Unit 7 Video Transcripts

There are 2 Video Transcript

Video Transcript: The Roots of the Great Revival (Dr. Bruce Ballast)

So last time we saw this incredible spiritual fervour in response to prayer that had bubbled up in this country and had created all those amazing results we looked at last time. Who could imagine if you were here when Alexis De Tocqueville wrote those words that we ended the last session with, who can imagine that by 1857, we need another revival. But things have gone down so badly. Who can imagine if you were a follower of Charles Finney, and those new measures that guaranteed revival that should be the ordinary, the ordinary part of the church, the ordinary process of the church should be revival, that by 1857, things would have gotten so bad that another revival was needed. But that is, in fact, what happened. Now, there are a lot of forces that led to a preparation or the need for a new revival. And we're going to look at those in this lecture. Now, just again, remember the theme, we're talking about ordinary people, extraordinary things. Charles Finney was one of those ordinary people, he was somebody that you wouldn't have picked as the person to become the lead figure in that period of revival. You know, somebody who came out of a totally unchurched, unspiritual background, somebody who was skeptical about religion at best, and yet, you know, God chose him as an ordinary person. We're going to be looking at this session, as the preparation for what's called the great revival in the next session at one of my favourite revivalists, because we're going to see that God seemed to choose the ordinary, very ordinary, to bring about extraordinary things. 

But this session, I want to focus on, especially on what got the country ready for another period of revival. While there are many forces that contributed to that. The first one was immigration. It's hard for us to imagine the numbers of people that are coming in, in fact, if you look at the broader history, not just to church history, but the immigration process during this time, it is sometimes called the Great wandering, because all over the world, people were kind of on a movement, there were waves of people and and throughout Europe, America was beginning to be called the land of opportunity. And so people began to focus on this country as one of the places that they could come, and they can have a better, more secure future, people began to look at this area as a place you could come and experience a religion for some of those great churches in the old country, as it was beginning to be termed that, that were starting to die there. And so people began to come, in fact, if you look at the numbers are rather astounding. In the decade of the 1820s. The Immigration Service count 128,452 people who came to this country and became US citizens, the decade of the 1830s. It's significantly up. I mean, significantly, four times more 530,381. But then you jumped to the 50s, two decades later, and it's 2,811,504,054 people who became citizens in the United States. So these are people who are voting. 

Now, there are several characteristics about this group that made them creators of fear among those who were first here, who are the descendants of the people that immigrated earlier. And in fact, it was during this period that a political party actually arose that called themselves the know nothing party. And they were called this because they kept the meetings or the discussions in their meetings secret, nobody could know. And they were directed that if anybody should ask them, what was the plan of the know nothing party, they would say, I don't know. And so they were called the know nothing party. Now, in spite of their efforts at secrecy, their main goal did leak out. And their main goal was to elect people who were native to American who were born in America, so that they supported political figures, who promised that when they appointed people in significant places, they would only appoint those who were born in America. So there's that kind of fear that's kind of behind it as these these massive groups of people are coming from another country and other countries. 

The other thing that was unusual about this immigration was that they these people had religious affiliation. Most of them are Roman Catholic or Lutheran. And so they came and they settled in some particular areas. You know, if you go to Minnesota area today, you will find all these Lutheran names or German names there because that's where they settled and they settled in their little ghettos in so that was unusual. It was not the same thing as what we've had previously that people just came And many of them are unbelievers at best. Another characteristic of this immigration group that was challenging was that most of them were poor. They came here for a better life. I know that's true of my ancestors. They came here because they didn't see any future in the Netherlands. And there were jobs, or jobs in the cities here that were thought to be better. And so they came, they came, and they numbers just kept growing and growing and growing. Another thing that created the challenge or prepare the way for the revival is that the result of one of the results of this large growth in immigration was that large cities began to be developed, I you have to know that that was considered something from the founding fathers to be just as important. When they look back at their experience in Europe, all of them who came from Europe, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc, etc. They thought one of the great evils in the old country in Europe were the large cities because that's where crime seemed to multiply, illness seemed to spread etc, etc. And now because of these people coming and because of the industrialization that had begun in this country, the jobs were in the cities. And so now you've got tenements and tenements and tenements of people who are settling in the cities. Just to give you a little taste of how important this idea was. Thomas Jefferson wrote one time notes on Virginia, in the state of Virginia. And this is what he said. 

