Charles Finney

Charles G. Finney became one of the most influential revivalists of the nineteenth century. 

Finney did not believe that a temporary emotional response or a verbal profession of faith was sufficient. He called people to repentance, personal faith in Christ, moral transformation, persevering obedience. He also criticized religious hearers who admired powerful sermons, but refused to change their lives.

His legal training influenced his direct, orderly, and strongly reasoned style of preaching, although he was not formally trained in a theological seminary. 

Through protracted meetings, urgent preaching, prayer meetings, personal counseling, and the use of the anxious seat, he sought to bring hearers to a definite decision. These methods resulted in many professions of faith and, in some communities, significant religious and social change.

Finney’s critics believed that his theology and revival methods departed from important elements of historic Calvinism. His defenders believed that he recovered the biblical emphasis on human responsibility, repentance, holiness, and active obedience (to keep the Commandments of Jesus).  

Finney would typically spend from several weeks to several months, preaching, teaching, doing personal and small group discipleship, holding intense prayer meetings, typically on a daily basis. He worked tirelessly from morning until nightfall.

Charles G Finney kept busy doing his father's business:
A) Starting in Prayer, B) Preaching the gospel, C) Making disciples, D) Raising up leaders, E) sending out missionaries, and F) raising up prayer warriors.

• The period influenced by Finney and the Second Great Awakening coincided with one of the most significant expansions of Protestant missionary activity in modern history.  

• By 1900, roughly 15,000 European and North American Protestant missionaries were working around the world, compared with only a few hundred near the beginning of the modern Protestant missionary movement.

• Finney’s revivals helped inspire a generation of evangelical Christians to devote themselves to preaching, ministry, and missions. Although he was not the sole source of the movement, his influence formed part of the wider nineteenth-century missionary expansion. Many missionaries crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries to serve among peoples who had little or no access to Protestant churches, trained Christian leaders, or Scripture in their own language.

• Finney was a major leader of the Second Great Awakening, especially from the 1820s through the 1850s. His preaching emphasized personal conversion, active evangelism, and the responsibility of ordinary Christians to respond decisively to the gospel.

• Finney’s long association with Oberlin College connected him with a school whose students and graduates became ministers, teachers, domestic missionaries, and foreign missionaries. Oberlin’s “Oberlin Band,” for example, sent students and graduates to China beginning in the 1880s, after Finney’s death but within the institutional tradition he helped shape.oberlin

Oberlin College was founded in 1833 as a coeducational institution. It began admitting African American students regularly in 1835, after trustee John Keep cast the deciding vote for an admissions policy supporting the education of Black students. Women entered the baccalaureate program in 1837, although Oberlin did not award bachelor’s degrees to women until 1841.

• Black and white students could study at the same institution.

• Women had access to college-level education unusually early in American history.

• Its students and graduates participated in abolitionism, education, preaching, and missionary work.

• Finney became professor of theology at Oberlin in 1835 and later served as its president. He was a prominent abolitionist and a major public advocate for Oberlin’s evangelical and reform commitments.