"The Event of the Century"

That’s the way some have described the Prayer Meeting Revival, which began 150 years ago today in New York City and spread across the country and the Atlantic to the British Isles. The events of 1857-59 started with a layman named Jeremiah C. Lanphier, who began holding noon prayer meetings at the Dutch Reformed Church on Fulton Street in New York. The meetings lasted approximately one hour once a week. Anyone desiring to attend could come and go anytime during that hour. At first hardly anyone came; three weeks later daily prayer meetings were requested, so the church was opened everyday at noon for prayer. Other churches began doing this, and soon the fire spread to other cities until most of the country was experiencing revival.

So how did these meetings spontaneously spring up across the land until the phenomenon became known as America’s “Third Great Awakening”? America had seen great revivals before, the last one dying out about twenty years earlier. By 1857 many areas of the country had become known as “burned-over districts” because of excesses that became prominent toward the end of the Second Great Awakening. Many people had come to accept the “New Measures” of Charles Finney as the way to do evangelism, exciting people’s emotions and trying to coerce them to make decisions, not realizing that the new measures represented a doctrinal departure into heresy. A large number of these converts fell away and became harder to reach. Ministers were always trying new ideas to interest people, but weren’t emphasizing the scriptural gospel and sound theology.

No doubt, the Lord used several circumstances to awaken people from their lethargy. The abolition issue was reaching fever pitch in the North while State’s Rights and Secession were doing the same in the South. The country was headed toward war. In 1857 an economic depression hit the country and brought about a “pall of mourning over every house” (words of J.W. Alexander, quoted by Iain H. Murray in Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism 1750-1858, p. 341). So, tempers were rising and spirits were falling.

However, God had certain men still preaching sound gospel. One of the most prominent of these men was James Waddell Alexander, a Presbyterian minister in New York City and son of Archibald Alexander, who was a leader in the Second Great Awakening. J.W. Alexander had been preaching to his people about the Holy Spirit’s role in conversion. The Lord blessed his preaching by granting his church a measure of revival in the years before 1857. One of the men blessed by such preaching was Jeremiah Lanphier, who later went to the Dutch Reformed Church and became a lay-evangelist. So, apparently, God brought about a sense of need in people and put some well-trained leaders in place to point needy people to the divine Supply.

This revival had at least three benefits for America: 1) it steeled the country for the destruction and debauchery of war that followed in the 1860s; 2) it produced a new generation of ministers and missionaries; and 3) it caused many people to change their focus from things temporal to things eternal. The revival that sprang from these prayer meetings caused many to think about their souls and to seek Christ and His salvation. How good of the Lord, in a time of national crisis, to send a national moving of His Spirit! We haven’t seen the like since. But God is the same, and He can send revival to needy people absorbed with the troubled affairs of modern-day life in America. We should be praying, “Lord, send a revival, and let it begin in me.”

Though there seems to be no definitive history written about the Prayer Meeting Revival, eyewitness accounts are available. The best one seems to be The Power of Prayer: Illustrated in the Wonderful Displays of Divine Grace at the Fulton Street and Other Meetings, in New York, and Elsewhere, in 1857 and 1858 by Samuel I. Prime, reprinted by Banner of Truth in 1991. J.W. Alexander wrote booklets about the revival, but I don’t know if these are in print. Iain Murray puts together a good account of this revival in his book Revival and Revivalism, also by Banner of Truth, 1994. Do you know of other accounts of this lively period of God’s extraordinary work?

"The Event of the Century"