with the police now that they were unemployed. In one case, they sent for a sergeant of the police, and a councillor asked him, What do you do with your time? Well, he said before the revival, they had two main jobs. One was to prevent crime. The other was to control crowds at football games, market days, that sort of thing. Since the revival was practically no crime, so they just go to the crowds. The councillor said, What does that mean? Well, the councillor said, You know where the crowds are. Every church is full. But do they need police direction to find their own church? Oh, you misunderstand. We have 17 police in our station. We've got three excellent manned quartets. If any church wants a quartet, they just need to find the police. That was happening earlier than Wales. There were even slowdowns in the coal mines. That's right, slowdowns. So many Welsh coal miners were converted and stopped using profanity that the horses that dragged the trucks in the mines couldn't understand what was being said. And transportation slowed down. Now, I find, especially my Pentecostal friends, have all heard of the Welsh revival, but they don't seem to know that it affected the rest of the world. It swept Norway. The Norwegian parliament passed special legislation to allow Lutheran laymen to conduct Holy Communion. So many people wanted to take communion with the Lord, you couldn't keep up with it. The same revival swept Sweden and Denmark and Finland. It swept out in India. It swept China and Japan. People talk about Japan being a resistant culture. The churches in Japan that year grew 62.5% in one year. It was called Springtime of God in Japan. And that revival swept the States. You see, I was watching some of these 700 Club. They jumped from the Great Revival to Azusa Street. Azusa Street happened at the end of the Great Revival in the United States. Nearly a million people converted. About 120 in Azusa Street had a new experience, and out of that developed a Pentecostal explosion. But do you know that 200 major stores in Portland, Oregon, closed each day from 11 to 2 for prayer? Do you know that the pastored First Baptist Church in Paducah in Kentucky took in a thousand new members in two months and died of overwork? And the Second Baptist Church had a glorious way to go. Do you know that they took a census of Atlantic City and discovered only 100 people left that hadn't been converted? That happened in the revival of 1905 throughout the United States and Canada. And it was out of that movement that came the Pentecostal explosion. A lot of people don't know these things, so perhaps I should give you some facts and fallacies about the Great Awakening. I have to do with both facts and fallacies. The last time that the Lord was speaking to his disciples, they said to him, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? They had been told that the Messiah came. He would deliver the people of God from the tyranny of their enemies. Naturally they said, now are you going to deliver us? Notice his response. It's not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has kept under his own direction. God did not give the disciples a blueprint or a timetable. I'm always being asked, where do you think we are? I don't keep God's timetable. God is sovereign. Nor do you have a blueprint. I'm the second most senior professor in the School of World Mission to Dr. Donald MacGowan. You've seen the head of Donald MacGowan in church groups. But notice. When the Lord left the disciples, he didn't give them a blueprint. He didn't say, now you must make a study of church groups and then act this way or that way. Oh, no. He said, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. I've been living in some of the big churches here in downtown Norfolk. I had a week of meetings in Firmation Street Baptist Church some years ago. And some churches are very well organized. But the Lord did not leave an organized congregation behind. He left just a prayer meeting. Just a prayer meeting. Not a year. It says that they all continued with one accord. Two hours were there. The 11 disciples were there. Two candidates for Judas' place. Mary was there, the mother of Jesus. That's 14. The half-brother of Jesus was there. That's 18. We know about 20 names, but there were 120 in that room. They continued in prayer. In other words, our Lord left a protracted prayer meeting. Not an organization. Then when the day of Pentecost had fully come, there came what we call the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. I was asked yesterday by Pat Robertson, do you think we're in revival now? I said, well, we're in a revival of interesting revival. That's certainly true. But the word revival is a very controversial word in some respects. I saw a church in the San Fernando Valley who had a sign outside it which said, Revival every Monday. Five miles away in Burbank, there's another sign that said, Revival every night except Monday. I was lecturing at Burley University when a Baptist pastor in New York had told me that all we had a revival here last fall, and we got revived. I said, we didn't have a revival. Oh, yes, we did. He told me the name of the evangelist and the name of the song leader. He told me how much money they put out in publicity, but he said we never got off the ground. I mentioned that when I was speaking to the Southern Baptists at Ridgecrest, the building company in North Carolina. One man came up to me and said, I'm a deacon in that church. Is that what the worst revival you've ever had? See, we weren't talking about the same things. By the way, you can blame this on a great man of God. I have to be very careful in saying this, because some people get quite upset when I say it. You can blame it on Charles Finney. Finney said revival, I'm quoting exactly, is nothing more than the likeness of the appropriate means. That's what you call the do-it-yourself school. One of the mediates, about whom you heard yesterday quite a bit, said revival is the work of God. What did Finney mean? Some people say, perhaps you're really hard on Finney, misinterpreting him. He gives the illustration, just as a farmer chooses a bay to plow the field and chooses a bay to sow the seed and chooses a bay to reap the harvest, so you can have revival. That was a Finney position. I think I would say that the scripture takes a different point of view, much as I've benefited from reading Finney in other respects. For instance, Finney said, the materialism of God exaggerates the work of grace in the midst of which the spirit of God is commonly grieved. That's certainly true. But not so jams like that from Finney. But you couldn't say revival is nothing more than the likeness of the appropriate means. So how are we going to settle this? What are we going to do about it? Well, first of all, the word revival, in the religious sense, appeared in the dictionary in 1702 for the first time. It is defined as an awakening in or of religion, especially after a period of decline. You'll all understand that definition. You'll find that in every American dictionary or encyclopedia. But since about 30 years ago, in American dictionaries there's a second choice. A, an awakening in or of religion. Evangelical religion is always understood because the word revival is not a Roman Catholic word or a Greek Orthodox word or a Jewish word or a Muslim word. It's definitely an evangelical word. But since about 30 years ago, in American dictionaries, it says, also, B, a week of livings, especially