In 1830 the city of Rochester, New York, was rocked by week after week of spectacular revival meetings. These meetings would catapult the already well-known Charles G. Finney to national attention. Finney had been preaching periodic revivals for more than five years, but it will be the meetings at Rochester, extending well into 1831, that will make his name synonymous with American revivalism.
Finney insisted he was faithful to
Jonathan Edwards' version of Reformed theology. In time, though, his friends and
his critics agree his emphasis on individual responsibility for repentance placed
freewill in Arminian rather than Calvinistic terms. Finney's theology continues
to be hotly debated, particularly with the resurgence of Calvinism associated
with Piper, Sproul, Carson, and the Gospel Coalition. And, while Finney's
theology impacts his methods, this post will introduce the practical changes
Finney will bring into Sunday worship. These changes will impact churches in
both Reformed and Arminian traditions.
The Anxious Bench
During the extended meetings in
Rochester, Finney introduced a new practice in revivals that was both
controversial at the time, and will ultimately play a key role in changing
Sunday worship. He came to believe people who felt the need to repent and seek
God should be asked to do something. Prior to this, whatever people did in
revivals was more or less spontaneous and not limited to the end of a sermon. Finney
felt that it was in the final minutes of a gospel sermon many came to the very
edge of repentance, but hesitated and waited. That hesitation often allowed the
burning desire of repentance to ebb and cool.
In response to this, Finney's first
idea was to conclude the sermon by asking those who wanted to repent to stand
up. The results were encouraging. Some stood. Others, seeing some standing,
then also stood. He could see the presence of others standing was a great
encouragement to the hesitant. It was not long before the idea of standing gave
birth to the idea of asking people to come forward. A special front bench was
reserved for this, remaining visibly empty throughout the service until the
ending of the sermon.
If the sight of people standing
encouraged some, the sight of people actually leaving their seats and walking
forward was dramatically more effective. The movement and gathering of people
in the front naturally encouraged more unrestrained emotions. Their open
weeping and shouted prayers, heard throughout the crowd, brought forth many others
to walk, and sometimes run, forward to join them.
Never before in all church history
had a sermon concluded by asking people who needed to repent or seek salvation
to come forward. And now it was an intentionally planned moment in the meeting.
The entire sermon was geared toward this concluding appeal. Under Finney's
guidance, the entire revival service will be structured and designed with this
same climactic goal: sinners coming forward to receive Christ.
The "New Measures"
Like his role model, Jonathan
Edwards, Charles Finney carefully studied revivals. Unlike Edwards, though,
Finney's study was less to understand revival theology than to understand just when
and how revival occurred. This led him to design a structure in which revival
would dependably occur. Like the farmer who learned how to plow, when and how
to plant, how to weed and water with the confidence that, having done those
things, God will always provide the harvest, Finney believed planting the Word
of God in revival could be just as confidently planned and its outcome
predicted.
Finney's conclusions for an
effective revival can be simplified (my apologies to those who know how much complexity
I am glossing over here) into three connected stages: The Preliminaries; The
Message; The Harvest.
The Preliminaries
For Charles Finney, the
preliminaries were all the things in the meeting that lay the groundwork for
people to hear the sermon. The most important of these was music. Finney was a
good musician and had played the cello as a young man. He believed that good
music could move the heart and touch the emotions. The role of music was to do
just that. In that role, Finney favored songs that gave testimony to how
terrible was sin, how glorious was salvation, and how earnestly the love of God
calls out to every human heart.
Although Finney did not discuss
music in his lectures on revival, he clearly made great use of it in his
meetings. He employed a choir and brought Thomas Hastings with him as a musical
assistant. Hastings compiled songbooks and wrote the hymn melody most Americans
associate with Rock of Ages. Music
served as a way to draw people to the meetings and then to prepare them to be
spiritually and emotionally ready for the sermon. As D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey
will demonstrate 50 years later, uplifting and sentimental revival music is so
critical that every great revival meeting needs a music leader as much as a
preacher.