Those who labor in the earth of the chosen people of God, if ever he had chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtual. While we have land to labor, then let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a workbench or twirling a distaff carpenters Mason Smith's are wanting in husbandry, but for the general operations of manufacturer let our workshops remain in Europe, a mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government a sore due to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republican vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker, which soon eats at the heart of its laws, and constitution. So Thomas Jefferson looked at the state of Virginia, his state, and he calculated that with the landmass that was available there, the farmable landmass that the state of Virginia could handle about four and a half million people. Now imagine that you can go to several cities in Virginia today, that if you look at the spread out area, that's more than four and a half million people. And so you have this massive immigration, it changes the character of the city, it creates fear and mistrust on the part of many, many people. And there are these no nothing parties that are coming up. And that began to set the seeds of some dissatisfaction and some decline in religious fervor. The second thing that contributed as a root of the great revival was prosperity.

During this time, if you read your history of the United States, you'll find there was a gold rush out in California, and that poured millions of dollars into the economy. There, the railroads were going great guns, the Erie Canal there, there were all sorts of things that kept us producing and selling and there was a great deal of prosperity. Now, it's an interesting fact that you can look at around the world. This is a principle that has been proven over and over again, generally speaking, there are some exceptions. But generally speaking, if the saying is, that the church has always been able to withstand poverty, in fact, poverty is often a root for revival of the the church has always been able to withstand persecution. And in fact, when the church has been persecuted, no matter where it's been persecuted, it tends to grow by leaps and bounds. The one thing that the church has not been able to withstand spiritually, is prosperity. Now, when you look at the Bible, you find that the Moses warn the people about this in the book of Deuteronomy, and the book of Deuteronomy, in the Old Testament, you have Moses getting five sermons. In fact, I used to kiddingly say in teaching in the book of Deuteronomy, that Moses gave five sermons and died. So there's a warning about ever doing too many sermons in a row. But he gets all these sermons and as a means of preparing the people to go into the promised land and start settling down and start building homes and he says, you're going to be prosperous there. 

It's going to be a beautiful place because you're going to go there and they're going to be homes that you didn't build. There's going to be vineyards that you didn't planted, and you're going to be prosperous. And he says, watch out here is from Deuteronomy, chapter eight. When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied when you build, find houses and settle down, and when your hearts and your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase, and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud, and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, you may say to yourself, my power, and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me. But remember the Lord your God, for this, he who gives you the power to produce wealth. So you've got this prosperity that's going on. Now, another preparation for the great revival, were church problems. I say church problems, because things are starting to boil up to the Civil War and the issues that are there. And when you look at the church, there were a lot of disagreements north south, not only but but also within churches. 

But in the church, you had some things that were happening that just said people made people sit back and say, that was nutty Christians. You know, one of them was the Millerites. William Miller, some significant dates in his life, he was a farmer, who studied the Bible. And as a result of his study of the Bible, and looking at the genealogies in the Old Testament, and plotting out dates, he's somebody who said he could predict the return of Jesus Christ. And so he began to preach the imminent return of Jesus Christ. And the first date he gave was April 23 1843, began preaching this widely, and people began to come, people began leaving their businesses, they began to prepare. Some groups of people even began living in communities together. And they made advent robes for the advent of Jesus, the second advent of Jesus Christ. And so there's this great build up to Jesus return. Finally, the data settled on March 22 1844. Now imagine the kind of build up there might be this kind of announcement that Jesus is coming back, people were meeting on mountains around that whole area, they were anticipating this wonderful return of Jesus, and October 10, I didn't come obviously. And then he re predicted that order, again, a couple of dates wrong. And so you read predicted it at October 10. That year. And once again, the same thing happened, the faithful gathered that they gave away all of their possessions, and the October 10, came and went, and Jesus did not return. Now after that, what happened to the Millerites is that they they kind of became, they believed, as William Miller said that Jesus returned, but he returned in heaven to the sanctuary and heaven.

He didn't return to Earth, and so a whole new religious movement came out of that. But the result of this was that the church looked a little foolish. As a result of this. Now, we know what that's like, in our day, we, we just very recently have had Harold Camping back in 1994, he predicted that Jesus was going to return on September 6, and he produced the book to that effect, and, and there were 1,000s of people who bought into that member of a church I served in California at the time was one of them, who gave away his rather lucrative business, was a trucking business and decided that he had to become part of this movement of telling people that Jesus was going to return on September 6, and so traveled around the world, and has just a lot of excitement. And then of course, September 6, came and went, and Jesus did not return. Again, there was a re prediction, much like William William Miller, and again, he didn't return. And I remember seeing the news reports about this at the time, and it was kind of like, you know, isn't this quaint, isn't this foolish? And then recently, Camping again, predicted that on May 21. 

