Preachers & Evangelists Billy Graham's America Southern sensibilities, media savvy, denominational openness, and an expanding social vision helped turn a country boy evangelist into a cultural icon. Grant Wacker
Grant Wacker, professor of Christian History at Duke University and a member of the Christian History advisory board, is working on a cultural biography of Graham, titled Billy Graham's America, to be published by Harvard University Press in 2011. … More …
After World War II ended, a world of evangelistic opportunities opened up. One significant catalyst of missionary interest among young people was InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. A missions-minded organization since its founding in Great Britain, IVCF caught on quickly at American universities after 1939 and in 1945 merged with the American-born Student Foreign Mission Fellowship, appointing J. Christy Wilson Jr. as its missionary secretary. Against opposition from both mainline denominations and fundamentalist groups, Wilson launched the first InterVarsity student missions convention at the University of Toronto a year later. The event drew 567 students and featured such prominent speakers as Harold John Ockenga. In 1948 a second convention was held at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Ever since then, the triennial conference has become known simply as "Urbana" and now attracts some 20,000 students.
By Elesha Coffman, assistant professor of history at Waynesburg University in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, senior editor of Christian History magazine, and Christian History blogger
This list represents my own perhaps quirky take on the Protestant mainline in America. My primary interest is not theological development (for that, see Gary Dorrien's series The Making of American Liberal Theology), nor institutional history (a recent exemplar is Margaret Lamberts Bendroth's A School of the Church), but the logic of the mainline—how thinkers within that tradition made decisions, and lived them out, and what they believed was at stake.
Recently, Lifeway Research published a study that showed that unchurched people "prefer churches that look more like a medieval cathedral than … [like] a more contemporary church building" by "a nearly 2-to-1 ratio over any other option." Indeed, unchurched people "may be turned off by … more utilitarian church buildings."
November 7, 739 (traditional date): Willibrord, a missionary monk who was trained in Ireland and traveled over northwestern Europe, dies. Called the "Apostle of Frisia," he was highly instrumental in the conversions of Germany and Scandinavia (see issue 63: Conversion of the Vikings).
November 7, 1637: Anne Hutchinson is convicted of spreading heresy and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her idea that believers are so united with the Holy Spirit that human categories (like moral law) are irrelevant, and her claim of direct revelation from the Holy Spirit rather than Scripture, caused many of her supporters (including influential minister John Cotton) to back off. Hutchinson was later killed in New York in an American Indian raid (see issue 41: The American Puritans).
November 7, 1837: Presbyterian minister and abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy is murdered in Alton, Illinois. A newspaper editor whose press was destroyed by vandals three times, he was accused of inciting slaves to revolt when he defended a black man burned at the stake by a mob. When another mob tried to burn down his warehouse, Lovejoy was shot trying to save it. His death helped to galvanize the abolitionist movement (see issue 33: Christianity and the Civil War).
"When God gets ready to shake America, He may not take the Ph.D. and the D.D. God may choose a country boy … God may choose the man that no one knows, a little nobody, to shake America for Jesus Christ in this day, and I pray that He would!"
