The Church Emerges

Pioneer Development: Part TwoCamp Meetings and Revivalism

Romantic Movement

Individual at the very center of all life and all experience

Religion as a formulation of intuitive imaginative perceptions of God that tend to speak a nobler truth than that of fact or logic

Nature a revelation of Truth, the "living garment of God"

Revivalism

A phenomenon in which churches experienced an unexpected "awakening" of spiritual concern, occasioned by a special and mysterious outpouring of God's saving grace, which led to unprecedented numbers of intense and surprising conversions that "revived" the piety and power of the churches

Charles G. Finney (1792-1875)

Presbyterian-Congregationalist

Personified individualistic approach to religion

Personal religious experience basis of conversion

Personal religious experience basis of social transformation

Camp Meetings

Generated a strongly emotional personal religious experience in a woodsy setting.

One of the only large gatherings in the American Frontier during the 19th century.

Nurtured the development of Negro Spirituals

Camp Meetings

This sketch, by Benjamin Latrobe, shows the layout of an 1809 Methodist camp meeting in Fairfax County, Virginia. Men's seats were separated from the women's and the "negro tents" from the white spaces.

Camp Meetings

Camp meetings created such gusts of emotion that their original sponsors, the Presbyterians, as well the Baptists, soon repudiated them. The Methodists, however, adopted and domesticated camp meetings, where for decades they were one of the evangelical signatures of the denomination.

Camp Meetings

The number of conversions translated into the success of a camp meeting

Schedule designed to forge temporary sense of community (like an early “Woodstock”)

Decline of Camp Meetings

Change in theological winds Emotionalism failed to provide solid

grounding for belief Camp Meetings became scripted

and routine Camp grounds formed, thus

institutionalize the movement Scammers, Fakers, and Frauds