Last year, I'm doing these lectures in 2012. On May 21, Jesus was to return and once again, the same kind of thing happened. And the result was, you read in the paper, just kind of a mockery, slight mockery of us Christians, and the crazy stuff that sometimes we believe while this was happening back then, there was this kind of like all those Christians, they're kind of crazy, right? And so they're those kind of church problems contributed to a preparation for a new revival because the interest in and the commitment to churches in Jesus Christ was dying. So there were the immigration prosperity problems, church problems, and there were great political problems. It was during this time that the Dred Scott case was, was decided. Now, Dred Scott was a slave. He was an owner. He was owned by a man who took him travelling to northern states where there was no slavery. And so we ended up suing his owner for freedom, saying, you know, he had lived for a significant period of time in these states where there was no slavery. And so he should be free because he lived in free states, the Supreme Court came down with a decision, part of which said, upon a careful consideration of the subject, the court is of the opinion that, upon the facts stated in the plea abatement, Dred Scott was not a citizen of Missouri within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, and not entitle as such to sue in its court. 

Now, the interpretation of that is, Dred Scott wasn't really a human being, he was a slave. Now that just began to divide the country, there was an uproar about this decision in the north, there was great joy in the southern part of the United States. And there was a deepening of positions about slavery in the country. And the other person who contributed to that was, of course, the beginning of the publishing of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. And, in fact, when President Lincoln met, the author said, oh, this is the little woman who caused this great big war. Because there's this picture of slavery as just an institution that is so evil, so bad, and the slaves as such good people, that this book began to be printed and reprinted and reprinted in the north. And so now you have to discuss political upheaval, this kind of dissatisfaction of the country. So all of these things are things that help contribute to the preparation for the great revival, and 1857, a thing that finally prepared, it was the financial collapse of 1857. Now, financial collapse does not always lead to revival. It certainly didn't in 1929, as we're going to see later, but this time, it caused people to look at their life, at their values. And once again, be ready for something new, something different, something exciting, and they found it in something old, the Church of Jesus Christ will look more at that next time.

Video Transcript: The Great Revival (Dr. Bruce Ballast)

Welcome back to ordinary people extraordinary things, the revival periods in the United States. We've come in our study up to what is my personal favourite revival. And I'll share more at the end why I think this is my favourite one out of all of them. It is called, in the literature that looks at this, the great revival. I've given up on things like the great awakening and the Second Great Awakening and, and yet this time was so significant, that they had to come up with some kind of term that had great in it, they could have just said revival. But now there's something about this. That is a great revival. And I hope you catch the flavour of it. It's a very short lived revival. But in some respects, an incredibly unique one, in the history of the United States, began in New York City, this is a picture on a postcard from 1857. This is what New York City had become by that time. Now, when you look at that picture, you've got to realize how much it had changed since the late 1600s 1700s. And it was settled. Most of this area had been houses. And there was a small kind of political area, the community buildings down toward the harbour. 

But now, businesses have taken over much of what had been houses, and then to handle all immigration, tenements had been built. And all of the evils that Thomas Jefferson saw in the city existed in New York City. And yet, this became the seat place for the beginning of what was called the great revival. Now did that, partly because of all of the pain of living in a city, you've got immigration population that is separated from its roots in Europe, you've got people who are wondering, you've got the financial collapse that has happened in New York City, about 30,000 people lost their jobs in the financial collapse of that time. Now, that was a huge percentage of the whole city. And so you've got just just kind of this Maelstrom going on in the city of dissatisfaction, unhappiness of the crime, the filth that a city produces. Now, what also happened is people moved out of the city. So the inhabitants who own the houses that used to be there, moved out, they began to move out of the city in rapid numbers, and the churches went with them. The Brooklyn tabernacle, you know, built for the Ministry of Charles Finney had moved out follow its people out toward not yet suburbs that didn't really happen till after World War Two. 

