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The Rise of the Evangelicals
Evangelicalism was once a tiny reform movement, one that was amazingly successful, says Mark Noll.
posted 8/08/2008 12:33PM
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There were some other individuals who became very important. John Wesley got back to England from Georgia in 1738 and almost immediately took a trip to Eastern Saxony to visit Zinzendorf's Moravian turf. When he was there, he spent most of his time recording the testimony of conversions of ordinary Moravian people, some who had become leaders but not learned academics, and these people had a terrific influence on John Wesley.
Shortly after getting back from that trip to Saxony, John and Charles Wesley broke with the Moravians for some fairly complex theological reasons. But there was very strong personal influence.
Second, the Moravians were the pioneers in what we would today know as evangelical hymnody. Hymnody in Britain and in America had been singing the Psalms until Isaac Watts. There was a beginning of a non-Psalm hymn-singing, but this was given a terrific impetus by the Moravians who were writing all sorts of Christ-centered, grace-centered, conversion-centered hymns. Of course, Charles Wesley and many other leaders of the evangelical movement became deeply committed to this hymn-writing enterprise. The hymns were the Christian instruction and the Christian language of ordinary people and had a tremendous impact, both as expressing and teaching the rudiments of the newfound evangelical faith.
The third was the small groups. The Moravians had been practicing a kind of small-group organization from the 1670s that developed in a couple of different forms, and they brought that to London for other German speakers. They had no real interest in making English converts. They were just in Britain briefly before they headed off to Ireland and Georgia and other places. But so impressive were these meetings, and leading Anglicans were so longing for spiritual renewal, that some of them attended and took heart. John Wesley's own experience of grace at Aldersgate is at a Moravian-type small-group meeting in the spring of 1738.
And the Moravians were the first to be very successful in preaching to the slaves.
That would be a fourth thing. The Moravians were the era's most committed and most successful Protestant missionaries. In some ways they were only doing what the Jesuits and other Catholics had done for 150 years. They were the pioneers in preaching with any positive results to Native Americans and to African Americans. They were more successful at first in the West Indies but eventually on the continent too. And that missionary spirit obviously would have a tremendous impact on Protestants. captionhough when we get to real serious English language cross-cultural missionary work, it comes more out of the Puritan strand and the English Baptists that lead to William Carey, but that's actually in the 1790s. So even the dates are significant. Moravians are doing cross-cultural missionary work in the early 1730s in Greenland, West Indies, and eventually the American continent with Native Americans. It's not until 1791 or 1792 that you get to Carey and the mission to India.
It can be easy to forget that evangelicalism is a very English phenomenon.
London is the key city for the evangelical movement at least to the time of the American Revolution and probably we could argue into the mid-19th century. London was the clearinghouse of people, ideas, books, and so forth.
Jonathan Edward's tract A Faithful Narrative, which is the key early document that more or less outlined what a local revival is supposed to look like, doesn't really make an impact until it's published in London. And that was already two years or more after the events he described had taken place. But once it's published in London with the approval of, among others, Issac Watts, who's fairly elderly by this time, then everybody hears about it. People are reading it in England and Scotland, and then they read about it in South Carolina, Philadelphia, and then eventually also in New England.
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