in the South. Now, how do you get from one to the other? Well, it's just this. In times of revival, when the Holy Spirit poured upon the whole body of Christ, you'll be everywhere holding livings. You'll experience revival. So they started calling a week of livings a revival. I was at Asbury College, one of my favorite stomping grounds. And the old professor said to me, in a warm little heart, he said, you know, I've been foretelling revivals here. I said, tell me, were they organized? Oh, he said, quite the contrary. He said, last one, 1970, the president had left town. I said, maybe he should move town after. The president was standing with us at the time. He was a good friend of mine. I said, tell me what happened? He said, we just had our annual revival and nothing much happened. The students were disappointed. We started having half-nights of prayer, and then we really had revival. I said, you just said you just had your revival. He said, I see what you mean. I didn't have a chance. You know, when you come from California to speak on the 700 Club and get 10 minutes, you can't say everything you want to say. But one of the hindrances to revival in the United States is the misuse of the word revival. People are intrigued about it. I remember a song that was coming to me. I'm saying, you know, you really shook me up there. I'll never misuse that word again. I said, what's your home state? He said, Tennessee. I said, you're going back there? No, he said, you're going to move to Alabama to hold another revival. And there you go again. Now, how can you deal with a subject when the Apostle Peter stood up at Pentecost? He said, this is that which was spoken of by the prophet Joel, I will pour out your spirit upon all flesh. Is the outpouring of the Spirit the work of God or the work of man? It's only one answer. The Lord Jesus said, the wind blows where it lifts. You can't tell where it's coming from or where it's going to, so it is with the Spirit. There is no organization under heaven, whether it's World Vision or the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association or the National Association of Evangelicals or the Vatican, that can say we have organized an outpouring of the Holy Spirit beginning the 15th of January next year. It cannot be done. I doubt even that it can be predicted unless the Lord puts it into the mouth of one of his prophets. And again, he has to be very sure when he's speaking for the Lord, otherwise he makes a fool of himself. Now, this is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. What is the effect of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit? First of all, the reviving of the Church. And by Church, I don't mean the organized body, but the body of believers, all those who love the Lord Jesus Christ. The first effect of revival is, the first effect of the outpouring of the Spirit is the reviving of the Church. Now, would you say that's the work of God or the work of man? I'd have to say both. It's the work of God, definitely. But it takes the response of believers. Believers can refuse to be revived. Some do. I've been in meetings where the pastor actually stopped what was going on because confession of sin had begun and he was afraid of being exposed. You can leave the Holy Spirit. So revival is the work of God with the response of believers. I used to hold a view, revive the Church and win the world. As a matter of fact, that was one of the slogans that Evan Rapids used. Certainly, you've got a Church from father to God, you're binding souls to Christ. But is it automatic? The Apostle Peter preached on the day of Pentecost. And overnight, 120 believers became 3,120. That's what Dr. Benjamin Galvin calls a very satisfactory Church growth. But what was the secret? Well, he preached the Lord and was filled with the Spirit. Does that mean that he preached the Lord and was filled with the Spirit? Do you have results of that? Not necessarily so. Stephen was filled with the Spirit. The scripture says so. And he preached the Lord just as faithfully as did Peter. But instead of adding 3,000, they subtracted one. They killed him. And I suddenly saw a truth I've never seen before. When you pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the body of believers, you should also pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the masses of people. I used to think that John Wesley was such a genius of an evangelist that when he preached, strong men that never died in a church door wept and found a Savior. But if you knew anything about John Wesley, at the beginning, at least, he was a rather stuffy high churchman. He was an ox with bone. Very prudent and proper. He wrote about his preaching at Bristol. He said, I made a series of appeals to the conscience and to the will. And the Holy Spirit fell on these people Was it John Wesley's doing? No. The same Holy Spirit was outpoured upon the masses of the people. And that's something you need to pray for. When he has come, he said that, the Lord Jesus, he will convict the world. Have you ever tried to convict him without the Holy Spirit? Stop someone in the streets of Norfolk and try and convict him of sin. He can tell you where to go. He has said a few holy truths about your demonic emotion into the Bible. No. It takes the Holy Spirit to convict of sin. Yet in times of great revival, people come weeping to God. In evangelism, the evangelist seeks the sinner. But in the days of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the sinners come weeping to God. So we need to pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the masses. Then the church evangelizes and teaches. The best definition of evangelism that I know was one written by a dear friend of mine who died about four years ago, Canon Maxwell in Westminster Abbey. To evangelize is so to present Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit that men may come to people trusting him as saviour and to serve his Lord in the fellowship of his church and in the vocations of the common life. I repeat that. To evangelize is so to present Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit that men may come to people trusting him as saviour and to serve him as Lord in the fellowship of his church and in the vocations of the common life. Is evangelism the work of God or the work of man? It's the work of man, with God's blessing. Man is expected to organize for it. If you start having an evangelistic campaign and don't tell anyone about it, do you expect results? You may get two or three gathered around you in the open air, but in evangelism, a certain amount of planning, a certain amount of organization, it's necessary. God has committed that to us. That's the duty of the church to evangelize and to teach. There's the great commission going to all the world to preach and to teach. And then, by mail or by queue, to engage in social action. I'm adding that because it's scripture. Inasmuch as you've done unto the least of these, my brethren, you've done unto me. We're told to visit the prisoners and the sick. Look how much has come out of the Great Awakenings. Most people know very little about the social impact of the revival. Out of the Second Great Awakening, the one that began 1792, came all the Bible Societies, the British and Polish Bible Society, the Mormon Bible Society, and all the others. Out of it came all the denominational mission societies. The first one was the Baptist Missionary Society, the UK, but then denomination after