Prayer @ Noon
“In the ‘Prayer Meeting Revival’ of 1857-59 there was virtually no preaching at all. Yet it apparently produced the greatest harvest of any spiritual awakening in American history: estimates run to 1,000,000 converts across the United States, out of a national population at that time of only 30,000,000. That would be the proportionate to 9,000,000 Americans today falling on their knees in repentance!
“How did this happen? A quite businessman named Jeremiah Lanphier started a Wednesday noon prayer meeting in a Dutch Reformed church…in New York City, no more than a quarter mile from Wall Street. The first week, six people showed up. The next week, twenty came. The next week, forty… and they decided to have daily meetings instead.
“ ‘There was no fanaticism, no hysteria, just an incredible movement of people to pray,’ reports J. Edwin Orr. ‘The services were not given over to preaching. Instead, anyone was free to pray.’
“During the fourth week, the financial Panic of 1857 hit; the bond market crashed, and the first banks failed. (Within a month, more than 1,400 banks had collapsed.) People began calling out to God more seriously than ever. Lanphier’s church started having three noontime prayer meetings in different rooms. John Street Methodist Church, a few doors east of Broadway, was packed out as well. Soon Burton’s Theater on Chambers Street was jammed with 3,000 people each noon.
“The scene was soon replicated in Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington, and the South. By the next spring 2,000 Chicagoans were gathered each day in the Metropolitan Theater to pray. A young 21-year-old in those meetings, newly arrived in the city, felt his first call to Christian work. He wrote his mother back East that he was going to start a Sunday school class. His name was Dwight L. Moody.” (p.150, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire)