Why do we need another Great awakening? When I think of an Awakening, even after our class, my mind immediately goes to images of eighteenth century revivalists like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, Jereena Lee and a large constellation of other preaching giants of yesteryear. These men and women created a legacy of spiritual fervor which has earned them a place in the annals of American religious history. Their effectiveness as preachers of the word and proclaimers of truth permeated a nation’s consciousness and snatched the nation from spiritual decline.
Several questions arise as I think of the Awakenings of years past. My first question is whether our nation is as spiritually receptive of an Awakening as it was two hundred years ago. My second question arises out of pure intimidation at the prospect of preaching a great awakening. I ponder inwardly; can the power of the Great Awakening be duplicated ever again? Are the conditions of the nation such that there needs to be spiritual renewal? There is a variety of potential issues which a Great Awakening can speak too.
William McLaughlin notes in his book Revivals, Awakenings and Reform that there have been several “Awakenings” in American religious history ,and that not all of these moments of renewal resembled the fiery preaching frenzies of the famed eighteenth century. Each “Awakening” had at its core a specific issue it was addressing. The issues in question could be spiritual declension (first Great Awakening), national back-sliding (second Great Awakening), biblical interpretation and liberalism (third Great Awakening), or American identity and progressivism (fourth Great Awakening). Thus, it is perhaps my own limitations that bristle at the idea of preaching the n...
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...ting and preaching. I think that claiming one’s unique voice and message is the key to joining the Great Awakening movement. People are transformed by encounters with the genuine. I hope to be the vessel that is truly me and truly what God wants for me to be.
For me the next steps are full time pastoral ministry. God willing, I will have a congregation of my own. I look forward to the pastorate because in my heart I know that is where I think the most transformative and world changing aspects of my ministry will occur. I look forward to awakening people’s lives with the Gospel. I look forward to joining a community and growing in faith together. I am excited because God has anointed me to preach good news. And the good news is this; all of God’s children have a stake in God’s transformational work. We are all anointed to preach good news. It is time to get ready.
With the development of a civilized society in America during the 1700s and 1800s, the role religion played in an everyday person's life was becoming more and more diminished. To combat this, a series of religious revivals were set in motion: The Great Awakenings. These were a series of large, sweeping religious, social, and political changes that sought to use the basis of religion to revive faith in a neglected belief, bring about numerous social reforms, and use political factions to great effect upon society's mentality. Although most view the First Great Awakening as the first' and greatest' religious, social, and political influence to American society, the second Great Awakening can be considered far more influential in its religious, social, and political aspects of influence.
1) Jonathan Edwards delivered this sermon during the first Great Awakening, a time of religious revival in Europe and America. During the Great Awakening, christianity shifted its focus from ceremonies and rituals, and began to realign itself with introspection to encourage fostering a deep sense of morality and redemption. Edwards was a key preacher and minister that delivered many sermons preaching about revival and reformed theology.
The Great Awakening was a religious movement that occurred in the early 1700s. Later on, the colonists would experience the Second Great Awakening, but for now, we will keep the focus on the First Great Awakening.
The Second Great Awakening impacted the social scholarly literature. The traditional school of thought has tended to portray the time period as one of widespread secularization and the concomitant efforts of church elites to bring wandering Christians back into the ecclesiastical fold. The Second Great Awakening appears as a process of renewal, as churches tried to co-opt Evangelical activism by dressing in new clothes, rather than the old traditional. By concentrating on the impulses of the Presbyterian and Congregationalist establishments, but neglecting the Second Great Awakening outside New En...
Speeches functioned as great tools for inspiring and motivating people. A passionate and charismatic speaker could often change a group of people’s view of the world with just a short speech. A perfect example of this phenomenon can be seen in the leaders of religious groups such as Matthias and Joseph Smith. These two men both possessed the ability to make people pi...