denomination. Out of it came the abolition of the slave trade. Out of it came, first of all, in the British Empire, the emancipation of the slaves came out of revival. Out of it came popular education. I can mention so many things. Now, there are some people who will confuse social action with evangelism. For instance, I notice that Southern Baptists, by the way, I'm an ordained Baptist minister, Southern Baptists confuse evangelism with revival. There are some Northern Baptists who confuse social action with evangelism. They say that's evangelism. I remember one of the leaders saying, we really must back some of the great evangelists like Castro. Castro? Well, he's had a revolution in Cuba. They say that's social justice and that's evangelism. I don't follow the logic of that. But what's the relationship? Is there any distinction to be made? Well, I'm going to put it in a very simple way. If we do not engage in social action as Christians, somebody else will. But if we do not preach the gospel, nobody else will. So I find a priority there. Now, I lay out these points because you can't put any here unless you define your terms. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is exclusively the work of God. It's always general. During the great revival of 1858 in Chicago, when King of the Episcopal Church had 121 members, but two years later built the church for 1,400 members, that the ministers of Chicago had met and someone had said, God has revealed to me he's going to choose for my midst a world evangelist. I don't think any of them there would have picked a young shoe salesman called D.L. Murry. But the Holy Spirit did. These outpourings of the Holy Spirit are times of recruitment when God chooses a man for a lifetime. These are the movements of the Holy Spirit. The outpouring of the Spirit is the work of God. It cannot be organized. It cannot be manipulated. It results in the revival of the church. That's the work of God with the responsible leaders. But also the outpouring of the Holy Spirit affects the people, makes them willing to listen or hold you for the word. Then the revived church engages in evangelism of whom? God, and in teaching. You evangelize the inquirers, you teach the disciples, those who wish to follow, and by many or by few you engage in social action. For instance, John Wesley, long before it became popular, wrote a tract called Thoughts on Slavery in which he said it was an abomination to God and men. He was way ahead of his time. Susanna Wesley, his mother, was a very godly woman. If she had done nothing more than give us John Wesley and Charles Wesley, that would have been a contribution to our humanity. But she never made any statements about slavery. Why? She had 20 children to bring up. 20! She had her hands full. So God hands these jobs out to different people. He may call in one man to go to Congress or Parliament. And that can be elaborate. So I say by many or by few we engage in social action. Now, the best way to illustrate this is to illustrate from facts of history. I propose to use the greatest awakening that this country has ever known. But first of all, I have to begin at the beginning. If you take the past 250 years, more or less, you can see a series of great awakenings. The first was in the days of Wesley and Whitfield, but it didn't begin with them. What we call the first great awakening, or in Britain it's called the Evangelical Revival, began 1727, simultaneously in Frankfurt in Germany, among the Moravians. That was the first hard point. It began in a prayer meeting that lasted 100 years. And all the time the Moravians were engaged in prayer they thought they were the leading missionaries in the world. At the same time, in the colony of New Jersey, the first sign of revival occurred at a place called New Brunswick, not far from where Princeton is today, in the ministry of a man called Theodore Frelinghuysen. The revival was seven years on the way before it broke out in Northampton, Massachusetts, under John F. Edwards. Before it affected the Congregationalist movement, it had begun to affect the Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and the Baptists in the South. At the time of the first great awakening, there were only 500 Baptists throughout the colonies. Today, in the United States, there are 20 or more. The Baptists got their running start in that first great awakening, because there was a church polity adopted to the frontier. They appointed or ordained farmers to poach and travel with the population moving west, where the Episcopal and Presbyterians and others had to act through Presbyteria or through the Bishop and so forth. That was the first great awakening. We know that it was in the Holy Club at Oxford. By the way, some student, a California polytechnic, asked me the other day, when I was introduced as having done my doctorate at Oxford, he said, This Oxford, is it accredited, he said. And it was very surprising. I told him, No. He said, How come? Well, I said, 1123 is when they started. There was no one to accredit them, so they were never bothered. But in the Holy Club at Oxford, John Wesley read to the group extracts readings from John of Leavenworth, a narratively surprising work of grace at Northampton, Massachusetts. There were always links between these things. Then revival began to spread through the ministry of George Whitfield, which was supposed to be awakened over there. But the movement had already begun among the Germans in war-torn camps in Saxony, Germany. And it was already underway in New Jersey in the ministry of Theodor Frelinghuysen. Out of that movement came the Nog College just north of Philadelphia, which bears Princeton University. Now, that revival lasted about 50 years. The excitement didn't last 50 years. The effects lasted 50 years. Some people seem to think that you only have revival when you have the excitement. No, no. The definition of revival in the dictionary is not only bringing a new life again, but the state of being revived. Moody was caught up in the revival in Chicago in 1858, but he was still preaching 1899. The revival lasted 41 years with him. And we've already said that many, many times. That revival, of course, died down. The churches got worldly. Not only that, but the country got divided. When you think of the American Revolutionary War, we mustn't forget that about one-third were revolutionists, about one-third were Tories. A lot of them emigrated to Canada. And about one-third didn't care one way or the other. But when people are so badly divided, they don't start prayer meetings about the political convictions. Sometimes they used to bring each other's churches down, and that sort of spurred the ecumenical feeling. The Baptists and the Methodists and the Lutherans and the Presbyterians supported the Revolution. Excuse me, not the Methodists. The Episcopalians and the Methodists supported the old country, largely speaking. So the country was divided. 