The truth will set US free, not religion. I hate crowds, especially those preying on emotion. imo, as always.

Thank you for sharing.

I attended a lot of them from age 14-17, courtesy of the church I attended. Apparently, the church's elders felt that it would be good for teens to be exposed to that environment. We thought those trips were a lark, though. You got to go somewhere, sit in a big, smelly crowd, and hear histrionic preaching. It was a source of wonderful entertainment. And those long bus rides back had their own special attraction, too, for some.

They were all kinds of wonderful, really, and that time period was sort of a peak for massive "Crusades." Tens of thousands of people singing "How Great Thou Art" in full voice is something to experience, for sure. Stirred up your juices and got everyone roused up, every time. There's something to be said for that, but I'm not sure what that something is, really.

good old fashioned "camp meetings" for us in the Midwest... I spent many a summer day in the tents listening to preachers and evenings roaming around the camps and catching fireflies with the other kids...

but the energy from all those people was physically palpable.

By a guy from college that I'm still friends with - one of the fastest thinkers I know.

In college, he worked at Arby's at the register. One slow night, it was just him and one cook when in walked a ton of people from a tent revival that was taking place near our college. He and his friend switch into overdrive to get the orders taken, cooked, and delivered. The last person to order is the evangelist. When his order is up, he comes up to the counter to get his tray, which my friend hands to him. The evangelist thanks him and says, "By the way, Jesus is coming."

My friend immediately replies with, "Well, we're about to close the kitchen. Do you know what he wants to eat?"

Evangelist is stunned as he can't make out whether my friend is serious or not. Tells the parishioners what he said, who then give my friend the Evil Eye.

TlalocW

It's a statement fraught with danger, to be sure.

"Jesus is returning" is much, much safer.

original message:

Jesus is coming!

added:

And boy is he pissed!

Or something.

meetings were a phenomenon in the early 1960s. Booking the entire L.A. Colosseum was quite a bold thing to do. It's rare these days to see such a massive gathering for a proselytizing event.

I feel lucky to have lived during those times. Today, television and the Internet has done away with such mass meetings.

and we will attend this year. There is always a lot of positive energy at these events, as well as at the union conventions that I attend.

Religious revivals and crusades are a completely different phenomenon. Large crowds gather for many reasons. Sports events, demonstrations, etc. Evangelical revivals are a very different thing. Large scale ones are rarely seen today, but were quite common back in the 1950s and 1960s. People like Billy Graham were able to bring masses of people together. Oddly enough, almost all of the people who attended those "crusades" were already Christians. Yet, every one of them featured a "come forward to be saved" call, during which those who were already Christians dutifully marched down to be saved once again. I always found that interesting, really. Apparently, many felt that more savings couldn't hurt, I guess.

Every large gathering has a crowd energy, but a revival sounds more like a charismatic church service on a large scale.

I have attended them as a spectator, but this type of service is not something that I ever attended back home.

they were a diversion from the entertainments available in my small town. I was a spectator, too, at a spectacle. For that's what they were. Especially the large, well-funded ones like Billy Graham's. In some ways, he was like a rock star putting on a show on the road. There was music and lights and lots of other typical things of a spectacle.

Ostensibly, they were held to convert sinners to Christianity, but, as I said above, few people went to them who weren't already church members and thoroughly baptized and converted. The church buses from all over Southern California filled the parking lot at that Billy Graham one illustrated in this thread. I was in that exact crowd, along with a couple dozen of my teen peers from that church. It was an outing for us. It was an entertainment. We were starved for such entertainment. Our little town had a movie theater, of course, but that was pretty much it, except for high school sports events.

So, we eagerly boarded the buses to travel to something like that "crusade." But, we weren't potential converts. All of us were already well-established teen Christians. So, why were we there? It was just entertainment. That's all. The same pretty much held true for just about everyone in that stadium. They came to be entertained by the professional preachers and their hangers on. And entertained we were. It's a phenomenon I've always been interested in, such large gatherings of miscellaneous church-goers for a spectacle.