Revival meeting

A revival meeting is a week-long (or longer) series of daily services held in some Christian churches (usually ones of the fundamentalist or Pentecostal variety). Often such meetings will involve a visiting evangelist from out of town. One traditional image of such meetings is the "tent revival", where an evangelist sets up a large tent and preaches nightly, although this form of revival meeting has become less common. Another variant involves the "camp meeting",[1] where church members go to a weekend or week-long retreat to be immersed in sermonizing.[2] Revival meetings aim to "revive" church members into living more "holy" lives and into rekindling their religious faith, as well as to attract the curious to attend and (hopefully) convert.

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The Pentecostal movement began during a series of revival meetings in 1906 in Azusa, California, where the intense services led to incidents of speaking in tongues and faith healings, reports of which attracted many visitors. Billy Graham (1918-2018) got his first big boost into fame by holding a tent revival in 1949. In some ways revival meetings served as religious predecessors to large group awareness training[3] and to Amway motivational meetings, which have both copied many of the same practices.

Snake handling is usually not part of such meetings, popular stereotypes to the contrary. However, revivals are usually much more emotionally and spiritually intense than the usual Sunday church service, and in some churches may involve a concerted effort at spiritual warfare, faith-healing, exorcisms, etc., while in other churches a heavy dose of hell-fire-and-damnation sermons aim to scare the devil out of you. Sometimes they just involve a lot of love bombing.

See also

References
  1. See the Wikipedia article on camp meeting.
  2. See the Wikipedia article on sermon.
  3. McWilliams, Peter (1994). Life 102: What to Do when Your Guru Sues You. Prelude Press. ISBN 9780931580345. Retrieved 30 July 2019.
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