1792 came the next great moment. It could be called the Second Great Lightning. It did not begin in the camp meetings in Kentucky and Tennessee. That's very popular with the skeptics and the critics. They like to talk about the extravagances, the barking and the jerking and the dancing up and down, and all the rest of it. If they can give a revival a black eye, they'll do it any time. Actually, the revival began in Yorkshire in 1792, the year after John Wesley died. It began through what was called the Union of Prayer. I won't give you details because you wouldn't be able to follow them all, but it swept Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Then it broke out in Boston. The Baptist minister called Isaac Bacchus worked to every denomination. At that time, the churches were losing out. Take a typical example. Samuel Shepard, pastor of the Lennox Congregational Church in Lennox, Massachusetts, complained that he hadn't taken anyone into fellowship for 16 years. It was like being a chaplain of an old people's home in a funeral parlor. He was just barren enough. That was just the congregations, the largest denomination. Second largest were the Presbyterians. In General Assembly, they were meant to declare the ungodliness of the country. The Methodists were the most aggressively evangelistic in those days, and they were losing more members than they were gaining, in spite of immigration. The Baptists said they had the worst winter. The Lutherans discussed uniting with the Episcopalians to prop each other up. Samuel Perverst, Episcopal bishop in New York, quit functioning. He had confirmed Rowland for so long, he decided he was out of work, so he took up unemployment. The Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, wrote to the Bishop of Virginia and said, the Church is too far gone ever to be redeemed. Voltaire said, Christianity will be forgotten in 30 years' time. And Tom Payne was really echoing that. They took a poll at Harvard, and in the whole student body they didn't find one believer. They took a poll at Princeton, found only two believers in the whole student body, and only five that didn't belong to the 50-speech movement of that day. Confucians were desperate. Now, you know, in the United States we had a rough time in the 1960s. But nobody suggested that churches were about to close. But it looked as if Christianity was about to be wiped out. Isaac Bacchus, taking a clue from the British, called for one day a month of prayer. They called it the Concert of Prayer. That's what brought the nation back to God. The revival began in the East Coast, in the Connecticut Valley, actually. Some people teach that revival is a frontier phenomenon. You'll find this in many of the history books. This doesn't make any sense. Even Whitfield's day, when Whitfield came across the Atlantic, he didn't start on the frontier. He was heading for the biggest town, Philadelphia. He must have. He landed in North Carolina, because navigation wasn't very exact in those days. But he went up by horse and visited Philadelphia. Ferguson, do you think, for instance, if believers in Purdue and Kentucky wanted Billy Graham for crusade, would that be the first place he would go to? Of course not. He was a world evangelist, head for the centers of population. And even treating evangelism as the test, the idea of frontier revivalism, is a lot of nonsense. The revival did not begin in Kentucky or Tennessee. That was the last place it reached. It began in the Connecticut Valley and spread throughout the East Coast. Three quarters of the population of the United States lived east of the Alleghenies in those days. But Kentucky and Tennessee were a lie to themselves. Congress reported that in five years in Kentucky, there had only been one court of justice held. They couldn't bring criminals to trial. Peter Codrack, the Methodist evangelist, said that when his father settled in Kentucky, Logan kind of was quiet, just trying to think of the peculiar word that he used. It would come to me, you must excuse me, I'm just about five years younger than David Duplessis. Sometimes my mind will go blank on a name. But if anyone committed a murder in Massachusetts or a robbery in Rhode Island, wondered their way from the police, all they had to do was get to Kentucky. They'd be glad they'd gone. The decent people formed vigilante regiments to fight the outlaws, fought a pitched battle and lost. The result was Kentucky and Tennessee were very wicked places. But when the Revival reached there, it completely transformed the communities. That is the second word I wrote in. As I said, out of that came the abolition of the slave trade throughout the world and the emancipation of the slaves throughout the British Empire and so many other social reforms. I heard Pierce Eagle, a professor at the University of Chicago, say that the mission of thrust in those days lasted as long as the concert of prayer, 50 years. Then there came a decline. My main emphasis today will be on this subject of the greatest delight in this country ever experienced. By the 1850s, the country was in decline again. You might say, why? There were no drilling, financially speaking. Railroads would be built everywhere. People were making money hand over fist. When D.L. Moody, as a young man, moved from Boston to Chicago, being a 15-year-old, he saved his money. They paid him 18% interest. I think that that's what the rate of interest is artificially maintained. That shows you that the demand was for money. Everyone was making money hand over fist. People's hearts were turned away from God. Second, the country was seriously divided over the slavery issue, not the North against the South. That's too simplistic. No need of forces between the Church and Chicago being split over the issue and a man be a member of this Church and hold slaves. Throughout the whole country, the country was much more seriously divided than during the Vietnam War. Third thing was that a very godly farmer called William Miller had rediscovered the doctrine of the Second Coming but made the mistake of fastening it on a date, 1844. When Christ didn't come in 1844, lots of people were disillusioned. There was a great deal of ridicule made of Christians. So for various reasons, the churches were emptying again. I discovered recent research that the Baptists in New York State were losing a thousand members a year in spite of immigration. Now, you'll find two explanations of the Great Revival of 1858. First of all, the second explanation from Professor William McLaughlin of Brown University. He said it was caused by a bank panic. In 1857 there was a bank panic. He said that panic-stricken businessmen in the distressed turned to God and that accounted for this great revolution. Even John F. Williams knew it wasn't that. There was a man called Jeremiah Lemphere. He started the prayer meeting in New York. Only six people came to it, but it grew and grew and spread all over New York and all over the country. About a million people were converted. And that's how the revival started. McLaughlin says yes, but he started that prayer meeting at the time of the bank panic. So you've got circular reasoning there. I discovered both the evangelical explanation and the secular explanation are wrong. Actually, the movement began in Canada, which didn't have a bank panic. It began in Hamilton, Ontario. A phenomenal movement of God's Holy Spirit. It was utterly unplanned. A godly Methodist couple, Walter and Phoebe Palmer, must have visited Canada in the summertime to visit the camp meetings. They were on their way back, hoping to get to Albany, New York, before the snow came. They stopped in Hamilton because their baggage had gone astray. Nowadays, when baggage goes astray, it ends up in Hawaii or somewhere like that. But they decided not to cross the American frontier without their baggage, which was a good idea. So they waited for three days. The ministers of Hamilton said, now we've got you here, let's have special meetings. It was the middle of the week, no time to announce. Only 