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The Spirituality of the Evangelical Revival
By Belden C. Lane

"As I look back now, the threshold experience of the revival has formed me more than I knew…. These include a deep appreciation for anti-structure, for the incapacity of any fixed place or institution fully to contain the holy. They involve the expectation of being found by God in the disconcerting moments of transition and movement in my life, as well as of the discovery of the Holy Spirit on the margins of society…. But I have learned also its limits…. All my grandest heroes would never quite fulfill their promise. But I loved them nonetheless."

I was ten years old the afternoon men came to the vacant lot across the street and began driving huge steel stakes into the ground. There on the dead grass where I'd chased kites and fielded grounders all my life, they had erected by evening a three poled tent of milk-gray canvas. In the warm August weather, its side awnings were left rolled up, revealing neat rows of folding chairs and large wood shavings strewn over the ground. The sudden emergence of this massive, if makeshift place-precisely where there had been no place the day before-enthralled us neighborhood children. Later that night we crossed the road to see the revival, my parents and I. And to a ten-year-old child without money, its excitement was as grand as a circus-perhaps even grander, with its laced edge of obscure mystery. I watched bare light bulbs hanging precariously from wires in the top of the tent as a woman played a small, portable organ and the evangelist traced with violin bow the high, wavering notes of "The Old Rugged Cross" on the flat edges of a hand-saw held between his knees. Brother and Sister Thomas, they were called, if I remember well. They sang duets, preached with an energy which seemed evoked by the tent itself, and gave an invitation that brought people sobbing out of their chairs and down to the front. I sat there mystified, caught up in a power I didn't understand but knew to be intensely real to these people. The melody of the hymns, the high and haunting sound of the saw, swept out of the tent and through the Florida night air, across our house, into the neighbor

Belden C. Lane is Associate Professor of Theological Studies and American Studies at St. Louis University and an Editor at Large for The Christian Century. He received his Ph.D. in American church history from Princeton Theological Seminary, and is wellknown for his skill and grace in the art of storytelling. His cassette tape series entitled Storytelling: The Enchantment of Theology was published in 1981, and he is now at work on a volume on "sacred space and American spirituality."

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hood beyond and over the landscape of America. On that night, in that liminal place, I knew myself to have stood for a moment on the edge of some universal reality. It was my first, but not last, encounter with the spirituality of the evangelical revival.¹

I

For years now I've been asking myself how to retrieve that experience of growing up on the margins of Southern evangelicalism. How do I discover the second naivete of which Paul Ricoeur speaks-the hard-won ability to reclaim the vitalities of myth on the far shore of critical suspicion? How can I be there again, without also denying all that I have since become? In asking these questions, I am intrigued that the process of memory seems so often linked to a sense of place. Recalling the physical environment, the concrete details of a given placed experience, can be the most vivid way of reviving forgotten and intensely powerful images. St. Ignatius Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, for this reason emphasized the reconstruction of place and application of the five senses in one's reading of the Gospel stories. In such a way, as he well knew, the reading would become a remembering-the rich remembering of anamnesis, a remembering that creates, that invites simultaneity and the deepest participation.

As I remember, then, the places that form the context of my earliest encounters with God-places distinctive to the experience of the evangelical revival-I remember them as places charged with liminality. They were places that were, at the same time, not places-places caught in transition, existing only on the margins of a structured world. A tent used as a revival hall, a furnace room housing a Sunday School class, a storefront serving as church, a barracks as evangelistic center, a dance hall as place of worship-these were the sites that filled my childhood imagination with the power of a God upsetting all structure and questioning all places once thought secure. These were places bristling with ambiguity, each used for a purpose utterly different from their original design. As a result, their multivalent sense of place left the air that much more charged with possibilities for imagining alternative selves, for rethinking the structures of one's own being.

The concept of liminality, as used by anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner to describe the transitions involved in rites of passage, is rooted in the Latin world limen, meaning "threshold."² It describes the experience of movement involved in having left one place, one conventional state of being, and not yet having arrived at another. One is caught "betwixt and between"-no longer a child, for example, but not yet either an adult. Such threshold experiences force us to

¹ The spirit of the Southern revival, especially as it appears in the region of Appalachia, is well captured in Eleanor Dickinson and Barbara Benziger, Revival! (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
² Cf. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960) and Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 94-130.

