1 of 3

Sallie Norris Hobart was worried. She and her husband, Calvin, had just moved into a raw frontier neighborhood on the Illinois prairie, and she did not see how her family was going to hold on to their religious life. There were rough and worldly families among their neighbors, and she feared her children, if deprived of religious privileges, might fall in with their drinking, dancing, gambling, and brawling.

Then came Levin Green, a Methodist preacher. He could barely read, and he murdered the King’s English, but, as Sallie’s son Chauncey remembered, “To him, God, eternity, death, the resurrection, the judgment, heaven and hell, were vivid and solemn realities. … He spoke as if these were actually present, being seen and felt by him.”

Green was the first of a series of Methodist preachers who, along with several additional religious families, helped create a flourishing religious community in the Hobarts’ neighborhood. Young Chauncey Hobart felt a close relation to all these people, and he came to expect that he too would, sooner or later, experience religion and thus “find all that these so joyfully narrated.” Sallie Hobart at age 89 was still testifying in love feasts how God answered her prayers in sending Levin Green to minister to her family’s needs.

On the frontier, the Methodists excelled in building families-in-communities. These communities were woven together by family prayer, neighborhood prayer meetings, class meetings, quarterly meetings, love feasts, and camp meetings. These rituals reinforced the faith of frontier families and, in turn, changed the nature of those families.

Leading the family in prayer was a duty enforced upon all Methodist heads of families. It was also a ritual faithful itinerant preachers led when they visited homes.

Circuit preachers would visit the various households in their memberships and use family prayer to attend especially to the “rising generation,” as the Methodist Discipline told them to do. William Fee remembered George Washington Maley, an early Ohio circuit rider, as a particularly impressive children’s pastor. “The whole family where he visited would often be bathed in tears. He appeared to understand the character and the peculiarities of every child. He prayed for all, and we thought he prayed for everything.”

Family prayer yielded a harvest of Christian converts. David Sullins, a Tennessee preacher, recalled that the first convert from his parents’ “family altar” was his father. His mother, during one sleepless night, had told her husband, “Nathan, we can never bring up the children right without family prayers.”

“Well, … what are we to do, Becky? I can’t pray.”

Mother Sullins insisted her reluctant husband could and should pray. She induced him to do his duty by promising to take turns leading. Nathan Sullins had joined the church some time before as a “seeker on probation,” but when it came to his turn to pray in his family, it seemed like God had sought him out. “Father dropped on his knees and, stammering and choking, began. Soon, under a crushing sense of sin and helplessness, he began to confess and cry for pardoning mercy. Mother prayed and cried, and the Comforter came, and light broke in, and father was converted at family prayers.”

Thirteen children were reared around that family altar, and later, all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren “old enough to know and love Jesus” were Christians.

Among Methodists, the “class meeting” worked hand in hand with the prayer meeting to nurture frontier faith. James B. Finley’s story illustrates how.

next page... |  1 of 3

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help