86 people came to the first meeting. But that night, Phoebe Palmer had a conviction from God that the Holy Spirit was going to move in an extraordinary way. And the following night, the revival movement began. It was largely led by the lay people. Actually, the poem was only printed once. The second thing I discovered that's not new, I've never seen it in print, and I'm hoping to publish it this year. The first community to be revived in the United States were the black slaves of Virginia and the Carolinas. In those days, the black Christians met in the same churches with the white. They occupied a gallery or sat to one side, but they met in the same buildings with their masters. So many of them wanted to pray. God's Holy Spirit was moving upon them that they took over the warehouses of Richmond and the other towns in Virginia and the Carolinas, packed them out. You don't read about this in American history. I discovered it in Canadian papers. They spoke of the slave revivals. Who ever heard of the slave revivals of 1857? You say, well, how did it happen? In South Carolina, there was a very godless Presbyterian theologian called John Gerardo. I was over in Alexandria, Virginia, and the theological seminary there, the Episcopal one, they told me that John Gerardo was one of the leading Presbyterian theologians of the South. He could have had any church, any white church he wanted in South Carolina. He was a great preacher as well as a great theologian. But he loved black people. He started what was called a mission church. It meant for black people. They had 48 black members and 12 white members. No doubt the white members were the office bearers. But it was meant for black people. He started a prayer meeting for Gerardo. He said, Gerardo, when you are preaching, I want you to feel the power of the Holy Spirit present. The church got full. The elder said to him, why don't you preach, Pastor? He said, it will work for the Holy Spirit. One evening while he was sitting in the pulpit while some black brother was praying, he felt as if he was hit by an electric bolt. He trembled to his toes. He got up and sat down again. He got up again. There was nothing to account for this in the Presbyterian Order of Service. So he was quite confused. Finally he got up and said, I believe the Spirit has come. We will start preaching tomorrow evening. Like a good Presbyterian, he wanted to prepare for it. He passed a benediction book. He had been moved. Then he said, like a gentle rain, people began sobbing and crying all over the church. Then he began exhorting in the name of the Lord. He didn't wait to prepare. That was the beginning of the revival. White people came in to see what was happening in this black church. Some came to scoff but remained to pray. The revival spread all over South Carolina. I was telling Ben Kinshlaw yesterday that in 1857 there was an underground army of blacks called the Knights of Tobor. Afterwards they called themselves the Knights of Liberation. 100,000 girls men were in the army for the insurrection. Have you ever heard of John Brown? Why did John Brown want the United States Army at Harpers Ferry? He wanted to get guns for the blacks. Of course the South was very alarmed about this. They had planned an insurrection to march on Atlanta in 1857 in the fall. I got this from Moses Dixon who became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. African Methodist Episcopal Church, I should have said. During the revival in which about 100,000 black people were converted, the chief, whose name was not mentioned, had a revelation from God that he was not to do anything. It is as if God said slavery is a sin for which there will be a blood atonement. 600,000 young Americans died in the Civil War. There was a blood atonement. But it is as if God said it is not your fault. Neither the slave owners in the South nor the abolitionists in the North can say it was the fault of the blacks that they were slaves. So stand aside and God will deliver you. That is actually what happened. It was utterly amazing that Confederate soldiers marched off to fight the Yankees and left their women and children in the care of the blacks' servants. I have come across a lot of very interesting stories from this. One plantation owner, the wife, I should say, of the owner, called together all her slaves and she said, We have got to have some prayer because the Yankees are getting closer. We don't know what will happen to the plantation. The master is gone. Father is funerally. So they all got together to pray. And they were praying, Lord, spare this plantation, and so forth. As soon as the mistress left about 11 o'clock at night to go back home, then they said, And Lord bless the Yankees. They sort of divided loyalty there. Do you know, if it hadn't been for that revival before the Civil War, perhaps what happened among the blacks in Brazil, or in Haiti, Voodoo, Candomblé, would have happened. Instead of that, once the blacks were liberated, Christianity took off like a rocket among them. Now, this was the first community to be revived in the United States. Not Jeremiah Lankford's prayer meeting in New York, but the movement among the blacks. Then I discovered, to my amazement, that revival began breaking out all over the state. In Waco, Texas, all businesses closed, all schools closed, churches full. Revival in Iowa. Revival in Maine. All over the states, in churches. Then in February of 1858 came the third phase of the revival, what we call the businessman's revival. Jeremiah Lankford had a prayer meeting going from September. It started with six people, but he had a full church by February. Horace Greenlee, you've heard of Horace Greenlee, the man who said, Go rest, young man. He sent a reporter around the prayer meetings in New York to find out how many businessmen were praying at noon. In one hour he could only visit 12, but he counted 6,110. He must have just rushed from one to the other, whipped up his pony and got off to the next one and counted how many were there. Let us report, causal landslide. 6,110. Then they began really to pray. They took over not only every church in downtown New York, but every theater. For instance, the great Burton's Theater on Chamber Street packed from pit to roof with 5,000 people. You say, what kind of people? There were 50 ministers of different denominations, about 200 women, and the rest, the 4,750 men. A feminist got up to me the other day and said, why were there only 250 women? Well, women weren't in business in those days. Some lived in factories, but there were no women in secretaries, no typists, nothing like that in those days. These 200 women would come down specially for the meeting. It was packed out in New York. Every church packed every night. You say, every church? Oh, yes. The pastors got excited. They went to their own churches, and the priests put on special preaching missions with redemptorious fathers and passionless fathers and some flawless fathers and so forth. Even the Unitarians had special meetings. Although Theodore Parker, the leading light among the Unitarians that day, said to expect revival among Unitarians is like expecting sparks from nearby sparks together. I didn't say that, but he said that. But it did some good. The professor of religion at Harvard, which was a Unitarian institution at that time, started prayer meetings on Wednesdays for undergraduates as a result of which he himself was converted and became an Episcopal bishop. This was the revival