Dwight L. Moody

Life

Dwight Lyman Moody was born on February 5, 1837, in Northfield, Massachusetts. His father, Edwin Moody, was a small farmer and stonemason who died when Moody was four years old. As a result, the family lived in severe poverty, and Moody's formal schooling ended at the fifth grade.

At seventeen he went to Boston to work in the shoe store of his uncle, Samuel Holton, who made attendance at Mount Vernon Congregational Church a condition of employment. Moody joined Edward Kimball's Sunday school class at the church, and he is said to have experienced conversion around 1855. In 1856 he moved to Chicago, where he became a successful shoe salesman, but he increasingly devoted his energies to Sunday school and Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) work. In 1862 he married Emma Revell.

On November 16, 1899, he fell ill while conducting a campaign in Kansas City. He returned home and died in Northfield on December 22 of that year.

Ministry and Achievements

Moody is regarded as one of the leading American revival preachers of the late nineteenth century. He is known as a lay evangelist who was never ordained. His preaching was marked by plain, colloquial language delivered simply and with conviction. His large-scale revival campaigns were held mainly in major cities and were backed by businessmen.

• Educational and publishing institutions: Using his share of the royalties from his hymnals, he founded a school for girls in his hometown of Northfield and a school for boys at Mount Hermon. The two schools later became today's Northfield Mount Hermon School. At Northfield he held annual summer conferences for adults and young people. In Chicago he founded the Moody Church and the Chicago Evangelization Society. The Chicago Evangelization Society developed into today's Moody Bible Institute, and after Moody's death R. A. Torrey succeeded him as head of the society. Moody Publishers also began as one of his ventures.
• Student Volunteer Movement: In July 1886 a Bible conference for college students, convened by the YMCA and presided over by Moody, was held at Mount Hermon. About 250 students from the United States and Canada attended, and 100 of them pledged to become foreign missionaries. Building on this group, known as the "Mount Hermon Hundred," the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) was formally organized in 1888, with John Mott as its chairman. The movement adopted the watchword "the evangelization of the world in this generation" and played a major role in the dramatic growth in the number of Protestant foreign missionaries in the early twentieth century.
• Support for foreign missions: He supported the China Inland Mission. He also popularized the "Wordless Book," devised by Charles Spurgeon, as a tool for sharing the gospel with people who could not read.

Influence on the Korean Church

Moody's life was introduced to the Korean church relatively early through Mudui Haengsul (The Life of Moody), published in 1926 by the Christian Literature Society of Korea. The Student Volunteer Movement, which arose from a conference he presided over, fueled enthusiasm for foreign missions among North American college students, and this period coincided with the time when Protestant missions in Korea began in earnest.

Assessment

Moody is regarded as a central figure in America's Third Great Awakening. He is also described as connected with the Keswick Convention movement, which emphasized holiness in the Christian life. He is highly regarded for having left behind, as a layman with almost no formal education, a range of institutions spanning mass evangelism, education, publishing, and the mobilization of missionaries.

There are also critical assessments. A theological conservative, he is criticized for failing to respond effectively to the rapidly changing intellectual climate of the late nineteenth century and to the liberal–conservative divide within American churches. By the time of his death, his influence as a revivalist had reportedly declined noticeably. Critics have also noted, as characteristic of his revivalism, that his campaigns were sponsored by urban businessmen and that his audiences consisted largely of the urban middle class.