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question old identities and entertain new ones, even as Janus, the Roman god of doorways, looked continually in two directions at once. The everyday awareness of liminality comes to us often in the context of travel. The hour or two spent on an airplane between stops can occasion considerable imaginative freedom, characterized as it is by a sense of passage and unstructured time. How many of us have adopted new personae on such occasions?-remarking to the person in the next seat that we worked as a teacher of Greek folk dancing and happened to live in a Benedictine monastery, when indeed we were nothing of the sort. We all have been irresistibly drawn to such creative playfulness. To view it as merely deceitful is to miss entirely the power involved in the imagination of vicarious selves. This juxtaposing of conflicting identities is very much also an exercise in faith. And nowhere is that exercise made more possible than in places of liminality. Hence, the dynamics of conversion-the abundant possibilities for significant personal change-may be intricately tied in the tradition of the evangelical revival to the magic of marginal places. We can explore more fully the implications of this by reference to three characteristics of liminal (placed, yet also unplaced) experience as found in Scripture and the history of American revivalism.

II

The first conviction of a biblically-informed spirituality of the revival is that God, as a God of aniconic freedom, can never comfortably be contained in any one place. Yahweh dwells in thick darkness (I Kings 8:12), beyond the control and predictability of those who would anchor the holy in secure and accustomed structures. God is always essentially beyond knowing, beyond being placed. The sacred groves and high places of Baal are thus attacked because of their mechanical claims of guaranteeing the divine presence-of promising what can never be produced at will. Containing God in any given object or place is always subject to biblical ridicule (Isaiah 44:9-20). Yet, a tension is thrown into this theology by the very mystery of revelation itself. The God who can be located by no one is nonetheless made known by a free act of God's own self-placement. God chooses to be disclosed in proximity to Eden, the burning bush, Sinai, the tabernacle and temple. The God who surpasses all fixed contexts is at the same time revealed in the particularity of place. Hence, a biblical dialectic persists between placement and freedom, iconic and aniconic imagery, temple theology and the theology of a boundless God.³ In the tradition of American revivalism, the latter term has always been the one most emphasized.

From the eighteenth century, when John Wesley began preaching in the fields at Bristol and George Whitefield, the Grand Itinerant, carried on his own ministry in cottages, barns, and marketplaces up and down the Atlantic coast, the revivalist tradition has celebrated the power of a

³ Cf. Walter Brueggemann, The Land (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). Both temple and anti-temple traditions can be found juxtaposed in II Samuel 7:4-11 and I Kings 8:12-61.

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God not limited by the confines of meeting house and parish. The: impulse of the revival has invariably involved a. spatial as well as social, and theological departure from existing church structures. In the Great. Awakening, the deviation from fixed ecclesiastical locations became the most celebrated and controversial mark of the New Light experience. Gilbert Tennent, in his sermon on The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry (1740), urged hungry souls to cross over parish boundaries in order to receive the spiritual nourishment they might not find at home. Other enthusiastic preachers followed Whitefield's example by exhorting in the streets or in open fields, contradicting the established patterns that questioned such "Gospel rambles." Indeed, in 1741, the Old Light faction in Philadelphia denounced this "Wonderful Wandering Spirit," given as it was to ranging "here and there, and every where,…. hating bounds and limits." Throughout the decade, anti-itineracy laws would be passed in local communities from Connecticut to the Carolinas.⁴ The reorientation of space has ever been an offending characteristic of revivalist spirituality. The revival declares God too often to have been domesticated and house-broken in the process of being restricted to a limited geography of grace.

In my youth, I felt keenly the appeal of this bold and itinerant spirit. The small Bible church of which I was a part met for a time in an abandoned storefront and even, for several months, in an old Army barracks, unoccupied since the Second World War. A great, liminal energy was generated by both places. Here I discovered a God who was too untamed, too unpredictable and demanding to be contained in the cultivated interior of a traditional sanctuary. The temporary, ersatz character of the sites themselves offered a sense of immediacy in worship that was appropriate to a God who "tabernacled" with his people. It was a former shoe store, in the shopping center next to the Publix Market down the street, that served for a while as our place of worship. I remember the scrape of Samsonite chairs on the bare concrete floor and especially the large glass windows that occasioned both embarrassment and fascination. Just sitting there was a defiant proclamation to the world that God had supplanted all merchandise and usurped every claim to stubborn secularity. We sang songs with lusty voices and exulted in the incongruity of God's strange presence.

But the barracks adjacent to the old airfield across the lake from our house offered even more vivid associations. Several frame buildings had been thrown up by the Army Air Corps in the 1940s and were scheduled to be demolished, but we were allowed to hold services there in the summer of '54. Government-issue olive-green paint was peeling off the walls and ceilings in huge sheets. We children found spent rifle cartridges in the hall and dug .45 caliber bullets out of sand bags stacked nearby at an old pistol range. The place still harbored a forgotten

⁴ Cf. Alan Heimert and Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awakening (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1967), pp. 147-148; and William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 60-66, 83-96.

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urgency, a sense of danger and robust masculinity-things not lost on any of us, especially eleven-year-old boys feverishly pushing their way to manhood. More exciting even than this was a series of missionary meetings held in the barracks that summer. Tommy Titcomb, a veteran missionary from West Africa, spoke of living in the Congolese jungle, eating monkey meat, and obeying Christ to the ultimate extent. He told grisly tales of primitive tribes whose pagan rites made them file down the front teeth of their children. I was transfixed by the violence and daring alike, reading still more adventures in his weathered face and intense eyes. On Saturday night, at the close of the meetings, he invited forward those who felt called to foreign missionary service and I stepped out to embrace all the fierce hazards of abandonment. I was suddenly claimed by a God who reveled in exotic and unfixed places.

III

A second conviction of a revivalist spirituality is that the liminal experience of being in transit-of being caught between one place and another-forms a primary metaphor of the encounter with God. Significant character change-the "turning around" process of metanoia often occurs in situations of displacement or transition. Here it is, on the marginal ground between places once held certain, that the Spirit of God often sets up camp. This is the place where "threshold beings" take form. It is a phenomenon apparent in many of the conversion accounts listed in Scripture, as well as in the history of American revivalism. Early Christians were not inappropriately characterized as people of the "Way," a people involved in passage and movement (Acts 9:2; 18:25). Paul's conversion experience occurred in transit-on the road between Jerusalem and Damascus, in a transitional state that allowed a rethinking of his antipathy to the people of the "Way." The experience brought with it a radical spatial disorientation, alleviated only three days later, after Paul had met Ananias and entered a new community of meaning (Acts 9:1-22). Similarly, the Ethiopian minister of finance mentioned in Acts 8 is overtaken by Philip while traveling south from Jerusalem by chariot. As they ride together, discussing the prophet Isaiah, a wadi is sighted from the road-its waters flowing down from the Judean hills-and the Ethiopian eunuch is drawn, by the serendipity of the passing moment, to request his own baptism (Acts 8:26-40). Frequently, the suggestive context of being en route is the occasion by which spiritual transformation occurs. It is a pattern repeated again and again in the history of the American revival.

One can almost put it down as a principle that conversion in the American experience is predominantly a peripatetic affair.⁵ People influenced by the revival are people caught in motion. Jonathan

⁵ Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, in her essay on "Women and Religious Revivals: AntiRitualism, Liminality, and the Emergency of the American Bourgeoisie," argues that "geographic rootlessness" was a major characteristic of the revival convert in the nineteenth-century American revival experience. See Leonard I. Sweet, ed., The Evangelical Tradition in America (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), pp. 218ff.

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Edwards was profoundly moved by the grace of Christ while walking the countryside near Northampton, having dismounted from his horse in a wild and remote area. David Brainerd encountered an "unspeakable glory" as he also walked in a "dark thick grove," along the Connecticut, River Valley. Peter Cartwright was walking in a horse-lot near a cave behind the family cabin in Logan County, Kentucky, when he, too, was struck by the divine presence. Charles Finney plotted his own conversion by means of a similar movement from the woods near his home to the road into town and on to the law office where he worked, all occurring on the day of October 10, 1821. The experience of transition appears to be rich in possibilitie ' s for personal, spiritual change. John Newton aboard ship in a violent sea, Sojourner Truth on her way back to her master's house, Billy Sunday waiting on a curb near a vacant lot-all these are occasions for dramatic conversion.⁶ William James offers a classic example of this threshold experience in his reference to the religious conversion of Henry Alline in 1775. In remembering his experinece, Alline paid most careful attention to where it occurred.

As I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamenting my miserable lost and undone condition … I returned to the house, and when I got to the door, just as I was stepping off the threshold, the following impressions [of God's presence] came into my mind like a powerful but small still voice.⁷

The spiritual experience of passage from one state of consciousness to another is often mirrored in the simultaneous passage from one particular place to another.

My own sense of appropriating a conscious and responsible faith in my childhood is indelibly associated with a furnace room behind the choir of the church where we finally settled. It was the location of Mr. Flinn's sixth grade Sunday School class, a place chosen with shrewd insight. None of us twelve-year-olds, of course, wanted to be considered part of the Sunday School, with its wing of pastel-painted rooms where the "children" pasted and cut. We were too old to be associated with children, though not yet old enough to be classed with teenagers. So our liminal status was given recognition by a liminal place. We had graduated from flannelgraph boards to furnace filters. Furthermore, a new content came with the new terrain. On the first day, Mr. Flinn carried us straight into the regions of hell, describing with graphic detail the Lake of Fire as depicted in the book of Revelation. Curiously, as I remember it now, my response was not primarily one of fear, but instead, one of being let in on something really big. This wasn't your usual Sunday School pap about lambs and cardboard mangers. This was thoroughly adult, life-and-death stuff. Mr. Flinn was treating us like persons old enough to make decisions about God for themselves. For the

⁶ Accounts of all these conversion experiences can be found in Hugh T. Kerr and John Mulder, Conversions: The Christian Experience (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1983).
⁷ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Collier Books, 1961), p. 180. Italics added.

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first time, Sunday School was about something that genuinely mattered. I was impressed. In this transitional place, half-way between the sanctuary and the regular classrooms, I began to work out the lineaments of my own encounter with God.

IV

A third conviction, anchored also in biblical faith, is that the revival experience-at its best-will always demand one's identifying with the marginal, unplaced peoples of this world. The liminal experience of the revival necessarily makes one sensitive to dispossessed and uprooted peoples everywhere. Victor Turner uses the term "communitas" to speak of that peculiar quality of social bonding that is formed among liminal subjects, a relationship not dependent upon similarities in class, rank, wealth, or social status. Young people involved in Ndembu initiation rites, fellow pilgrims making their way to Canterbury, commuters on a New York subway that breaks down in a power failure-all these discover a sense of comradeship that is spontaneous and concrete, one not shaped by the customs, laws, and norms of social structure.⁸ People in such contexts are naturally made sensitive to others whose identity may be defined outside the institutionalized structures of society. Their experience of liminality allows them to entertain connections they might not have imagined before.

Biblically, this notion is grounded in the experience of Israel as a displaced people-never far removed from the memory of their own journey through the wilderness, their own encounter with exile. This means that their please for justice will invariably include a particular concern for those who, like them, have been victims of dislocation. The homeless, especially widows and orphans, will be singled out for deliberate care (Ex. 22:22-24). Cities of refuge will be designated as centers of sanctuary for those in flight (Num. 35). The precepts of the year of Jubilee will pointedly connect social righteousness with the disenfranchisement of place (Lev. 25).