of 1858. It went up to Hudson, down to Mohawk. The Baptists had so many candidates for religious baptism that they couldn't get them into their churches. They marched them down to the river Ohio. It could have been slushy on the ice, and baptized them in the cold water or in the Mohawk River, whatever river it was, of course. And when Baptists do that, they really are on fire. In the revival which came in Missoula, Michigan, the first businessmen's prayer meeting was convened by an Episcopalian. The town hall was packed. He said, I see our rector is here. We'll ask him to lead in prayer. We'll ask the Methodist minister to read the scripture. Then the meeting is open for prayer. But he said, so many people here, I'm afraid they won't get a chance to pray. Would you perhaps save time by writing your request in a slip of paper? Hang it up. I will read it to someone and pray for you. The first request he read was, A praying woman asks the prayers of this company for the conversion of her husband who is far from God. Immediately a burly blacksmith stood in his apron and said, I think my wife wrote that note, because I'm far from God. Would someone help me? A lawyer got up and said, I think it was my wife who wrote that. I need some counsel. Five husbands converted in the first five minutes. That's what was happening during that arrival. The arrival swept. For instance, did you know that the mayor of Chattanooga called for Thanksgiving in February instead of November? He said, why wait till November? They said, what are we celebrating? He said, this is the millennium. They thought the millennium had begun. It was interesting. So successful was this revival, it encouraged what you call post-millennialism, that we're born among the Lord and first, then Jesus will come. Western Union, or I should say, they were called into Western Union. They hadn't formed a union of the telegraph companies. The telegraph companies gave free telegrams to converts. Any convert could send a telegram to his pastor or his parents, free, after five o'clock in the evening, before eight o'clock in the morning. He said, how could they afford to do that? Well, they decided to make a list of what kind of message they'd like to send. A would be, never your prayers have been answered. I've given my heart to Christ. That was A. But C was, tell our minister that I've given my heart to Christ, and so forth. They do that now, congratulating telegrams, you know, weddings and all that sort of thing, but this was all in the days of telegraphs. The population of the United States was a million, a thirty million. There were three million active church members, and in one year they increased 25% across the board to five million. Five million. A 25% increase in 18 months across the board. You say, how long did the Revival last? About 14 years. Not for excitement. The excitement didn't last that long, but the effects lasted that long. I used to suppose that because the Revival will arrive in 1858, and the Civil War will arrive in 1861, that the Revival must have come to an end. Oh, no. I've been re-researching this again. You know what 150,000 Confederate soldiers conducted in the armies of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee? A professor at Washington wrote to me and said, how could you explain a religious revival when these people go out to fight each other? Well, don't ask me to explain it. But it happened. Any of you who are patriotic southerners, you know that General Robert E. Lee would get off his horse sometimes and point at the man in the ditch who was lying wounded there, pointing him to Christ. Yet, they were fighting on the wrong side, as we would say. Now, who would make a day for slavery today? But those who have written books about the Confederate Revivals among the soldiers said that there was no such movement among the Union armies. I decided that this was worth looking into. So I looked into it, too. Someone came to, by the way, I was in a meeting where I heard Archbishop Fulton Sheen turn to President Jim Carter and say, Mr. President, there was only one president of the United States in all of our history who ever admitted there was anything wrong with the country. And he said, that was President Lincoln. He said, the official hierarchy of religion is we are such a good people, God can't help but bless us. But President Lincoln called upon the nation to engage in a day of prayer to confess our national sins. Well, actually what happened was someone showed President Lincoln a copy of a southern paper which said, the Yankees are trusting in their superior numbers and industry and armaments, but God is on our side. Lincoln was always a very truthful man, you know, and he said, well, I saw this, he said, General Webb is praying more than our boys. That's why they called it a day of prayer. Two months later, Gettysburg. You heard it, Confederates were running rings around the Union troops for two years. Defeat after defeat. Lincoln had to replace general after general. It wasn't till Gettysburg the tide turned, and that was just after the day of prayer, about two months after the day of prayer. At the same time, he put forth the Emancipation of the Slaves as a proclamation. Hi there. Was there a revival in the Union troops? I came across a report from, do any of you know where Lingle, Georgia is? Well, in Lingle, Georgia, there were 10,000 troops, Northern troops, placed for the march through Georgia. Germans army. I saw a request from four young evangelists from Illinois to visit the front. And General Sherman wrote by endorsement on the application, certainly not. We have more need of gunpowder and oats than moral teaching. Sherman was quite a general patent of his day. But he changed his mind and let them in. In Lingle, Georgia, there was such a revival that one Sunday evening, one Sunday afternoon, they marched 150 soldiers down to the river to be baptized according to preference. Some by immersion, some by pouring, some by sprinkling. They had a communion service of 400 new converts. And that night, Major General Earl Howard, who was killed in the Battle of Penicill Mountain a month later, preached the gospel and 36 more soldiers were converted. That was a revival among Sherman's troops. One Sunday afternoon, just spurred by mentioning Sherman, Sherman's name's not very popular in the South, neither the man who bombed Atlanta. But I also found a revival in northern Virginia. From the young troops who were attacking, Frederick's people were driven back in a storm of hail and sleet, and the bitterness of defeat, every hillside was appalling. I find to my amazement that the revival of 1857-58 continued in the armies. And then broke out again. I find to my amazement in the Presbyterian records that in 1868, ten years after the revival, it said revival had occurred from 75 Presbyterians out of 92, in the same race greater than 1858. That surely must have been the greatest revival of all time. Well, there's so much one could say about this. By the way, Dr. McLaughlin, who said it was all caused by a bank panic, isn't going to be too pleased when I publish this book showing what was due for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But I enjoyed debunking the debunkers. That set the pace for the next 40 years. But I'll tell you something else interesting. I remember, I was very close to Billy Graham at the time he had a moving from God at Forest Home, 1949. And when God poured out His Spirit upon that great crusader in Los