Baptistic Theologies, 2009

n Australia, for example, there was a powerful revival among Indigenous Australians in 1978-79. Beginning while the missionaries were away, it involved vivid dreams and, unusually in that 24 Noel Gibbard, Fire upon the Altar: A History and Evaluation of the 1904-05 Welsh Revival (Bridgend: Bryntirion Press, 2005). 23 Noel Gibbard, On the Wings of the Dove (Bridgend: Bryntirion Press, 2002). ~ 6 Stanley, Baptist Missionary Society, p. 273. 27 Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univerity Press, 2001), chap. 6. 28 Stanley C. Griffin, A Forgotten Revival: East Anglia and NE Scotland - 1921 (Bromley, Kent: Day One, n.d.), p. 17. 29 Kevin Ward, ‘The East African Revival of the Twentieth Century: The Search for an Evangelical African Christianity’, in Cooper and Gregory (eds), Revival and Resurgence, pp. 365-87. 30 Stanley, Baptist Missionary Society, p. 347. 12 Baptistic Theologies 31 culture, the transfer of leadership in the church from women to men. This awakening owed something to the charismatic renewal that had drastically affected many churches throughout the world from the 1960s. For many, it was the chief vehicle for revival in the late twentieth century. Its global reach is illustrated by its impact in the Baltic republic of Estonia when in the 1970s the country was still a part of the Soviet Union. During the Effataa Revival in a Tallinn Baptist church, a music group led healing services with charismatic signs that attracted visitors from other Soviet republics. So popular were the Russian-language meetings that they were T9 suppressed in 1981 after pressure from the Soviet authorities. Charismatic renewal was drastically affecting certain Baptists even on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. It is an example of the way in which forms of revival were globalised during the twentieth century. Overall, what can be concluded about the relationship of Baptists to revival? In the first place it is evident that Baptists have participated in revival events over the centuries. They contributed significantly to each of the categories considered at the start of this paper. The most obvious instance of a series of planned events was the sequence of crusades over six decades led by Billy Graham. Spontaneous happenings in particular congregations were common among the Separate Baptists of America in the eighteenth century. And the place of Baptists in spontaneous awakenings over whole regions is represented by the role of R. B. Jones in the Welsh revival of 1904-05. Baptists had no monopoly of any of these expressions of the revival tradition, for they participated alongside members of other denominations. But Baptists were prominent in them all. It is also evident, secondly, that Baptists were not wedded exclusively to one style of revival. They did not espouse the Presbyterian model, since a communion season did not exist among them