Can It Happen Again?

“…if My people…will humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face…” (2 Chronicles 7:14).

The 1850s in the U.S. were remarkably similar to today.  The nation was divided over the question of slavery [now abortion].  The 1849 gold rush [now oil rush] had created immense wealth for some while leaving many more others impoverished and destitute.  Much greed created a whole host of financial and social problems.  The country had entered a recession.  Unemployment was high.  Morality was in decline.
Just a few decades earlier, the Second Great Awakening had restored religion to a fever pitch, leading some to believe that Jesus was coming back at any time.  The result was many saved souls and redeemed lives.  Novel religious ideas, including Seventh Day Adventism and Christian Science, also began to spring up, but by the 1850s, the religious fervor was already on the wane.
The economic panic of October 14, 1857, saw over 5,000 businesses fail and the stock market fall 66 percent in a five-year period.  The panic spread to other parts of the world as a great Civil War loomed on the horizon.  Economic recovery wouldn’t begin until eight bloody years later.
In the late summer of 1857, the Old Dutch Reformed Church in lower Manhattan, New York City, decided to close its doors.  One of its members, though, Jeremiah Lanphier, didn’t think it would be right to leave that part of the city without a gospel witness, so he went door-to-door to try to convince people to come to the church.  When his plan failed miserably, he decided to do what many Christians do as a last resort when things don’t turn out as hoped or planned:  he decided to pray.
Passing out fliers in the area, he invited people to a one-hour, lunch-time prayer meeting, and at noon on September 23, what became known as the Fulton Street Revival began, with Lanphier the only person in attendance for most of the hour.  But at 12:30, he heard others coming in, and before the meeting was dismissed at one o’clock, six people had shown up to pray.
Undaunted, Lanphier held another meeting the next week and 14 people showed up, and then 23 the week after that, and then 40 the following week.  Encouraged, the prayer warriors soon decided to meet daily and were amazed as the numbers quickly swelled to the thousands at various locations around the city.  The financial crisis turned people to God in droves.  By the end of that October, revival spread northward to Ontario, Canada, and down the eastern seaboard of the U.S. into the South.  By March, 1858, New York City alone witnessed 10,000 businessmen praying regularly in packed churches and halls at lunchtime and in the evening.
Historians estimate that out of a total U.S. population of only 35 million, over a million people were saved during this short-lived period.  If a similar revival was to break out in America, an estimated 9 to 10 million people would be saved.
The long-term results of the Fulton Street Revival?  A veritable Golden Age:  charitable organizations to help the poor and the needy; the start of the YMCA; the beginning of the Sunday School movement; preachers like D.L. Moody and John Wanamaker; Christian standards such as “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” were written, as well as the incredible musical catalogue of Fannie Crosby.
And God used that revival mightily throughout the whole world.  England saw the conversion of a million people; the Salvation Army was formed; the China Inland Mission was founded by Hudson Taylor; Zulu and Banta tribesmen came to Christ in Africa; natives were saved on the South Pacific islands; Muslims were saved in the East Indies; Christian conversions on a large scale occurred in Jamaica and South America.
Can something like this, even on a small scale, happen today?  That depends on you and me.  Are we willing to humble ourselves and pray and seek God’s face?
–The Fulton Street Revival, 1857