The First Global Revivalist? Reuben Archer Torrey and the 1902 Evangelistic Campaign in Australia

Abstract

AbstractAs a revivalist who appeared to have initiated a world-wide awakening of Christianity and was also an early leader of the fundamentalist movement, Reuben A. Torrey is generally regarded as a major figure in the early twentieth-century history of evangelicalism. By tracing its origins and results, this article attributes Torrey's rise to prominence in the global evangelical movement to the evangelistic campaign he conducted in Australia in 1902. Setting this episode in the context of the history of international revivalism, it identifies Torrey as the first global revivalist in influence as well as geographical range. In place of the traditional providential interpretation, the analysis proposes the alignment of the revivalist theology, methods, and achievement exhibited in the Australian campaign with the hopes and expectations of the preexisting conservative evangelical subculture as a “functionalist” explanation of Torrey's impact. As the reason for Torrey's transformed standing in the evangelical movement in America and the wider world, the 1902 Australian campaign also emerges as a revealing case study of the dynamics of global evangelicalism and the function of international revivalism at the beginning of the twentieth century.