But out further in the city, the old brick Presbyterian Church and other other well known churches followed its people out, moving further out. And so within the center of the city where all the tenements and businesses are, there are fewer and fewer churches to serve a burgeoning kind of population. Now churches are leaving, one church decided to stay. Now we don't know exactly the history of why, but it was the North Dutch church at the corner of Williams and Fulton streets. Now the North Dutch church, it is speculated, waited too long to move until it wasn't feasible anymore. So it's members had begun moving out moving out further to the further edges of the city. And the church just kind of hung in there as the attendance began to go down, and then financially began to go down. And all of a sudden, they wake up one day, and they say. Wow, we can't continue here. We can't afford to do ministry here anymore. And so that kind of drove them to try some different things. Now. Just again, the note too, today in the United States and in Europe, and the United States, there's been this history of churches moving out of the city. And you may have seen that I once had a call to a church right near Chicago, but I was on one of the outward rings and my denomination, you can trace the growth of Chicago by looking at where the churches got planted. 

So the first churches were right near the center of the city, and then the population moves out to the suburbs. And then there's another wave and there's another wave and we can count churches down there. And I had a call to Anderson, Illinois, which was way way Anderson Indiana which was way down on the south, the latest of the waves going out of the city. And as a result, we really in my denomination are just trying now to try to learn how to reach the city. Because very, very often the cities are left behind as the churches move out to the suburbs following its people and yet there are some very, very courageous people who decide to stay and find unique ways to reach the city. Well, if you know of have in your denomination churches that have decided to do that their mother is the North Dutch church. Now imagine you've got all these immigrants, a lot of Lutherans, Roman Catholics, they're from all over Europe. So they don't necessarily speak the Dutch language, the Netherlands being one of the smaller churches there. And you've got in your name, the North Dutch church, there aren't a whole lot of folks who are going to say, oh, that's my kind of people who go there and go start attending. And so they had all kinds of strikes against them, this declining population. But what they decided to do was hire an evangelist, somebody who could hopefully turn the trend around, begin to reach people and bring them into this church building again, and bring it back to its former glory. The person they hired, was a man named Jeremiah Lamphere. 

Actually, this is a statue of him a bronze statue of him on a bench in New York, that you can go and sit next to him and I, I have not yet done that in my life. I ever get to New York again, in this life. That's one of the things I'm looking to see is to sit next to Jeremiah Lamphere. don't know much about him. We know he was born in 1809 and Coxsackie, New York. We know he went into business, in fact, it was probably the mercantile business. So he, he was a businessman. In other words, he's not somebody who's been to seminary, he's that somebody who's gone to Bible College. He's not somebody who was known as a leader in a church anywhere before this. But somehow, for some reason, he decided to leave his work as a businessman, and go into the church. We do know that, you know, he's hired to do this job, and 1842 he's in New York preparing, not preparing for this job necessarily, but being prepared by God for this job. There's a description of him. That is said he was tall with a pleasant face, and affectionate manner, and indomitable energy and perseverance, good singer, gifted in prayer and exhortation, a welcome guest to any house shrewd and endowed with much tact and common sense. Not a bad kind of description, right? So he takes on this job begins in 1857, as the evangelists of the North Dutch church. Now what do you do, you're going to try to turn around things for the North Dutch church. He approached his job as probably any good businessman would, he divided the whole area into certain districts, and he simply began calling from house to house to house, he had prepared a packet of information about the church, that he would leave with various houses, but he talked with everyone from district after district after district, according to his carefully laid out plan, and inviting them to come to church did that each Sunday, he had reserved an area of pews in the church ready for all those visitors. And people didn't come. 

Besides decided that we had to change the tactics. So he began visiting the motels and the boarding houses. And he began leaving cards with the times of the church services saying, tell people that if they're looking for a church to go to, to come to the north Dutch church. And again, he would sit there on Sunday morning, and people did not come. After doing this for some time, with no real visible results, he was indeed frustrated, in fact, didn't know what in the world to do. And so he decided to pray. Now, you'll notice, I began talking about the Second Great Awakening people that using that quote, that said that there was nothing else that could do. They had no, no power, no political power, no capability to get things done in a way that would change that community. So all they have left was prayer. Well, that's where Jeremiah Lamphere was. He had tried everything he knew how to do it come to the end, nothing had worked. So he decided to pray. But he thought he would invite other people to pray with him. And so he sent out into the neighbourhood, help giving it to various businessmen. 

