In Our Time is movement of worship and prayer for awakening/revival in Providence and New England. Nearly 200 years ago a revival/awakening moved powerfully though the city of Providence and the surrounding county. They saw an acceleration of the things of the spirit.
“I think it exceeds anything I have seen
and may be said that God has visited every home.”
This is an invitation to seek and to thirst for more of God. Edwards reminds us that we often “spend our lives in busy activism, instead of pausing to realize the possibilities, The inevitable and constant preliminary to revival has always been a thirst for God, a thirst, a living thirst for a knowledge of the living God, and a longing and a burning desire to see him at work.”
“Conservatives would rather work to reform church theology & practice. Intellectuals doubt supernatural intervention. Rationalists dismiss emotional enthusiasm. All convene committees and organize campaigns. But few will plead for revival.
– Martyn Lloyd-Jones –
This is an invitation and a resource to stir a hunger for more. Join us by filling out the form below. Here is what this practically means.
- practice a personal daily time of prayer
- commit to a fast during First Seek
- join us for Heart (city-wide worship) nights
- receive special email updates about how to go deeper in prayer, and stories of how God is moving in our community
PROVIDENCE, 1820
Throughout the spring of 1820, a revival of extraordinary power engulfed Providence. Sparked by Second Baptist Church, the blaze of religious enthusiasm “soon spread and the glorious work of the Lord was extended throughout the town at large.” In a town of not quite 12,000 persons, nearly 500 converts stood before their respective congregations to pronounce declarations of faith. They not only joined established churches but connected themselves with new congregations. The revival also provided the flame that led to the creation of the African Union Meeting House, the city’s first independent black church. Neither Charles Finney‘s well-orchestrated visit to the city in 1831 nor the ripple of genteel enthusiasm of 1857—58 surpassed it for sheer scale and transformative power. As an event that reconfigured the city’s, the revival of 1820 proved to be
unmatched.
Willard Preston, 21 Congregationalist pastor, firmly declared to Brown University students that “Never did the inhabitants of this town experience such a season of refreshing from the presence of God, it is believed, as they now experience.”
In nearby Seekonk, Massachusetts, the Baptist minister John Pitman felt the reverberations of the Providence revival. As he made his way to the city to watch his colleague Stephen Gano conduct mass baptisms, Pitman, too, proved an instrument of God. As he moved from house to house, he recorded striking instances of conversion. Pitman wrote of the revival, “I think it exceeds anything I have seen and may be said that God has visited every home.”
Even those citizens who cast a dubious eye toward the revivalists conceded without question that the hand of God was visible everywhere.
Attorney Philip Crapo outlined with dismay the frenzied pace of church activity for his friend Samuel Eddy. He discovered that the Baptists, Congregationalism, and Methodists had gathered “every night for a long time 84 have had crowded assemblies.” If this were not enough, Crapo noticed that private meetings “are almost without number at all times of day from morning till late in the evening.” In- deed, he lamented, “Everything which goes forward seems to be preaching, praying, exhorting, and singing.
Moses Brown, the aging Quaker merchant and manufacturer, noted an especially stunning example of spiritual transformation. “Anson Potter,” he recalled, “a Professed Deist or Thomas Pain’s Man has become a Seriously Concerned Man; from Rejecting the Bible from his house, has bo’t one and Read Abundance now says it is the Best and most Consistent Book he ever read.”
As Anson Potter’s case indicates, the heat of the revival penetrated even the stone-cold hearts of the rational.
In Our Time 