Baptistic Theologies, 2009

le congregation. A revival on the Mizoram field of the Baptist Missionary 1 Christian Advocate [American Methodist periodical], quoted by Wesley Banner (London), February 1849. 2 Timothy Larsen, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 4. 3 George Rawlyk, The Canada Fire: Radical Evangelicalism in British North America, 1775-1812 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994). 2 Baptistic Theologies Society in north-east India in 1919, the most spectacular instance of church growth in the society’s twentieth-century history, is a good example of an occurrence of this type that drastically affected the course of life in a whole region. 4 An awakening, fifthly, may even be a development in a culture at large, usually being both wider and longer than other episodes of this kind. The eighteenth-century movement called the Great Awakening in America or the Evangelical Revival in the British Isles, in reality a single transatlantic phenomenon, illustrates this type. So revivals have taken a variety of forms. Here the smallest and the largest types will be left aside, and the analysis will concentrate on those awakenings that consisted of events: the second, third and fourth of the categories that have been listed. What, then, have been the characteristics of the revivals in towns or regions, whether planned or spontaneous? What different styles have there been? It can be suggested that awakenings can be analysed in terms of a number of models. Much of the material will refer to Christian bodies other than the Baptists, because members of the denomination were rarely innovators in this field. Rather, Baptists usually copied and were influenced by other denominations. These patterns are no more than approximations to the reality they describe, ideal types in the terminology of Max Weber. Not all the specified characteristics were present in every given instance. But the various traditions do give a sense of the trajectory of revivalism over time, illuminating the context in which Baptist revivals have taken place. One is the Presbyterian model. The revival in the modern sense was a Scottish discovery of the seventeenth century. There had been innumerable earlier movements of renewal: in fifteenth-century Italy, for example, Franciscan preachers practised something close to later revivalism. 5 A recognisable tradition of revivals, however, began only after the Reformation. The Presbyterian pattern had a number of specific features. It was firmly controlled by the parish minister, who called in elders of the parish and other ministers to help, and so was carefully supervised. Because of this high degree of discipline, the Presbyterian revival was orderly. It was undemonstrative, or, if it contained elements of excitement, they were restrained. The doctrine preached was Calvinistic. Consequently there was an awareness tha