What was called a bill again, just something inviting to pray, and this is what it said, started with the state question, how often Shall I pray? And the answer, as often as the language of prayer is in my heart, as often as I see my need of help, as often as I feel the power of temptation, as often as I am made sensible to any spiritual declension or feel the aggression of a worldly spirit. In prayer, we leave the business of time for that of eternity, and intercourse with men, for the intercourse with God. So I set a time, come and pray, come join in this intercourse with God, the day he set aside was noon, Wednesday, September 23. And when I tried to picture what was going on, and Jeremiah Lamphere, he never wrote about it. So we don't know. But I tried to picture that the this was kind of a last ditch effort, there's nothing else to do. And I imagine he was probably pretty cynical at this point. I remember early in ministry, first church, I served as Pastor thinking, the same kind of thoughts on height. I've tried everything, and nothing is growing this church, and the kind of despairs you see people leaving and to just see what happens in churches, sometimes between people, all kinds of forces that that exists inside the church and outside the church, that that will try to bring it to destruction. And you try and you try, and you try, and nothing happens, nothing happens. And I imagine as he handed out these invitations to prayer to various businessmen, people in in the neighbourhood of the North Dutch church that he probably thought, well, this is. Noon, time came around. Nobody was there, except Jeremiah Lamphere, sitting in the council room, which was in the back of the church. 12:15 no one there. That point I picture, him getting up and checking and seeing if the door was locked or stuck. Or maybe nobody could find it since the consistory room where the meeting was announced to be was in the back of the church, and you had to go upstairs to get it. I imagine him walking down looking rose, anybody here, nobody there. 

Finally at 12:30, I heard some sound on the steps and, and over the next few minutes, six people gathered to pray. Now they had a good time doing that. And they felt like they were at least doing something looking at the spiritual nature of the city of New York. So he decided to meet the next Wednesday, once again. And that before they came, they would invite their friends. And so the next week, there were 20 people there. And then the next week, there were 30 people there. And it was sometime during that meeting that they decided to not meet every week anymore, that they were going to meet every day at noon for prayer. And what happened from there is rather unbelievable. September 23, it began by January 1858, they were in three large lecture halls of the church. That's how many people there were gathering in these large lecture halls. The program was simple. They'd sing a hymn, they would pray or be led in prayer. That's all. And other people began to hear now about what was going on at the the North Dutch church. And so they decided that they would start praying as well. And by March 1858, it was estimated by newspaper men who were going from place to place counting how many people were in each building that there were 10,000 people meeting daily, for prayer in the city of New York, in 20 different locations. And one of the unique things about this revival is that the press was engaged with it and excited about it. And they were in fact, announcing it. 

Here's an article by one man in the newspaper says we understand that arrangements are being made for the establishment of one or two additional meetings in the upper portion of the city. Soon, the striking of the five bells at 12 o'clock will generally be known as the signal for the hour of prayer. Can you imagine that? Now I live in a fairly small town in the state of Michigan in the United States. And I could probably see in our local paper getting some kind of announcement like that going. But it was unusual that this was happening all the newspapers, reporters were going from place to place and reporting on what was happening. Some of the well known preachers of the day, were getting involved, and they were giving some talks or sermons at these meetings. But mostly it was just people gathering together swinging a hammer to and then gathering together for prayer. This thing spread like wildfire. You know, people in New York were doing this. But it began to spread beyond there. 

The interesting thing about the Great Revival, as we know it started there, but we also know that God was doing something else in Pittsburgh. That was another spark that eventually the two flames of the two fires joined together. in Pittsburgh. Excuse me, I forgot one thing. At the end of this period, there was a man who wrote this he said I'm from Omaha, Nebraska on my journey east, I have found a continuous permitting all the way. We call it 2000 miles from Omaha to Boston. And here was a prayer meeting about 2000 miles an extent that that's how rapidly this thing spread. But anyway, on to Pittsburgh, in the fall of 1857, there was a group of people that became concerned there now they didn't know all of what was happening in New York as far as we can tell. And yet God was calling them to do two things. One, a group of churches, a multi interdenominational churches decided that they would dedicate the first Sunday in January to pray for revival and the next Sunday to prayer and fasting for revival. And so that was another way that God was doing something that eventually just swept the nation. Now, when we look at the great revival, we find that there were three phases to it. Prayer meeting attendance, was one of them are very important one of them, there were all these meetings going on all over the place. I can't quite picture this quite well, you know, imagine this happening daily in every major city from Omaha to Boston. 

