Youth Revival Movement honored at Truett

Posted: 10/27/06

Youth Revival Movement honored at Truett

By Marv Knox

Editor

WACO—Participants in revivals that began at Baylor University and spread across the nation six decades ago looked back in gratitude and forward with expectation as they gathered on the campus where it all began.

Scores of senior adults transformed by the Youth Revival Movement of the 1940s and ’50s reassembled at Baylor to dedicate the Youth Revival Heritage Room at the university’s Truett Seminary Oct. 22.

They reminisced about how God used the revivals to change their lives and how the movement mushroomed far beyond anything they could have been expected from their meager skills and limited experience.

Jack Robinson (standing, right) speaks at a dedication service for the Youth Revival Heritage Room at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary. Seated are (left to right) BO Baker, Ralph Langley, Charles Wellborn and Buckner Fanning. (Photo by Steve Fanning)

“The artless, unsophisticated young people chosen by God for the Youth Revival Movement were absolutely, completely ill-equipped,” recalled Jess Moody, who later founded Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida and was pastor of Shepherd of the Hills Church in southern California.

“All of us together didn’t have a good sermon,” quipped the late Bruce McIver in a memorial video. McIver went on to become pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas. His book, Riding the Wind of God, chronicled the movement.

Several speakers recalled how Baylor students—convinced America’s campuses needed spiritual awakening during the closing days of World War II—planned a citywide student revival for the spring of 1945.

But before that meeting, the students prayed for revival for 90 straight nights, Moody noted. “This revival came as a response to weeping long nights of prayer.”

“We were pleading with God for spiritual awakening,” added Howard Butt, who became a businessman and author, in the video.

As word of the Waco revival spread, the young evangelists received invitations to spread the gospel to students in other cities. “The movement of the Holy Spirit was driven past Texas,” reported Ralph Langley, who retired after a longtime pastorate at First Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala.

"All of us together didn’t have a good sermon," said Bruce McIver, whose book, Riding the Wind of God, chronicled the movement.

Soon, the students preached and sang in Houston and Fort Worth and Dallas. And later, the movement covered the South, in cities such as Birmingham, Knoxville and Atlanta, and in small communities as well. Eventually, the revivals reached all the way to Honolulu and touched lives that spanned the globe.

“I’ve preached in 100 countries,” noted Jack Robinson, an All-American basketball player at Baylor who went on to become pastor of First Baptist Church in Augusta, Ga. “Everywhere, people come up and say, ‘I was saved at such-and-such a service.’” Thousands of people became Christians through “our feeble attempts at witnessing for such a mighty Savior,” he acknowledged.

The spirit of revival also spread beyond students, said Charles Wellborn, who later was pastor of Seventh & James Baptist Church in Waco and eventually taught at Florida State University.

Wellborn described a “protracted” revival meeting in Olney in 1948, when the young preacher told an 80-year-old unconverted man, “I will bet my life if you will give God a chance, he will shake you up.” Late in the second week of the meeting, the man walked the church aisle, shook Wellborn’s hand and said, “Kid, you won your bet.”

“One soul saved; one life changed,” Wellborn remembered. “But you and I know that’s what it’s about—God changing lives.”

Often, results of the revivals could only be described as miraculous, said Buckner Fanning, who was pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio for more than 40 years.

In Knoxville, two girls who attended the Tennessee State School for the Deaf made professions of faith in Christ “without hearing a word,” Fanning reported, explaining, “The Spirit of God touched their lives.”

In addition to the lives changed in the revival meetings, the Youth Revival Movement’s impact spread because it took root and shaped a generation of ministers, added BO Baker, who retired from Plymouth Park Baptist Church in Irving.

“One of the most significant impacts of the youth revival era was the filling of our seminaries,” Baker insisted. “We needed the breath of heaven, the filling of God. We needed it, … and when we filled the seminaries, it happened in our churches and in our states.”

Consequently, creation of a Youth Revival Movement heritage center at Truett Seminary on the Baylor campus is entirely appropriate, Baker noted—a sentiment echoed by the seminary’s dean, Paul Powell.

“The Youth Revival Movement needs to be memorialized at Truett, where we’re training the next generation of ministers and missinaries,” Powell said.

The Youth Revival Heritage Room at the seminary is the depository of historical documents and memorabilia and will be a center for research, said Ralph Wood, chair of the steering committee that planned the room. Wood described himself as a product of and participant in the movement. He later became pastor of First Baptist Church in Waco.

“We envision a new generation of Baptist students taking up their mantle as we once again experience an outpouring of God’s Spirit,” Wood said.

“We pray for students who are inflammable, who will feel the fire, who will spread the fire to reach America’s youth,” Moody added.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to John Wood as Ralph Wood.