Sam Jones a New Biography

Reform is a city in Pickens County, Alabama, and it's located halfway between Columbus, Mississippi and Tuscaloosa on Route 82. The city records state it was named Reform after a visit by an evangelist. Reform, Alabama was named after the evangelist Sam Jones conducted revival meetings there.

Sam Jones came into town and preached for eight weeks, and when he left town, there was nobody in the jail. The theaters were closed, nobody played cards, and the liquor stores were run out of business. There wasn't anything questionable left, and when men would curse in the streets, they would lower their voices so nobody could hear them.

Sam Jones was an evangelist in the late 19th century, of whom it's been estimated he preached to 25 million Americans when the population of America was only 50 million, meaning in his generation, he reached half of this nation with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Sam Jones was the most quoted man in America. He was a household word.

Babies were named after him, candy bars were named after him, streets were named after him, and his likeness hung framed in thousands of homes throughout America. And when Sam Jones came to town, he would hold the attention of tens of thousands at a time, for a month at a time, reaching a quarter of a million people in cities like Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis. Under Sam Jones' preaching, the Nashville Revival of 1885 shook that city and turned it upside down for God, resulting in 10,000 conversions and producing the most famous convert of that revival, Captain Tom Ryman, a riverboat captain who owned a fleet of riverboats along the Cumberland River.

There were floating dens of iniquity. There were saloons and gambling dens. But when Tom Ryman got saved under Sam Jones' preaching, he poured out all the booze on his boats into the river and made them preaching places, and he built an auditorium in Nashville for Sam Jones to preach in, which still stands prominently in that city today as the Ryman Auditorium, also known as the home of the grand old Opry.

When Sam Jones died, the nation mourned, and more than 30,000 people followed by his casket as it lay in the rotunda of the Capitol Building in Atlanta. My new biography on Sam Jones is over 400 pages and is a definitive biography with rare photos never before published, provided by his surviving family members. It's a case study on revival and the significance of having sent revival to a church and a nation.

If you have an interest in revival, friend, or a concern for revival in our day, this book will ignite and fan that flame. It can be purchased on Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon. Get your copy today.