5.Gary Nash thinks the Great Awakening highlights the tension between the existing authority and the new radical thinkers of the eighteenth century. To those in power, the movement was detrimental to them. While the common people viewed the Great Awakening as a way to control their own salvation which increased their individualism. The lower class view the movement as a step back to the times where individuals acted for the community instead of for their own gain. Implications of the Great Awakening would be the distrust of established authority and the sense of individualism among the American
There was a catalytic event that occurred throughout the mid-1700s to the early 1800s, known as the Second Great Awakening. This event was the slow reformation of Puritan doctrine which lead to new denominations...
Martin Luther King Jr., an American Baptist minister and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement, spoke out to eight clergymen about why not standing with him during this time of discrimination is ultimately an unwise choice if they want to consider themselves “men of God.” Likewise, Jonathan Edwards, one of the most powerful and persuasive Puritan preachers, spoke out to everyone in the countless communities he visited to convince them that it is vital to recommit their life to God. Both MLK and Edwards pieces are effective. An effective piece is a piece that keeps a single focus and successfully convinced an audience to adopt the author's point of view. MLK and Edwards share a sophisticated use of the same techniques to persuade
People of all groups, social status, and gender realized that they all had voice and they can speak out through their emotional feels of religion. Johnathan Edwards was the first one to initiate this new level of religion tolerance and he states that, “Our people do not so much need to have their heads filled than, as much as have their hearts touched.” Johnathan Edwards first preach led to more individuals to come together and listen. Than after that individual got a sense that you do not need to be a preacher to preach nor you do not need to preach in a church, you can preach wherever you want to. For the first time, you have different people coming together to preach the gospel. You had African American preaching on the roads, Indian preachers preaching and you had women who began to preach. The Great Awakening challenged individuals to find what church meets their needs spiritually and it also let them know about optional choices instead of one. The Great Awakening helped the American colonies come together in growth of a democratic
Martin, Wendy, ed. "Introduction." New Essays on The (Awakening. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 1988.
The Emergent Church has both positive and negative effects. It’s beneficial in the way that it is adapting to today’s culture to assist with evangelism, but it isn’t a totally comfortable concept to grasp. Neither is postmodernism, which the emerging movement basically represents in its theologies and ideas. The fact is that for as many questions that it can answer in Christianity, it raises twice as much. However, whether or not the culture accepts this movement, the one thing that seems inevitable, is its growth.
Mead, Loren B. The Once and Future Church Reinventing the Congregation for a New Mission Frontier . The Alban Institute, Inc., 1991. Kindle eBook file.
Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening, transcends societal structures and expectations. It deals with the day-to-day realities that a woman must face if she is to progress to full maturation and become at peace with herself and the world. Set in turn-of-the-century Creole New Orleans, it addresses the relentless strength and courage required for a woman to remain true to her convictions. Most studies of The Awakening focus on Edna Pontellier's newly emerged awareness and struggle against the societal forces that repress her. However, they ignore the weaknesses in Edna that prevented her from achieving the personal autonomy that she glimpsed during her periods of "awakening." The character of Edna Pontellier, therefore, is also an insightful study of the weaknesses that prevent a woman of any era from progressing toward self actualization.
I have not experienced anything quite so disillusioning as a crisis of faith. It is a gut-wrenching, world-warping realization that sets in slowly with increasing pain. But like an ice cube thawing in your hand, the agony yields to absolute numbness. For me, this tribulation set in after leaving my Christian community of ten years. When I started attending an out-of-state, Christian liberal arts school, Wheaton College, I was surprised to discover—in place of the diverse body of competing doctrines and life experiences that I had anticipated—a homogenous student body composed of two-thousand teenagers who were also nondenominational, also raised in megachurches, and also floundering to find a “church home” in the city with America's greatest number of churches per capita (Tully and Roberts 2008). In the three years since, I have sought to better understand the factors that impacted my drifting, and the search has led me to evaluate the megachurch in which I grew up. What I have discovered is a critical oversight in the “new paradigm” game plan—an evangelical church strategy designed as a response to secularization—that may be rendering evangelical Protestantism less relevant than ever for my generation. In my experience attending a megachurch, the movement toward consumer Christianity and its consequences for how church was conducted precipitated my departure and engendered an interest in attending smaller, more liturgical churches.
Martin, Wendy, ed. "Introduction." New Essays on The (Awakening. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 1988.