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A recent article in the Boston Globe discerns a spiritual "New Day" in New England—a day in which evangelical Christianity has penetrated even the liberal fortress of Harvard and stands poised for a full-blown regional revival.

To some modern-day evangelicals this may seem a bizarre—if welcome—a piece of news. On a level with God's bulletin to Jonah that Nineveh would at last be saved. New England, such skeptics would say, long ago slid into a spiritual funk that has got to have John Winthrop (of Puritan "City on a Hill" fame) rolling around in his grave.

Never mind the glory days of Jonathan Edwards and his Northampton, Massachusetts-based Great Awakening (see last week's newsletter), the evangelical skeptic might say. In a time when Harvard Divinity School students eviscerate their Bibles and celebrate "Coming Out Day" to affirm their homosexual colleagues, this spiritual legacy is long buried. No, the Unitarians and other liberals have, the critic would say, definitively won the day in that erstwhile blessed region, and God has passed over the land of his chosen (Puritan) children, moving on to revive hearts where the prospects seem more promising.

As usual, it's time for a history lesson. Not all has been bleak in the New England of these past two centuries. If space allowed, we could dwell on the nineteenth-century successes of the Adoniram Judson Gordons and D. L. Moodys.

Well, maybe we have a little space. We forget, for example, that Moody, the man whose name was synonymous with American revivalism during the last few decades of the nineteenth century, was closely tied to his birthplace of Northfield, Massachusetts. Though most famously associated with the Chicago college and related ministries that bear his name, Moody established a vital work in Northfield that did much to keep the revival fires burning in New England and around the world.

This work was the Northfield Conference series, held each summer under Moody's sponsorship from 1880 through his death in 1899 (the conferences continued into the twentieth century, but their influence waned). The well-attended conferences focused on Bible teaching and spiritual renewal. Renewing countless Christians, the conferences majored on Moody's favorite theme: the power of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life.

The most lasting impact of the Northfield conference came in 1886, when it spun off a student arm. At the students' first meeting, 100 pledged their lives to foreign missions. From that nucleus grew the influential "Student Volunteer Movement," with its missionary battle cry, "the evangelization of the world in this generation."

From this turn-of-the-century peak, the church in New England did seem to enter a decades-long doldrums, as America descended from its Victorian heyday of Christian cooperation into the fundamentalist-modernist division. In the 1920s and 30s, it seemed conservative Christians were becoming too busy "fighting the fight" to work towards a general revival.

In New England the problem was made particularly acute by the continuing spread of Unitarianism. This Yankee denomination's wide-open approach to the faith resulted (even in the opinion of the denomination's own historians) in a significant falling-off of church attendance in the region through the whole of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth.

Enter a New Hampshire layman named J. Elwin Wright.

In 1897, concerned about these signs of morbidity in his beloved church, Wright's father Joel, a Pentecostal minister, had founded the "first Fruit Harvesters' Association" from a headquarters in New Hampshire. This was a group of Pentecostal churches that worked together to build up the faith in the whole region of New England.

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December (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47