Baptistic Theologies, 2009

atter for public gaze. The professional approach extended to the individuals who led the revivals. Already there had been a tendency for individual ministers, such as the Irish-American Methodist James Caughey, to concentrate on leading revivals, but now there emerged a class of professional revivalists, credited with special expertise in conducting mass meetings. One, for example, was Henry Varley, an undenominational preacher who spanned the world with his travels. All these features were suited to the expectations of a modern commercial society. 22 Sharyl Corrado, 'The Gospel in Society: Pashkovite Social Outreach in Late Imperial Russia’, in Sharyl Corado and Toivo Pilli (eds). Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives (Prague: International Baptist Theological Seminary, 2007), p. 53. 10 Baptistic Theologies The archetypal episode in this category was the so-called ‘Businessmen’s Revival’ of 1857-58. Starting in New York, it spread to other American cities. Although it was a more spontaneous awakening than later events of this kind, lacking a single professional preacher in any of the places where it took hold, it was definitely businesslike. Typically there was a noon prayer meeting timed to coincide with the commercial lunch break so that no trading hours would be lost. Gatherings were all carefully scheduled by the clock, never continuing beyond the stated hour. - This was the model adopted in the 1870s by Dwight L. Moody, the doyen of professional revivalists, though he added the attractions of song supplied by his colleague Ira D. Sankey. The tradition became cruder in the early years of the twentieth century as showmanship took over. Thus Billy Sunday, the leading American evangelist of his day, engaged in knockabout polemics on the platform. This was the phase of revivalism satirised in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry (1927). The tradition, however, was to be rehabilitated by Billy Graham from the 1940s. Graham’s crusades were organised by his efficient team all over the world. The evangelist was a Southern Baptist, and many Baptists gave him their support, but his meetings were scrupulously interdenominational. His missions were also urban in focus, businesslike in method, restrained in atmosphere and professional in leadership. There was nothing spontaneous about these epitomes of the modern style of revival, but they represented the most obvious form of the phenomenon in the later twentieth century. The years after 1900 were nevertheless marked by a wide range of revivals of varying kinds all over the world. The style commonly mingled elements of the synthetic and the modern, but often, too, there was a large element of the unplanned that drew on indigenous cultural influences. The epicentre for much of the global spread was the Welsh Revival of 1904-05, an occurrence that affected virtually the whole principality. The first revival stirrings occurred before the begin