Church History 102_Demo

___________________________ movement. The emphasis on personal faith led more people to
study and interpret the Bible for themselves - an activity that 100 years earlier had led a
Puritan woman, named Anne Hutchinson, to be banished from the colony. New
___________________________ were established by churches to train their preachers and
educate their followers, including Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers and Columbia
Universities.
Lesson 5: 1801 Cane Ridge Revival
1801 Cane Ridge Revival
Objectives
Understand the conditions that made this revival so explosive.
Identify the key figure and the doctrines in which they introduced in an attempt to bring
the church back to its first century roots.
Describe the influences of the Cane Ridge Revival and its relevance today.
Faith on the Frontier
Kentucky was not even ten years old in 1801. It was granted statehood in 1792. The
population of Bourbon County, where Cane Ridge is located, was twelve thousand people in
1800. Now, both of those statistics are important because of what happened in that week in
August 1801. More than ten thousand people, almost the entire population of the county,
attended a weeklong communion service, known as a camp meeting, in the hills of Kentucky.
It is also worth noting that this was the frontier in American culture in the 1800s.
One witness who was there for this week of camp meetings put it this way: “For more than
half a mile I could see people on their knees, before God.”
"The noise was like the roar of Niagara," wrote eyewitness James Finley in his biography.
"Atone time I saw at least five hundred swept down in a moment as if a battery of a thousand
gunshad been opened upon them, and then immediately followed shrieks and shouts that
rent the very heavens."
"It arguably remains the most important religious gathering in all of American history, both
forwhat it symbolized and the effects that flowed from it," wrote Paul Conkin, author of
CaneRidge: America's Pentecost.
The Road to Cane Ridge
Rampant alcoholism and avaricious land-grabbing were matched by the increasing popularity
of both universalism (the doctrine that all will be saved) and deism (the belief that God is
uninvolved in the world). Methodist James Smith, traveling near Lexington in the autumn of
1795 feared that “the universalists, joining with the Deists, had given Christianity a deadly
stab hereabouts.”