The same dynamic is also found in the history of American revivals. The social impact of the Evangelical Awakenings has by now been well documented , indicating its own propensity toward ministering to alien and displaced persons.9 The spirit of revival has, at various times, driven David Brainerd to work among Native Americans in Massachusetts or Charles Sheldon to question labor conditions in Topeka, Kansas. It has prompted Theodore Dwight Weld to anti-slavery activities in Ohio and Phoebe Palmer to slum reform in New York City. Revivalism, despite its

⁸ Robert L. Cohn, in his essay on "Liminality in the Wilderness," relates this phenomenon to the experience of Israel in the Sinai Desert, midway as they were between Egypt and the promised land. See The Shape of Sacred Space: four Biblical Studies (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981). Cf. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 231-271.
⁹ Cf. William McLoughlin, op. cit.; Timothy Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); and Donald Dayton, Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

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ethereal, other-worldly ethos, has been rich in possibilities for radical social change.

I think back, for example, to a dance hall at a migrant labor camp which became another site in the formation of my early grasp of faith. There I witnessed firsthand the risks of discipleship, the social consequences of the revival. Marv Renstead was the lay preacher who took me with him every Sunday morning one winter to hold services at a large labor camp near Orlando. Men from Haiti and the Bahamas were brought in and housed there, to pick oranges in the groves nearby. They lived in shanties covered with sheets of corrugated tin. I never understood why they were paid so little or abused so much. Each week, the acrid smells of lard, stale cigarette smoke, and urine clung to my clothes all the way home. I went along to play the accordion, while Marv preached-and organized, always asking questions, as he did, about living and working conditions. He would have done Joe Hill proud, Marv would. I remember him as a crazy mix of Billy Sunday and Saul Alinsky. He preached with an unmeasured passion and had a way of making enemies with great ease. One night the Ku Klux Klan chased him for hours through the groves-driving his 1944 Hudson at full throttle, without lights, to avoid being caught. They would have killed him if they could. This was one "nigger lover" who had gone too far in demanding civil rights for alien blacks. But Marv survived, and so did my faith.

In fact, the most meaningful communion service I have ever known occurred in the camp dance hall one Sunday morning at the end of the season that year. After the crap games had been driven out and the chairs set up in the large, empty hall, I began, as usual, playing "Amazing Grace" and "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," practically the only songs I knew. The seats were filled. Marv preached. Then we formed a circle of huge black men with wide Caribbean smiles, a bald white agitator, and an ingenuous thirteen-year-old accordion player. Tears flowed freely as we all passed a jelly-jar glass of Welch's grape juice and several slices of white sandwich bread. I was hugged so much that day that it hurt. But I never remember being encountered so much by the real presence of Christ as on that day in that liminal place. There the revival became inescapably for me a matter of love molded in the shape of justice.

As I look back now, the threshold experience of the revival has formed me more than I knew. Its liminal places led me to openings that have been nurtured all of my life. These include a deep appreciation for anti-structure, for the incapacity of any fixed place or institution fully to contain the holy. They involve the expectation of being found by God in the disconcerting moments of transition and movement in my life, as well as of the discovery of the Holy Spirit on the margins of society, at those points where the people of God embrace the pain of others. I have willingly yielded to this impact of the revival on my manner-of-being.

But I have learned also its limits. There was always, in my past, a

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sense of tentative transience even to the most exciting events of the tent and storefront-an awareness that even here the faithful had not fully caught the glory for which they grasped. They all harbored a fear that the power wouldn't last. And, indeed, it didn't. Brother and Sister Thomas took down the tent and moved on. Tommy Titcomb returned to Africa. Our enthusiastic congregation suffered two major church splits, one caused by the minister's leaving his wife and three children to run away with the church secretary. He began selling used cars in a town nearby, while the church divided over what to do next. Mr. Flinn, my Sunday school teacher, was arrested for pretending to be a doctor in "Colored Town" on the far side of the city, and even Marv Renstead left home and was indicted on charges in Tennessee that I never understood.

All my grandest heroes would never quite fulfill their promise. But I loved them deeply nonetheless. They were people who had been touched by angels, but who finally were too frail to hold for long the power of God. They stood wavering on the threshold, torn by a bold hesitance. They were like us all. I see their faces still as I strain to remember the haunting melody drawn from the edge of a hand-saw by the violin bow of a traveling evangelist. They live somewhere, in a liminal stretch of memory, beyond the limbus of my own well-ordered world. I recall the strange half-places of yesterday and I'm with them once more.