Book Description

This is a book about American revivalist religion and the ways in which it impacted British Christianity in nineteenth-century England. The term `revivalist' seems to have first been used in the period after the `Second Great Awakening' in the United States. It designated those individuals and churches who sought to manufacture or create revival by human endeavor rather than, as in former times, pray and wait for a sovereign move of God's Spirit. Revivalism had a number of marked features which are charted in detail in chapter 1. it was inevitably characterized by emotion, excitement and religious exercises. Particular attention has been given to ways in which the different American revivalists understood revival and the methods by which they sought to achieve it. The book includes a focus on one or two female revivalists whose work has tended to be overlocked in some studies. "A treasure trove of good things! Nigel Scotland has produced a carefully researched, well written accessible and captivating study. While the obvious revival figures are given their due, he breaks new ground with the inclusion of material on unknown or less well-known figures and types of mission. His figures come alive and are given good opportunities to speak for themselves. There is a judicious handling of controversial historiographical and historical matters. The impact of the whole is enhanced by effective graphics." ---Lisa Severine Nolland lay chaplain and tutor in Bristol, and author of a Victorian Feminist Christian: Josephine Butler, the Prostitutes and God (Paternoster, 2004) "This is a wide-ranging study which offers vivid pictures of well-known American revivalists such as Charles Finney and D.L. Moody, as well as several whose work has been given much less attention. It is particularly pleasing to have chapters on two African American women, Zilpha Elaw and Amanda Berry Smith. The influence of Phoebe Palmer and Hannah Pearsall Smith, both of whom helped to shape aspects of the nineteenth-century holiness movements, is also helpfully analyzed. This book is an excellent resource for those interested in the history of revival movements." ---Lan M. Randall Director of Research, Spurgeon's College, London, and Senior Research Fellow at the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Prague