Let us generously dedicate time to fast and pray for the lost and seek the Lord for another Great Awakening! God, use us as catalysts for revival!
In 1796 James McGready (1763-1817) left North Carolina for Kentucky and took the pastoral charge of three congregations in Logan County—Gaspar River, Red River, and Muddy River. These congregations were small, and in a low state of interest in the things of Christ.
He drafted this revival prayer covenant for the people he served:
“When we consider the word and promises of a compassionate God to the poor lost family of Adam, we find the strongest encouragement for Christians to pray in faith—to ask in the name of Jesus for the conversion of their fellow-men. None ever went to Christ when on earth, with the case of their friends, that were denied, and, although the days of his humiliation are ended, yet, for the encouragement of his people, he has left it on record, that where two or three agree upon earth to ask in prayer, believing, it shall be done.
Again, whatsoever you shall ask the Father in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. With these promises before us, we feel encouraged to unite our supplications to a prayer-hearing God for the outpouring of his Spirit, that his people may be quickened and comforted, and that our children, and sinners generally, may be converted.
Therefore, we bind ourselves to observe the third Saturday of each month, for one year, as a day of fasting and prayer for the conversion of sinners in Logan county, and throughout the world. We also engage to spend one half hour every Saturday evening, beginning at the setting of the sun, and one half hour every Sabbath morning, from the rising of the sun, pleading with God to revive his work.”
To this covenant he and they affixed their names.
Within a few years the Second Great Awakening of 1800 would break out in Kentucky… He would come back to North Carolina and the Revival would spread across North Carolina, into the Methodists and Baptists, then into Virginia, South Carolina, and north Georgia.
Excerpt from “James McGready: North Carolina Catalyst for Revival” by Gene Brooks (March 25, 2011).