Forerunner Of The Great Awakening

When Jesus ascended to heaven and sat down at the right hand of God the Father, He poured out His Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This significant historical and redemptive event was not the last time Christ poured out His Spirit in redemptive history. Mindful of these subsequent acts, Pentecostal Outpourings , presents historical research on revivals in the Reformed tradition during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Investigating the British Isles, it observes the outpourings experienced among Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, Irish Dissenters, Calvinistic English Baptists, and Scottish Presbyterians. It then moves on to evaluate the revival instincts among Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and the Dutch Reformed in America. May the knowledge of these outpourings of the Holy Spirit help us seek God earnestly to revive His Church once again. Table of Contents: Preface - Steve Lawson I. Revival in the British Isles 1. The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival - Eifon Evans 2. Melting the Ice of a Long Winter: Revival and Irish Dissent - Ian Hugh Clary 3. The Lord Is Doing Great Things and Answering Prayer Everywhere: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century - Michael A. G. Haykin 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective - Iain Campbell II. Revival in America 5. Edwards's Revival Instinctive and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded -Robert Davis Smart 6. The Glorious Work of God: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries - Peter Beck 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth Century - Tom Nettles 8. Dutch Reformed Church in America (the 18th century) - Joel Beeke

In the mid-eighteenth century, Americans experienced an outbreak of religious revivals that shook colonial society. This book provides a definitive view of these revivals, now known as the First Great Awakening, and their dramatic effects on American culture. Historian Thomas S. Kidd tells the absorbing story of early American evangelical Christianity through the lives of seminal figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield as well as many previously unknown preachers, prophets, and penitents.The Great Awakening helped create the evangelical movement, which heavily emphasized the individual’s experience of salvation and the Holy Spirit’s work in revivals. By giving many evangelicals radical notions of the spiritual equality of all people, the revivals helped breed the democratic style that would come to characterize the American republic. Kidd carefully separates the positions of moderate supporters of the revivals from those of radical supporters, and he delineates the objections of those who completely deplored the revivals and their wildly egalitarian consequences. The battles among these three camps, the author shows, transformed colonial America and ultimately defined the nature of the evangelical movement.

Preaching today all too often tragically misses the point. We've all heard sermons that sound more like a lecture, filling the head but not the heart. And we've all heard sermons tailored to produce an emotional experience, filling the heart but not the head. But biblical preaching both informs minds and engages hearts—giving it the power to transform lives. By the Spirit's grace, biblical preaching brings truth home from the heart of the preacher to the heart of the hearer. Joel Beeke—a pastor and professor of preaching with over four decades of experience—explores the fundamental principles of Reformed experiential preaching, examining sermons by preachers from the past and bridging the historical gap by showing pastors what the preaching of God's life-transforming truth looks like today.

This book presents a thorough investigation of the evangelistic contributions of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1692–1747/8)within the context of the First Great Awakening. In it, Scott Maze identifies the theological foundations of Frelinghuysen’s ministry, surveys his key evangelistic endeavors, and evaluates the effects these things had on the Great Awakening. This book sheds light on a lesser known figure of the Great Awakening, reveals the influence of the Dutch Further Reformation (Nadere Reformatie) in colonial North America, and provides significant insights in terms of ministry contextualization for the contemporary student of evangelism. Table of Contents: 1. A Brief Biography 2. Theological Bases 3. Evangelistic Contributions 4. Catalyst to the First Great Awakening

This collection of essays showcases the variety and complexity of early awakened Protestant biblical interpretation and practice while highlighting the many parallels, networks, and exchanges that connected the Pietist and evangelical traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. A yearning to obtain from the Word spiritual knowledge of God that was at once experiential and practical lay at the heart of the Pietist and evangelical quest for true religion, and it significantly shaped the courses and legacies of these movements. The myriad ways in which Pietists and evangelicals read, preached, translated, and practiced the Bible were inextricable from how they fashioned new forms of devotion, founded institutions, engaged the early Enlightenment, and made sense of their world. This volume provides breadth and texture to the role of Scripture in these related religious traditions. The contributors probe an assortment of primary source material from various confessional, linguistic, national, and regional traditions and feature well-known figures—including August Hermann Francke, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards—alongside lesser-known lay believers, women, people of color, and so-called radicals and separatists. Pioneering and collaborative, this volume contributes fresh insight into the history of the Bible and the entangled religious cultures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Along with the editors, the contributors to this volume include Ruth Albrecht, Robert E. Brown, Crawford Gribben, Bruce Hindmarsh, Kenneth P. Minkema, Adriaan C. Neele, Benjamin M. Pietrenka, Isabel Rivers, Douglas H. Shantz, Peter Vogt, and Marilyn J. Westerkamp.

This book is an engaging look at spiritual awakenings that have happened in the church throughout history. It examines how these extraordinary movements of God translate into the larger cultural analysis of today. Spiritual awakenings have refreshed the people of God from the very origins of the church. What about these past movements can be instructive for the church today? Can we expect God’s awakening presence in our day? These questions brought about the “Surprising Work of God Conference” in the fall of 2015 in which speakers traced awakening movements from the Old and New Testaments to the present day. Great Awakenings represents the culmination of this conference as the collected works of notable speakers. Chapters address questions about spiritual awakenings through historical, theological, and sociological lenses. They look at the events that precipitated these awakenings, evaluating whether their causes were purely religious or otherwise, and finally suggest what about the awakenings is normative for the church today.

New Jersey: A History of the Garden State presents a fresh, comprehensive overview of New Jersey’s history from the prehistoric era to the present. The findings of archaeologists, political, social, and economic historians provide a new look at how the Garden State has evolved. The state has a rich Native American heritage and complex colonial history. It played a pivotal role in the American Revolution, early industrialization, and technological developments in transportation, including turnpikes, canals, and railroads. The nineteenth century saw major debates over slavery. While no Civil War battles were fought in New Jersey, most residents supported it while questioning the policies of the federal government. Next, the contributors turn to industry, urbanization, and the growth of shore communities. A destination for immigrants, New Jersey continued to be one of the most diverse states in the nation. Many of these changes created a host of social problems that reformers tried to minimize during the Progressive Era. Settlement houses were established, educational institutions grew, and utopian communities were founded. Most notably, women gained the right to vote in 1920. In the decades leading up to World War II, New Jersey benefited from back-to-work projects, but the rise of the local Ku Klux Klan and the German American Bund were sad episodes during this period. The story then moves to the rise of suburbs, the concomitant decline of the state’s cities, growing population density, and changing patterns of wealth. Deep-seated racial inequities led to urban unrest as well as political change, including such landmark legislation as the Mount Laurel decision. Today, immigration continues to shape the state, as does the tension between the needs of the suburbs, cities, and modest amounts of remaining farmland. Well-known personalities, such as Jonathan Edwards, George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Dorothea Dix, Thomas Edison, Frank Hague, and Albert Einstein appear in the narrative. Contributors also mine new and existing sources to incorporate fully scholarship on women, minorities, and immigrants. All chapters are set in the context of the history of the United States as a whole, illustrating how New Jersey is often a bellwether for the nation..