p. 93 | The Gospel in Tents

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 8, 1874

The Gospel in Tents.

A CORRESPONDENT OF The Liberal Christian, living in a New Hampshire village where one of our brethren is now holding a tent-meeting writes an article to that paper, headed, “Jacob was a Plain Man Dwelling in Tents,” from which we make the following extract:—

But Verbal Inspiration in tents is, after all, an improvement on the same doctrine in churches. The fresh air of common sense finds more abundant entrance, and under the inspiration of rude, extemporized pine seats, an eager, curious, and strangely mixed assemblage, and the general absence of stiffness and formality, a great many good, true, and broad things get said, a good many people are aroused to something better than a passing interest in religious life and thought, and where, as in the present case, the preacher is in earnest and no friend of Mr. Hammond’s sensational methods, there is something tonic and refreshing in the zealous missionary spirit which goes thus from village to village, pitching its own tent, and asking nothing but a fair hearing from friend or foe.

On the whole, therefore, we are inclined to think well and hopefully of the work of such ministers of religion, whether orthodox or heterodox, blue lights or new lights, as have the courage and zeal in these days of ease and comfort to “dwell in tents.” Somehow or other the stiffness and coldness of most worship in churches must be broken up, or the church will continue to lose its influence and attraction for warm, young blood more rapidly even than at present. We are by no means in favor of abandoning the churches for tents, for religious life may be nourished and developed to better advantage in the more stable, commodious and attractive edifice. But for gospel recruiting-service it may be that we have undervalued the advantage of pitching our tents. A very large proportion of the non-church-going people of every town—and it need hardly be said that they largely outnumber the church-goers—would, we believe, welcome and enjoy public worship freed from the costliness, the apparent exclusiveness, the stiffness, the coldness, the deadness which now repel them. The instinct for public worship is, we think, as natural and general as the craving for companionship, and it is quite as extravagant to argue that those who never set foot inside a church door are without interest in religion or public worship as to imagine that those who are never seen in what we call “society” are unsocial.

Certainly the unintentional but none the less actual exclusiveness of most public worship is a problem which demands immediate attention, and, in towns and villages where commons and parks abound, there seems no good reason why, except in the winter months, thousands should not be regularly gathered to hear the gospel preached in tents. The expense would be comparatively trifling, the occasion and surroundings would stimulate hearty, earnest worship, and, after tent worship ceased to attract attention by its rarity, it is unlikely that such meetings would be molested or disturbed if wisely managed and conducted.