Angeles, I said to Billy, Billy, if you're going to model yourself in any previous evangelist, model yourself in D.L. Niddy, well actually I said rather than Billy Sunday. Billy Sunday was somewhat sensational, you know. He used to build up furniture on the platform to emphasize a point. The one who denounced the devil would pick up a chair and smash it on the platform. Great effect, of course. But Billy Sunday wasn't quite of the same order as D.L. Niddy, who became a world evangelist. So I urged Billy Graham to model yourself, if you really want to, on D.L. Niddy. And that's why he became a great evangelist. Niddy was willing to work with anyone who would accept his preaching. I think you could say the same for Billy Graham. But Niddy preached for 41 years after that. But I described it, and when that paper converted in 1858 and revived it, and there were all 30 minutes between the next 40 years. That's something worth thinking about. What God does. It's almost as if God says sometimes, stand aside and I'll show you what I can do. The scripture speaks of the days of the right hand of the Almighty. And that's what we were praying for. Not organized crusades. God bless the evangelists, they were the harvesters. But a movement of the Holy Spirit was the point of the church for us. That same movement broke out in Northern Ireland. That's where my grandparents were converted. It swept Scotland, 300,000 converts out of 53 million population. It broke out in England. I became a Salvation Army in the China-England nation. I became so many social reforms. This country was engaged in the Civil War and there wasn't much chance to do any reforming during that, except of course the abolition of, I should say the emancipation of the slaves. That was a great step forward. But then all these social reforms came over from Britain after that. Continued until the end of the century. Then came the great revival of 1905. Worldwide. Touched every place of an evangelical class. I've written all these things up. Pat Robertson said to me just now, I've written 35 books on revival. I didn't want to correct him right away. I've written more than 35 books, but at least 10 of them are documented works dealing with the great revival. What about today? Yes. I was in Nagaland not so long ago. The Secretary of the Church Council there is one of my students from Puller. You all know the Nagalanders. It's just due north from New Zealand. It's northwest of Burma, northeast of Bangladesh. It's a sub-government Indian state. In 1972, they celebrated their centenary. The Nagas were headhunters. Their mission was to get among them. After 100 years, they had 100,000 converts. 100 years, 100,000 converts. They decided to celebrate, so they won the Bill of Rights to come and hold a crusade. Then their army wouldn't let them in. They were too sensitive of an area towards the China border. But Mrs. Gandhi said in New Delhi, I will not give India a bad image by refusing a permit to a man I will instruct the Indian army to give me a permit. So they gave me a permit for two days. Then they had a huge rally, but no campaign. It was a bit like the man who said to the meeting, I lost my notes, so I'm not very well prepared, so I'll have to depend upon the Lord. But tomorrow I'll be better prepared, he said. The Nagas had to depend upon the Lord, so they devoted all of 1973 to prayer meetings for the Nagas. Every church, every week. 1974, consular training in anticipation. 1975, commissioning outreach, studying the papers all around them while we still had them. 1976, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at a little village called the Wankan. I'm a little out of touch with Nagas, I haven't met a friend in a couple of years, but after seven years, 100,000 have become 217,000. That's out of a population of 600,000. That means that they're about 90% Christian. You see, they're mostly baptized, and they don't count unbaptized members of families. They can count all the families, and it's about 90% Christian a day. It has charismatic, I was going to say overtones or undertones, whatever you like to say, but everyone, so to say, is better than everybody else. In terms of the Bible, it's a whole new miscarriage of relationship with Christians who are concerned. Same sort of thing going on in Papua New Guinea. Same thing going on in the Solomon Islands. I've seen revival in Brazil. Remember seeing streets packed from wall to wall, the buses couldn't run, people sitting on the tops of the buses listening to the messages. We're not seeing that in the States yet. Notice I said yet, but we want to pray that the Holy Spirit will be outpoured upon the whole body of Christ. Now, I meant to give perhaps a doctrinal message as well, but time is limited. I have to go back to an appointment in Los Angeles this evening, and if I may, I can take 15 minutes of questions, providing they're on the subject. I'm sometimes a little nervous about taking questions. Somebody says, Is Kissinger the Antichrist? Last time I was asked that, I said, certainly not. Well, why not? I said, It's the Antichrist, but I've never thought they were. I'm sorry, Kissinger? Well, any questions on the subject? Do any of you know the name of David Bryant? He's with InterVarsity, and he's one of the mainsprings behind this concert of prayer. He came to, I've directed a conference of scholars at Oxford for about 10 years. The sponsor of the Archbishop of Canterbury, I don't recall the name, a very evangelical man, and David Bryant came there and sort of caught the spark there. He studied the great revivals, and he said the Canish prayer, so he came back and started this concert of prayer. But not only David Bryant, there's another guy, Dick Henderson, the chaplain of the United States Senate, says there's a revival, an interesting revival. The other hand, The Wall Street Journal said, If we are in the midst of a great evangelical awakening, it's the first revival in history, on record, that hasn't affected the morals of the people yet. That's certain truth, too. But, Dick Henderson, also the man who said, A lot of people are pleading, 2 Corinthians 7, 14, If my people are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray. But they don't finish the verse. Turn from their wicked ways. There has to be a repentance, not only of the masses, but a repentance of the Church. The word repent occurs seven times in the letters to the churches. And the word repent doesn't mean to feel sorry. It means to change your attitude. Yes, sir. Well, I just wrote to Nancy DeMoss, the very... Are you friends with him, Marica Lidzigan or something like that? Yes, it's a beautifully illustrated thing. I find that popular writers often mix up a few points, you know. I once had a very famous soloist, better not mention his name, who said on TV, I'm going to sing this song for you. It was written by Charles Wesley for the coronation of Queen Victoria. He said the Queen invited him to a coronation to sing, but he wrote, Your Majesty, not only will I sing, but I will write a song for the occasion. So this good man sang all 4,000 tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise. Well, the problem is Charles Wesley died 50 years before. And I find people get mixed up in some of their facts. I wrote to Nancy about some minor points, but the book is quite... I congratulated on the production of this. But Nancy, Nancy DeMoss, the young lady who was the back of that, she came to our conference at Oxford also. Any other