Omaha at that point, was it you know, at the fringe of the country, the frontier, and yet in every major city, in dozens of places, there are these prayer meetings going on? I know how difficult that is, we have in our country, a National Day of Prayer, and we have in my community 42 churches, and we gather for noon and a prayer in about three different places. And then sometimes for an evening meeting, and that most we see at a gathering 20, 25, 30 people. I imagine what would that be like to see people doing this every day 1,000s upon 1,000s of them, taking their breaks, businesses closing all because they want to pray. They want to pray. That's something what the Holy Spirit does, now that something happens into the churches as well. And these two years, it's estimated that 2 million people were added to church roles as a result of the prayer of the great revival, sometimes referred to as the prayer revival. In 1859, it went international, man was visiting from Ireland, and he saw it was going back, went back to Ireland and started it and same thing happened there. And then somebody was visiting Ireland from England and brought that revival to England. And then somebody from there, brought it to Europe and had extended as far as India. So in a very few a number of years, there was this incredible kind of renewal of faith, revival of religious fervor, and all started because of Jeremiah Lamphere. So the three phases, the first one was the prayer meeting attendance. The second phase, I want to talk about more next time. And that is the conversion of Dwight Lyman Moody, don't want to say too much about him. 

But he was a shoe salesman and was converted and took part in this revival and became the major figure of the next section of revival in the United States. And so he's a very, very important person. And we're going to leave off the next lecture and dedicate that entirely to looking at Dwight Lymen Moody, and a heritage that he gave to revivals, and not just his own period of time, but after the Civil War, even to today. A third kind of phase was a missionary movement. Young Men's Christian Association found its heyday, in this revival of the Salvation Army established during this period of revival, and those who look at history say there were 849 missionary societies that were begun as a result of this revival of a couple of years. Wow, like I say this is one of the most exciting revivals for me, partly because it just came from God. There is no other explanation for what happened. What were the results? Well, there were several, there were social, renewed social concern, I guess, is the way to put it as a result of this revival. In fact, one person put it this way, the rapid growth of concern with purely social issues, such as poverty, working men's rights, liquor traffic, slum housing, and racial bitterness is the chief feature distinguishing American religion after 1865 from that of the first half of the 19th century, and that's largely due to this revival. Now, think of some of the issues we talked about poverty that these immigrants are coming in. 

They're poor. There were no working men's rights. A children were being abused in work, liquor traffic, you know the problems without alcoholism were huge, slum housing occasionally, in our day, in our country, we get to hear about some slumlord, who's just putting people up and very substandard housing, and they're dealing with rats, and they're dealing with all kinds of variety of insects and etc. And that person has to clean his act up because we have laws, although all laws all came out of this revival, racial bitterness. And all this is the time prior to the civil war in the United States. And so there's a great mistrust of people from other colour. And certainly as immigrants came people from other background, and so there was this great social concern that began to bubble up and found its way in the expression of missionary societies and social agencies. Lay ministry was a big part of this, Jeremiah Lamphere, was not ordained and you don't find anybody in this whole movement. Aside from Henry Ward Beecher in New York as a name that somebody was involved with these noon prayer meetings. There were no big names, Jeremiah Lamphere did not become a big name. Nobody came to check with Jeremiah Lamphere about what they should be doing. It was all one person taking it somewhere else who took it somewhere else who took it somewhere else. And it was totally laid driven ministry.

Wow, In addition to that, again, women became involved very deeply. At first it was only men meeting at noon, but soon the when women came in, they were soon leading singing. And once again, that opening up of roles to women. People realized, I guess, especially as a result of this great revival or prayer revival, that you could be an ordinary person. And God could do extraordinary things through you. That's why this is one of my favourite just because there's nobody here that got a big name as a result of this revival. Nobody that was seen as the driving force, nobody that you could point back to and say, ah it was him. And certainly Jeremiah Lamphere, wouldn't say that it was him because he didn't know what he was doing and didn't know what he had done after he had done it. He just realized he had been watching the Holy Spirit do something very, very special. And so this has been incredible, great revival, and one of the greatest in the history of the United States, and one of the most unique beginning in the city, driven by lay people, so much so that a place like the north and Dutch Church can begin to cross ethnic barriers and grow. And so next time, we're going to look at Dwight Moody, because he came out of this time out of this revival. He didn't become well known until after the Civil War, and after this revival had begun to wane, but we're going to look at his ministry because he becomes again, one of those incredibly ordinary people. In fact, if you had tried to list somebody who would be a person who would be one of the great revivalist in history, no one I think when he was young man appointed Dwight L. Moody. And so next time we're gonna look at moody