Baptistic Theologies, 2009

to precipitate an awakening. The Congregational style, however, in which a revival was a response to a minister’s forceful preaching, was taken up by Baptists, who turned it into their predominant technique in the American South. The Methodist approach deeply influenced them too, for the revivals among Baptists became more like their Methodist equivalents as the nineteenth century progressed. Many Baptists, furthermore, adopted the synthetic model for planned revivals during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The modern style, with its mass urban missions, attracted much Baptist support, and its greatest exponent, Billy Graham, was a Baptist. With the phenomenon of revival becoming global during the twentieth century, 31 Stuart Piggin, Firestorm of the Lord: The History of and Prospects for Revival in the church and the World (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2000), pp. 77-9. 32 Toivo Pilli, ‘Towards a Revived Identity: Estonian Baptists , 1970-1985’, in Corrado and Pilli (eds). Eastern European Baptist History, pp. 154-6. Revivals, Revivalism and the Baptists 13 Baptists played a full part, from the outworking of the Welsh revival to the spread of charismatic renewal. As approaches changed over the years, Baptists were willing to enter into different styles of revivalism. The third comment, however, is that the subject is worthy of much closer attention than it has been given. George Rawlyk has examined certain Baptist revivalists of the Canadian Maritimes and their predecessors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but not the particular congregations that were stirred under their preaching. Ian Balfour has scrutinised Charlotte Baptist Chapel, Edinburgh, as closely as any congregation of the denomination in any country, and its 1905 revival is part of the story. 4 But the revival is only one incident in a long narrative, whose focus inevitably turns to many other issues. Others have written of revival episodes in their lands: Toivo Pilli, for example, has discussed the Effataa Revival of Estonia. Yet there is scope for much more detailed analysis of revival events, examining the individuals involved, whether as revivalists or converts, the social context, in the local community as well as in the broader region, and the ideas that were current, both religious and secular. Such a holistic approach, encompassing the piety and culture of the participants in an awakening, promises to reveal more than we already know about the changing dynamics of revivalism/ It will be instructive to discover the ways in which Baptists experienced outpourings of the Spirit that brought quickening to their churches and conversion to sinners. Professor David W. Bebbington, University of Stirling, Scotland. 33 Rawlyk, Canada Fire. 34 Ian L. S. Balfour, Revival in Rose Street: Charlotte Baptist Chapel, Edinburgh, 1808-2008 (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2007). 35 Pilli, ‘Towards a Revived Iden