Baptistic Theologies, 2009

ere merely ‘gathering to the Lord’. Brethren carried this type of revivalism round the world. Lord Radstock, then identified with the Brethren, took it in 1874 to the fashionable salons of St Petersburg, creating an undenominational movement subsequently led 18 Finney’s thought is best illuminated by David L. Weddle, The Law Gospel: Revival and Reform in the Theology of Charles G. Finney (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985), which stresses its subject’s legal training. 19 John Kent, Holding the Fort: Studies in Victorian Revivalism (London: Epworth Press, 1978), pp. 316- 17. Richard Carwardine, ‘The Evangelist System: Charles Roe, Thomas Pulford and the Baptist Home Missionary Society’, Baptist Quarterly 28 (1980), p. 211. 21 N. T. R. Dickson, Brethren in Scotland, 1838-2000: A Social Study of an Evangelical Movement (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002), pp. 69-73. Revivals, Revivalism and the Baptists 9 by Vasilii Pashkov. 22 The Pashkovites became a major tributary to the broad stream of Russian Baptist life. During the later nineteenth century another type of revival emerged that can be called the modern style. Although related to the synthetic model, sharing many if its characteristics, it formed a distinctive response to the changing social conditions of the time. It was, in the first place, urban. There had already been a shift of Finneyite revivalism into the cities, but the new approach was actually moulded by the conditions of the urban civilisation that was coming into being around the middle of the nineteenth century. Revival leaders concentrated on large-scale efforts in industrial and commercial centres, holding meetings in vast halls and targeting, not particular congregations, but whole cities such New York, Chicago, London and Glasgow. Local leadership was in the hands of businessmen. These figures were not just laymen who happened to play a prominent part in revivals, but members of the city’s business elite who put up the money to pay for the event and expected to have a part in planning it. Thus they typically encouraged participation by the local Young Men’s Christian Association, prompting their own junior employees to help with organisation. The theology purveyed in such modern revivals, though firmly Evangelical, was neither Calvinist nor Arminian because those responsible knew that they had to appeal to both parties in order to maximise support. Consequently the events were not so much undenominational as interdenominational, encouraging co-operation by a variety of bodies and respecting the views of all of them. There was a restrained tone so that no potential supporters or attenders should be alienated. The revival events were as respectable as their bourgeois promoters. They typically concluded with after-meetings, designed to provide counselling for the spiritually anxious, which were held in private so that the discussion of personal matters should not become a m