PETER CARTWRIGHT PART 3

The Biggest Communion Season Begins

Near the start of the biggest Communion season ever, a meeting was held at the Red River Meetinghouse in June. The meeting lasted the entire night with no pauses or breaks, and more than eighty people found peace with God. Peter described what resulted from that summer’s revival:

The Origin of Camp Meetings

“In this revival originated our camp meetings, and in both these denominations they were held every year, and, indeed, have been ever since, more or less.
They would erect their camps with logs or frame them, and cover them with clapboards or shingles.
They would also erect a shed, sufficiently large to protect five thousand people from wind and rain, and cover it with boards or shingles; build a large stand, seat the shed, and here they would collect together from forty to fifty miles around, sometimes further than that.
Ten, twenty, and sometimes thirty ministers, of different denominations, would come together and preach night and day, four or five days together.

And indeed, I have known these camp meetings to last three or four weeks, and great good resulted from them. I have seen more than a hundred sinners fall like dead men under one powerful sermon, and I have seen and heard more than five hundred Christians all shouting aloud the high praises of God at once, and I will venture to assert that many happy thousands were awakened and converted to God at these camp-meetings.

Some sinners mocked, some of the old dry professors opposed, and some of the old starched Presbyterian preachers preached against these exercises, but still, the work went on and spread almost in every direction, gathering additional force, until our country seemed all coming home to God.”

Peter’s Summer of Prayer and Faith

Peter spent much of that summer going from one Communion service to the next, hungering continually for God and growing ever bolder in his faith.

He participated in many small prayer meetings that the young men would start on the periphery of the gatherings, and in doing so, he helped several men come to the Lord. At one such meeting, several detractors spoke against the meeting, including a rather intelligent man who said he was Jewish and seemed to enjoy opposing Christians. At one point, he observed Peter and several other young men assembling one of these small prayer groups, and he approached them to investigate.

Confronting Opposition

Peter recalled this incident in his Autobiography: “During our little meeting this Jew appeared, and he desired to know what we were about. Well, I told him. He said it was all wrong, that it was idolatry to pray to Jesus Christ, and that God did not nor would He answer such prayers.

I soon saw his object was to get us into a debate and break up our prayer meeting. I asked him, ‘Do you really believe there is a God?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said he.
‘Do you believe that God will hear your prayers?’
‘Yes,’ said he.
‘Do you really believe that this work among us is wrong?’
He answered, ‘Yes.’
‘Well now, my dear sir,’ said I, ‘let us test this matter…'”