In Other Nations
First Great Awakening
It was a religious revival that swept Protestant Europe and British America in the 1730s and 1740s. This evangelical movement, left a permanent impact on American Protestantism. It resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of deep personal revelation of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ. The Great Awakening moved away from rituals, ceremonial functions, sacraments, and made Christians to have a deep sense of spiritual conviction and redemption, and by encouraging personal introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality.
The movement was an important social event in New England, which challenged established authority and created division between traditionalist Protestants, who insisted on the continuing importance of ritual and doctrine, and the revivalists, who encouraged emotional involvement. It had an impact in reshaping the Congregational church, the Presbyterian churches, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the German Reformed denominations, and strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist Anglican denominations. It had little impact on most Anglicans, Lutherans, Quakers, and non-Protestants. Throughout the colonies, especially in the south, the revivalist movement increased the number of African slaves and free blacks who were exposed to and subsequently converted to Christianity.
The Second Great Awakening
It began in about 1800 and reached out to the un-churched, whereas the First Great Awakening focused on people who were already church members. 18th-century American Christians added an emphasis on “outpourings of the Holy Spirit” to the evangelical imperatives of Reformation Protestantism. Revivals encapsulated those hallmarks and spread the newly created evangelicalism in the early republic. Evangelical preachers sought to include every person in conversion, regardless of gender, race, and status.
It was a Protestant religious revival during the early 19th century in the United States. The movement began around 1790, gained momentum by 1800 and, after 1820, membership rose rapidly among Baptist and Methodist congregations whose preachers led the movement. It was past its peak by the late 1850s. The Second Great Awakening reflected Romanticism characterized by enthusiasm, emotion, and an appeal to the super-natural.
The revivals enrolled millions of new members in existing evangelical denominations and led to the formation of new denominations. Many converts believed that the Awakening heralded a new millennial age. The Second Great Awakening stimulated the establishment of many reform movements designed to remedy the evils of society before the anticipated Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Historians named the Second Great Awakening in the context of the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s and of the Third Great Awakening of the late 1850s to early 1900s. These revivals were part of a much larger religious movement that was sweeping across Europe at the time, mainly throughout England, Scotland, and Germany.
Third Great Awakening
It refers to a hypothetical historical period proposed by William G. Mc Loughlin that was marked by religious activism in American history and spans the late 1850s to the early 20th century. It affected pietistic Protestant denominations and had a strong element of social activism. It gathered strength from the postmillennial belief that the Second Coming of Christ would occur after mankind had reformed the entire earth. It was affiliated with the Social Gospel Movement, which applied Christianity to social issues and gained its force from the Awakening, as did the worldwide missionary movement. New groupings emerged, such as the Holiness movement and Nazarene movements, and Christian Science.
The era saw the adoption of a number of moral causes, such as the abolition of slavery and prohibition. However, some scholars, such as Kenneth Scott Latourette, dispute the thesis that the United States ever had a Third Great Awakening.
The 1904–1905 Welsh Revival
This was the largest Christian revival in Wales during the 20th century. While by no means the best known of revivals, it was one of the most dramatic in terms of its effect on the population, and triggered revivals in several other countries. The movement kept the churches of Wales filled for many years to come, seats being placed in the aisles in Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Swansea for twenty years or so. The Awakening swept the rest of Britain, Scandinavia, parts of Europe, North America, the mission fields of India and the Orient, Africa and Latin America.
The Brownsville Revival (also known as the Pensacola Outpouring)
This was a widely reported Christian revival within the Pentecostal movement that began on Father’s Day June 18, 1995, at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida. Characteristics of the Brownsville Revival movement, as with other Christian religious revivals, included acts of repentance by parishioners and a call to holiness, inspired by the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Some of the occurrences in this revival fit the description of moments of religious ecstasy. More than four million people are reported to have attended the revival meetings from its beginnings in 1995 to around 2000.
All told, more than 2.5 million people have visited the church’s Monday prayer and Tues-through-Saturday evening revival services, where they sang rousing worship music and heard old-fashioned sermons on sin and salvation. After the sermons were over, hundreds of thousands accepted the invitation to leave their seats and rush forward to a large area in front of the stage-like altar. Here, they are asked to get right with God.. Untold thousands have hit the carpet in repentance. After the alter call pastors and leaders would pray for anyone who desired to be prayed over. S0me fell to the ground some shook under the power of God’s presence some lay in a state resembling a coma, sometimes remaining flat on the floor for hours at a time. Some participants call the experience being slain in the Spirit. Others simply refer to receiving the touch of God.
Church renewal is a term widely used by church leaders to express hope for revitalization of the Church (as well as Christianity in general) in light of the decline of Christianity in many western countries. The idea of a post-Christian era has made church renewal a popular topic of study among many commentators. Various philosophical, theological, sociological, and practical reasons have been given for the decline of Christianity and the waning influence of the church, and various ideas have been proposed to halt the decline. This has led to the rise of a number of church renewal movements, such as the emerging church movement, the missional church movement, the confessing movement, the simple church movement, New Calvinism, and New Monasticism, among others.
