Maya Angelou once said, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.” She’s right. If we desire to understand the present, we profit from learning about the past.
And yet the difficult part about gazing into our past is that there are periods we’d rather forget. I’m still grateful that no one had camera phones to document my early 90s grunge phase. For many pastors and Christians, the latter half of the nineteenth century tends to be one of phases we’d rather forget.
Most of my brothers in ministry love reflecting on the First Great Awakening. Our shelves are full of books by and about men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. This time in the history of the American church is encouraging and inspiring to many, especially in a day and age when the American church desperately needs revival. And yet I doubt many pastors have a host of books on what transpired just a century later. The Second Great Awakening—a misnomer to many—saw the rise of religious fervor sweep across the country due in large part to manufactured, premeditated “revivals” led by men like Charles Finney.
Many pastors possess at best
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