Evangelists: The Quarry From Which We were Hewn Part Two

Author: Michael Gott

. . . Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn.   Isaiah 51:1, NIV

Let us try to recapture all the atmosphere which surrounded the ministry of the early American evangelists from the Methodist circuit riders to the bold Baptist exhorters to the Presbyterian evangelists who swept across America by the thousands as passionate messengers of God with God’s flaming fire within.

Most of these itinerants lived off the land, and they were barely able to provide for their own families. For example, Methodist circuit riding evangelists were paid a scant sixty-four dollars a year; but there are no existing written records of their complaints or of expressions of self-pity. Their reward was an incredible harvest of souls. As proof, Methodists grew from 15,000 to 850,000 in about fifty years. What soul winners they were!

The word of God totally captured their thinking and sermon preparation. On several occasions these rough-hewn evangelists admitted, “I read nothing all the winter but my Bible.” As a result, uneducated exhorters preached messages that had the force of a flaming sword. Their sentences were punctuated with scripture.

Their preaching was immensely practical and at times terrifyingly pointed. They lived among the people of the community. They often prepared their sermons as they observed people in any number of everyday situations. They used a kind of forceful, pile-driving technique in preaching. That is, they kept driving away at a single point until it was definitely understood in the minds of all the hearers. These evangelists preached sermons of short, powerful sentences. They often used a kind of platform theatrics dramatizing sinners in conversation with Satan. They told of dying children and heaven’s host welcoming a Christian safely home. They saw nothing wrong with this approach.

Their sermons were folksy but zealous, and they certainly preached for a verdict, an immediate, heartfelt response, and never for contemplation. They made it all too clear that a person could do whatever he chose with the message of God — that is, receive it or reject it — but a decision had to be made. They were always ruthlessly honest. Yet each of them seemed to have his own individual charming style of communicating. While they always had flaming evangelistic zeal, it was coupled with warmly emotional appeals that moved the heart.

All of them without any exception had a clear sense of calling; often, it was as definite as their conversation. They would certainly agree with Vance Havner, who said nearly a hundred years later, “A man cannot really preach until preach he must. If he can do something else, he probably should.”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones would also strike fire with them. He said, “A man should only enter the Christian ministry if he cannot stay out of it.” They all spoke of being called by God.

Most were people known for extended prayer times in private; some prayed for entire days on end. Often, they prayed at daybreak in passionate pleading with God. Many had “prayer trances” with dreams and visions accompanying their praying. This feature was common among most of them.

The greatness of these exhorting evangelists was their transparent humanity. They were not some lofty “bishop from afar” but tough grained men who wore the clothes and used the language of the people. They fully understood the business of living so they were never in theological clouds, and they never had to come down to get to the people, for they lived among them.

Some historians said of these homespun evangelists, the devil was as real to them as George Washington, and hell was as much a place as Pittsburgh! They felt they could not be too plain, and sinners were often reminded of the “awful danger” of going to hell and the terrible miseries of torment as a result. Deep concern frequently overwhelmed their souls. They were spellbinders who literally believed what the Bible said so thoroughly that all their listeners did also — for them the term “hell-fire preacher” was coined.

Like a swarm of honeybees they cross-pollinated the frontier with a deep awe of God, and they preached clothed with authority from heaven. They were so very much at home with the supernatural, which was as real to them as the world in which they lived.

They most certainly believed in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the need of an awakening, and they sought for a real stirring of God among the common people. They all held these unchanging principles. They themselves had a great hunger in their own hearts for revival, a kind of constant yearning toward the Almighty God. They longed for Spirit-led, ruthless, honest obedience.

They clearly saw the open vulgarity of the frontier and the growing vice of the emerging settlements. They called out loudly as God’s prophets in the American wilderness; they were an authentic voice. They preached with the fire of the Holy Ghost, calling for the urgency of repentance. If a person had to choose a key word that characterized them, it might be the word urgency. They were not only sincere but desperately earnest. No one could deny it.

