At certain times during the Christian era, social, spiritual, and political forces have converged to create an environment primed for a revival. Such an alignment occurred exactly 150 years ago—seemingly a most unlikely time for God to do a new thing.

In Britain, Queen Victoria ruled over a vast bureaucratic Empire, but even outside the British sphere of influence, the Victorian Age was characterized by a love of orderliness and a sense of upper-class Anglo-Saxon superiority—what Rudyard Kipling infamously labeled "the white man's burden." Notably, it was also the time of the industrial revolution: a birth of factories and mass production. Their era's prosperous, mechanizing mood affected not only the way Victorians treated their servants and made their furniture, but also the way they preached the Gospel.

That is, until 1854. In that year, three men launched ministries that would shake their comfortable churches to the core.

The first rule of medicine is that a ...

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