The Message
Revival sermons focus on the great
themes and stories of the gospel. The wrath of God deserved. The love of God
offered. The Prodigal returning home. The prayer from the cross in which the
Savior offers forgiveness toward those who have up to that point rejected him. These
powerful themes and passages were joined with dramatic descriptions of hell and
of heaven. Stories of a wayward sinner's mother faithfully praying night after
night for her sinner son to repent tore at the heart strings of grown men in
this highly sentimental culture.
Finally, the sermon would turn
toward a great call, a glorious appeal, for the Prodigals to return and for
sinners to answer their mothers' prayers. People would, of course, know there
was a place down front where those deeply moved and touched by the Spirit of
God would be invited to come. The faithful listened in those final moments and silently prayed for the time of harvest they knew was coming.
Finally, the sermon ends with a
great call for all those far away to come home. And, to come home by coming
down. There is no actual evidence of a formal "invitation hymn" in
the 1830s (as there will clearly be later), but it is reasonable to assume
music was employed. In any case, we know dozens, often hundreds, would come
forward at Finney's revivals. They would sit or kneel and pray for God's grace.
Often, retaining at least an outward framework of Calvinism, they would plead
for God to remember them. That is, to have included them within the predestined
elect. The incongruency of a man tearfully pleading with God to have, since
before creation, unconditionally included him within the number of the elect, is
typical of the tension between Calvinism and revivalism.
Sunday Worship in Oberlin
What happens in the Sunday worship at the First Congregational Church in Oberlin is as understandable
as it is revolutionary. Charles Finney simply brings his three-stage structure
for a revival meeting and incorporates it into weekly Sunday worship.
To understand how easily this
occurs, you need to recall what I shared in the previous post about Finney, Sola Scriptura. The church in Oberlin,
like most American churches, already approached Sunday worship as the Service of
the Word, alone. Scripture reading, music, prayer, and preaching were already
the normal fare for Sunday worship.
The difference was that Sunday
worship was, up to then, approached as a gathering of the church. Scripture
readings could be quite lengthy. Sermons were addressed to believers, with
their purpose being to strengthen and deepen people who had long identified
themselves as Christians. The music of worship was music believers addressed to
God in terms of worship. O Come All Ye
Faithful presumed those singing were already faithful. All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name presumed those singing were the
saved already joining the sacred throng
and prostrate angels in worship.
In the Sunday worship Charles Finney will
introduce in the 1840s, the assumed purpose of Sunday worship in the minds of people
does not change overnight. It is likely Finney, himself, does not abandon that
assumption. He is merely changing a few details of procedure. But, in very powerful ways, how we practice worship will, over time, influence what we think about worship.
What he does might be presented as simplifying
Sunday worship. Oh, and this simplified structure also tends to reward the
church that adopts it with increased numbers of decisions (or prayerful
appeals). There are some other changes, too. Extended scripture readings will need
to be gradually reduced and then abandoned. Those planning and leading music
will begin to see its role as, at least partly, preparing people for the
sermon. And, just as in the revival, the high point of the service will
increasingly feel like the conclusion of the sermon and any responses that
follow.
By 1900, a large number of churches
with strong links to revivals, Methodists, Baptists, and many others, will have
naturally adopted Finney's revival structure for Sunday worship. Music written
for revivals will be added into Sunday worship, gradually replacing older
hymns. By 1950, especially among groups that resisted theological liberalism, Finney's
three-stage structure in Sunday worship will be everywhere. A person could visit
a Methodist church one Sunday, a Baptist church the next, a Nazarene church the
next and then a Christian church: all of them would have the same basic
structure (preliminaries into sermon into invitation), the same revival congregational
music sung, and sermons on gospel themes all ending with what might be exactly
the same invitation hymn, Just As I Am.
In the next and final post of this
series, we will finally address head-on the statement that has run throughout
the titles of these posts: How Charles Finney ruined Sunday Worship. And, I
will return to a statement made in the introductory post. I believe these
changes have both prostituted worship and undermined evangelism by redefining
both.
2 comments:
Thank you for boldly and fairly examining Finney's influence on the life of the church. Over a hundred years of pragmatism have caused us to assume that our contemporary worship practices are in essence the same as those of the New Testament church - or at least those of Brother Campbell.
I'm looking forward to your third installment.
I have enjoyed the first three episodes (intro and parts 1 and 2) and am looking forward to the next one.
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