In their sermons none was spared, not the smug and respectable Pharisee nor the greedy, fallen publican with an insatiable thirst for wickedness or wanton pleasure. For example, when evangelist Peter Cartwright learned that General Andrew Jackson was in the throng of listeners, he called out his name and told him that his only hope was to repent before God. Jackson later said if he had a hundred men like Cartwright, he could win any battle! That brawny, rugged courage characterized all of them. Many were mavericks who took orders directly, they believed, from God, and they did or said what they were told.

All about them, however, was not totally positive, and we should not glamorize them to the point of sinless sainthood.

Most detested the idea of any broader education. The Bible, the hymn book, and possibly one or two other religious classics were all they read. To most of them, there were two kinds of ministry — evangelistic and educated. For the most part educated ministry was looked upon with outspoken suspicion.

These pioneer evangelists longed for thundering and lightning any time they stood to preach. To them worship without excitement, tears without glory, and shouts without repentance were a sham if they did not produce true, life-changing conversions.

Often, they were so eccentric that they provoked controversy, and they were guilty at times of being overly zealous. They were accused of causing “disorderly tumults and indecent behavior.”

Some of these men established churches, but the rough and shaggy camp meeting spirit of the frontier had to be refined, combed, and groomed before it could ever be married to established churches now emerging in growing population centers.

These men were sometimes ridiculed by secular writers and became the laughing stock of some satirists and humorists. Later on, even Mark Twain took a shot or two at them. In the end, they seem to have gotten the last laugh based on the lasting influence they had on American life. Also, they were enormously popular, and those who openly criticized them ran the risk of damaging their own reputations. The significance of their contribution to the spiritual life of America even to this day stands out clearly.

They were a kind of unique combination between Daniel Boone and John the Baptist in the emerging, expanding American wilderness. They were out to prepare the way for the Lord.

To give a final illustration of the solid character of these early pioneer-evangelists and to bring the story further west, I offer this.

McBeth, in Texas Baptists: A Sesquicentennial History, says the first sermon ever preached by a Baptist in Texas was preached in 1820 by a preacher named Joseph Bayes. At that time Texas belonged to Mexico, and the Mexican government expected people who came to Texas to become Mexican citizens and live by Mexican law.

There was no religious freedom. The Catholic church was in total control of all religious activities, and they forbade teaching or preaching except by Catholic priests. Bayes scoffed! He said,

and started evangelizing people along the Sabine River in East Texas.

He did this defiant preaching for almost three years before he was arrested. He was taken to the regional judicial center of San Antonio to await trial. While he waited, this bold Baptist exhorter decided to overpower his guards, clubbing them senseless with their rifle butts, and then he fled to Louisiana. There he and his son prepared to return to Texas with Moses Austin and others to fight with Sam Houston. He was at the final battle at San Jacinto when Texas won its independence, and then he went back to God’s work! To them it was simple; one had to be done before they could do the other — it was all part of their world at that time.

With the war over Joseph Bayes and other preachers like Z. N. Morrell claimed by faith that they would evangelize Texas for the Lord. All this speaks of their souls’ being aflame and burning within to preach Jesus. They were full of evangelistic passion, believing God had sent them to Texas for His sovereign purpose. Therefore, nothing would deter them; not the now defeated Mexican government, not a discredited General Santa Anna, not war-like Cherokee Indians, not swollen rivers, and not a roadless republic, and not miles and miles of untamed wilderness!

These early American evangelists over a 150 year period of time proved one point — the common man commissioned by God and set on fire by the Spirit of God was the backbone of evangelism in early America. That is certainly their lasting legacy.

And so why at this moment in time look back? Winston Churchill tells us why in one simple sentence, “The further back you look, the further forward you can see.” This is our heritage and history with God’s thumb print clearly on it. So it is, as C. S. Lewis said, “History is a story written by the finger of God.”

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