questions? Yes. Just something came to my mind. I used to wonder why is it that John Mackay, who was president of Princeton and the vice-president of the Royal Council of Churches, used to say, we can't win Latin America with the five points of Calvinism. And he wasn't at all surprised the Pentecostals were going away with the job. The thing is that people in Latin America are conditioned to believe in the supernatural. When Harris Trach and the great Scottish evangelist went to Quito in Ecuador, he was advised, don't come here now, our Catholic friends are having a 25th anniversary of the Winking Virgin. A statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary was made 25 years before to wink. And they're having a great celebration of this. Well, as far as people in Latin America are concerned, there's no problem about believing in miracles. So when people did have belief gifts in the spirit and came along and demonstrated them, you don't understand the response. So I would say that, for instance, the Sandwich of God in Brazil got maybe four million members today when it started in 1912. Yes, the charismatic David Muir, I believe, is part of God's plan for this century. I said before, the Pentecostal movement didn't arise in a vacuum. It came out of the great revival in time of the Welsh Revival. Now, the Welsh Revival was not blasphemic. A certain famous Pentecostal scholar, and I talked about this in the film, he said, I was told that speaking in tongues came to the Zusa Street from Wales. I said, I've read every report I can find in the translations of Welsh. I can't find speaking in tongues in the Welsh Revival proper. But I know that Edmund Roberts did write to the Zusa Street. They exchanged correspondence. Then he said, Glenn did speak in tongues between Wales. I said, you want to know exactly? He said, yes. I said, it was in the home of Thomas Manet Jeffreys in a town called Llanflwyd in the Ebbw Vale in South Wales on the 23rd of December 1907 about 8.30 in the evening. I said, as a scholar I wouldn't commit myself further than that. He said, who told you that? I said, Donald G. Donald G. was known as Mr. Pentecost before David B. Paterson got that title. Donald G. was a signer of the Pentecostal Royal Alliance. Now, the speaking in tongues spread from... He said, how did it begin in Wales? I said, through a visitor there Pentecostal missionary called A.H. Post who went to Egypt as a missionary. He went with some of the Crouch family Paul Crouch I know some of the Crouch family one that was in the Bible College in Springfield. But the Welsh Revival the general revival was not blasphemic, nor did it stress healing in particular. But it was all sorts of phenomena like hearing heaven and the choir sing things that the British Psychedelic Association examined. Remarkable movement. But out of that came I should say rather that the Pentecostal movement spread on the wings of that revival. People were praying for someone greater and it was in the street that they began to pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit with signs following. That was our emphasis. And the Pentecostal movement really got underway. Now, there were Pentecostal manifestations before that of course, even back to 1830 in the urban life movement. But the Pentecostal movement was a particular development in the general revival. Just as the Baptists came out of the Puritan movement. Now, some Southern Baptists here don't agree with me. They think we started in the banks of the Jordan under John the Baptist, but no. The Baptist movement came out of the Puritan movement. The Puritan movement was a general movement affecting all sorts of people. The Baptists emphasized believing in baptism and other things that Baptists are strong about. So you get my idea. The Pentecostal movement arose out of a general revival in 1905 all around the world. And these were all the same personnel. And then the Charismatic movement, of course, has been the recent development. I've known Herbert Buchholz long before he became famous. He used to just drop in to talk to us in Afrikaans because he was a bit homesick, and he knew that I knew South Africa quite well. But the Charismatic movement is a particularized revival with emphasis on the work, the personal work of the Holy Spirit. But it has not yet caused the conviction of sin that we need to turn this nation around. We need a general movement, a classic movement. This issue of this issue of church growth and revival, I have a little book that I wrote some time ago, The Outpouring of the Spirit and Revival in the Way. You know, this issue of church growth, it's written academically, and it was already written to share with my colleagues at Fuller, the strength of church growth. I think church growth is a very useful study. It's a technique, but we need dynamic. I'll illustrate. I was in New Zealand in 1956. Carlton Boone was a member of our team at that time. And I met a Presbyterian minister who had no use for mass evangelism in general, and no use for Notre Dame in particular. I said, well, don't you believe in any kind of evangelism? Oh, yes, he said, I believe in visitation evangelism. With tongue in cheek, I said, how do you do that? Well, he said, you try and get people to ring doorbells and speak nicely and not to be too obtrusive and so forth. Refer any difficult cases to the pastor, or try and get them to come to church at least, and so forth. He explained the whole thing. So I said, that sounds good. How are you getting along? He gave an uncomfortable answer. I said, I can't get them to do it, he said. That makes no use without dynamic. And that, according to the Holy Spirit, is a dynamic. And I've said in faculty, and I've said in, the last time I spoke to an assembly of our school of mission, showing the platform with Don McGavin, Ralph Winter, and all the other, Peter Widener was there, and all these other people. I said, you know, I've always had an odd view that the Holy Spirit knows more about church growth than even Dr. Don McGavin. And Don McGavin smiled at that. He gave this more malice than a remark. God raised him up to emphasize the truth. And church growth is a very useful study technique. But you see, the Jehovah's Witnesses could use church growth techniques too. Yet they'll deny the miracle of the Lord Jesus Christ. So there should be no clash, except that if you want to see and I've told the Holy Spirit to turn this nation around, it won't be by techniques. It will be by moving the Holy Spirit upon the whole body of Christ. Well, just one more request back then. I can't believe it. The decline of the Moravians, I suppose you could say they lost their vision. But one reason why they lost their vision was that all the other denominations took up their vision. And they were nothing special after a while. When the Moravians started their missionary program, they also had missionaries out like that. But after the second great awakening, Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and Bishopians, all of them had missionaries in the field. There was nothing so special about the Moravian emphasis. And then of course, the Moravians were a German group. And sometimes they were in a cultural cocoon if I use that expression. I thought you were going to ask why do revivals decline? I would say they last as long as the generations arrived. But each generation needs a new experience. Could I suggest we'll sing a hymn in conclusion? 425. I wrote this 50 years ago. Thank you. . . . .