Urban Evangelist

Era of the Evangelist.

Dwight Lyman Moody was the most famous and widely admired Protestant evangelist of his day, and perhaps the last great itinerant evangelist to receive the wholehearted support of both liberal and conservative Protestants. His greatest successes came in a series of urban revivals in the United States and Great Britain that began in London in 1872. More than any other religious leader of his era, Moody found effective ways to repackage the "old-time religion" in an increasingly urban and industrial world. Moody remained a layman throughout his life and never presented himself as an expert in theology. He had a great talent for delivering simple and straightforward sermons that reflected personal warmth. In fact his style could not have been more different from his predecessor Charles Grandison Finney, the "father of modern revivalism," whose sermons were more direct, tough...