Finney's Revivals

Charles Grandison Finney was a lawyer, not a preacher. He was studying law in Adams, New York, and bought a Bible mostly because the legal books he was reading kept quoting Moses. What he found there began to work on him. On October 10, 1821, he went into the woods north of the village, told God he would not come out until the matter was settled, and came out changed. That evening, alone in the law office, he described being met by what he called waves of liquid love — his own words, in his own account, written down decades later.

The next morning a client came to ask about his case. Finney's answer became famous: he had a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead His cause, and could not plead the man's. He was licensed to preach by the St. Lawrence Presbytery in 1824 and sent out by a small missionary society into the thinly settled counties of upstate New York. He preached the way he had argued — no manuscript, plain words, eyes on the people, driving toward a verdict tonight.

The country he worked was already known as the burned-over district: so much religious excitement had swept through it that people said there was nothing left to catch fire. It caught anyway. Evans Mills, Antwerp, Gouverneur, Western, Rome, Utica — through 1825 and 1826 the meetings ran night after night and whole towns took notice. Ministers who came to inspect him often stayed to help.

Going ahead of him, usually unnoticed, was Daniel Nash. Father Nash, as people called him, would arrive in a town weeks before Finney did, find a room, and pray — often out loud, often for named people, sometimes for hours at a stretch. He kept a book of names and marked them off. Finney was the voice the newspapers argued about; Nash was the reason there was anything to argue about. When Nash died in 1831, Finney's years of town-to-town itinerancy were nearly over too.

The methods came to be called the new measures, and they scandalized a lot of good men. Finney held meetings on consecutive nights instead of once a week. He named sins from the pulpit and sometimes named people. He set an anxious seat at the front — a bench where anyone under conviction could come and sit, in public, where the whole town could see. He let women pray aloud in meetings where men were present. None of this is strange now, which is exactly how much he changed things.

The opposition was serious and it was not stupid. Asahel Nettleton, an older evangelist with real fruit behind him, feared the measures would burn churches out and leave them colder than they were found. Lyman Beecher agreed. At the New Lebanon convention in July 1827 the two sides argued for nine days and settled almost nothing. Beecher's threat, printed later in his own Autobiography, was that if Finney tried to carry a streak of fire into Connecticut and on to Boston, he would meet him at the state line and fight him every inch of the way. Four years later Beecher invited him to preach in Boston — in his own pulpit.

Rochester, from September 1830 into the spring of 1831, is the peak and the best-documented stretch of his life. It was an Erie Canal boomtown of about ten thousand people, new money and new problems, and Finney preached there for roughly six months — three times on Sunday and three nights a week. By his own reckoning about a thousand people were converted. What people remarked on was who they were: lawyers, judges, merchants, the men who ran the place. Beecher, who never liked the methods, said afterward that the work of that year was the greatest the world had seen in so short a time — a warm sentence from a cold critic, and the ledger's best evidence that something real happened.

The converts did not stay in the pews. Finney's meetings fed the temperance societies and, more importantly, the fight against slavery: Theodore Weld, converted under his preaching at Utica, became one of the hardest-working abolitionists in America. Finney himself refused communion to slaveholders in his New York congregation. In 1835 he went to Oberlin in Ohio to teach theology, and later served as its president; Oberlin admitted black students and women when almost nowhere else would. His Lectures on Revivals of Religion, published that same year, taught a century of American preachers how to hold a meeting.

The argument goes with him. In the first of those lectures Finney wrote that a revival is not a miracle but the right use of the right means — a sentence his critics have never let go of, and one that sits oddly beside his own account of a night in a law office he did not plan and could not explain. His later teaching on original sin, on what a sinner is able to do, and on Christian perfection was disputed hard by Princeton's Charles Hodge in his own day and is disputed still. This page honors the fruit — the towns, the converts, the abolitionists — without pretending the argument was ever settled.