While the church has experienced trials throughout church history, the modern church renewal movements have arisen in response to the decline of the church in recent history
Duncan Campbell (13 February 1898 – 28 March 1972) was a Scottish preacher, who is best known for being a leader in the Lewis Awakening or Hebrides Revival, a mid-20th century religious revival in the Scottish Hebrides. The Welsh revival was not an isolated religious movement but very much a part of Britain’s modernization. The revival began in the fall of 1904 under the leadership of Evan Roberts (1878–1951), a 26-year-old former collier and minister-in-training. The revival lasted less than a year, but in that period 100,000 converts were made. Begun as an effort to kindle non-denominational, non- sectarian spirituality, the Welsh revival of 1904–05 coincided with the rise of the labor movement, socialism, and a general disaffection with religion among the working class and youths. Placed in context, the short-lived revival appears as both a climax for Non conformism and a flashpoint of change in Welsh religious life. The movement spread to Scotland and England, with estimates that a million people were converted in Britain. Missionaries subsequently carried the movement abroad; it was especially influential on the Pentecostal movement emerging in California.
Unlike earlier religious revivals that pivoted on powerful preaching, the revival of 1904–05 relied primarily on music and on paranormal phenomena as exemplified by the visions of Evan Roberts. The intellectual emphasis of the earlier revivals had left a dearth of religious imagery that the visions supplied. They also challenged the denial of the spiritual and miraculous element of scripture by opponents of the revival, who held liberal and critical theological positions. The structure and content of the visions not only repeated those of Scripture and earlier Christian mystical tradition but also illuminated the personal and social tensions that the revival addressed by juxtaposing biblical images with scenes familiar to contemporary Welsh believers.
In 1949, Campbell felt called to rejoin the Faith Mission, which provided him with a house in Edinburgh. However, his ministry took him back to Skye, where he had worked 25 years before, travelling to and from Edinburgh by motorcycle. This work was successful, leading to people being converted to Christ. He was thoroughly engaged in that work when he received the call to go to the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He initially resisted this call, but doors closed in Skye, opening the opportunity for him to go.
The call came from the Reverend James Murray MacKay, at the prompting of two Gaelic-speaking sisters in their eighties, who had been praying for revival. It was only at the third invitation that Campbell accepted. Over the following years he traveled from village to village preaching with many people being converted.
On one occasion Campbell was the main preacher at the Faith Mission Convention at Hamilton Road Presbyterian Church in Bangor, Northern Ireland, when he suddenly felt that he must leave at once, despite being engaged to speak at the closing meeting there the next day. He went (according to the call) to the island of Berneray off Harris, where he met an elder of the local church (then without a minister), who was so convinced that Campbell was coming that he had already announced the meetings at which Campbell was to preach. After several days of meetings, suddenly the island was gripped with a new awareness of God.
After unreliable reports of events on Lewis, he published a booklet, The Lewis Awakening, as an official account of this revival.
Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 – March 22, 1758) was an American revivalist, preacher, philosopher, and Congregationalist Protestant theologian. Like most of the Puritans, he held to the Reformed theology. Edwards is widely regarded as one of America’s most important and original philosophical theologians. Edwards’ theological work is broad in scope, but he was rooted in Reformed theology, the metaphysics of theological determinism, and the Puritan heritage. Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his life’s work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical fittingness, and how central The Enlightenment was to his mindset. Edwards played a critical role in shaping the First Great Awakening, and oversaw some of the first revivals in 1733–35 at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Edwards delivered the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, a classic of early American literature, during another revival in 1741, following George Whitefield’s tour of the Thirteen Colonies . Edwards died from a smallpox inoculation shortly after beginning the presidency at the College of New Jersey (Princeton).
William Franklin Graham Jr. known as Billy Graham, is an American evangelical Christian evangelist, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, who became well known internationally after 1949. He is widely regarded as the most influential preacher of the 20th century .He held large indoor and outdoor rallies; sermons were broadcast on radio and television, some still being re-broadcast into the 21st century. In his six decades of television, Graham is principally known for hosting the annual Billy Graham Crusades, which he began in 1947, until he concluded in 2005, at the time of his retirement. He also hosted the popular radio show Hour of Decision from 1950 to 1954. He repudiated segregation and, in addition to his religious aims, helped shape the worldview of a huge number of people coming from different backgrounds leading them to find a relationship between the Bible and contemporary secular viewpoints. Graham has preached to live audiences of nearly 215 million people in more than 185 countries and territories through various meetings, including BMS World Mission and Global Mission. He has also reached hundreds of millions more through television, video, film, and webcasts.
Graham was a spiritual adviser to American presidents and has provided spiritual counsel to every president. He was also lifelong friends with another televangelist and founding pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert H. Schuller, whom Graham talked into doing his own television ministry.
Graham operated a variety of media and publishing outlets. According to his staff, more than 3.2 million people have responded to the invitation at Billy Graham Crusades to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.