James McGready was not your ordinary pastor. His preaching on sin and repentance so antagonized some laymen in North Carolina that they sent him a letter written in blood; its message: leave the territory or else. It looked like McGready's ministry for the Lord was ending.

In 1796 McGready moved from North Carol in a to Logan County, in southwestern Kentucky, where he began preaching to the hard-bitten frontiersmen of that region. Described by Barton Stone as a man who forgot everything "but the salvation of souls," McGready began to see some men and women turn to the Lord. And yet he was not satisfied. He drew up a covenant which his church people agreed to sign and act upon. Its focal point was a commitment to pray for an outpouring of God's Holy Spirit upon the land.  The Covenant said:  

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. ...he has left it on record, that when two or three agree upon earth, to ask in prayer, believing, it shall be done. Again whatsoever ye 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 out-pouring 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, at the rising of the sun, in pleading with God to revive his work.

The answers to their prayers were stupendous. In 1800, McGready wrote in the New York Missionary Magazine that a revival like a "few scattering floods of salvation" was beginning in Kentucky. In the summer of that year he sent invitations to Methodists, Baptists, and fellow Presbyterians to come to what became the first camp meeting in American church history: the Gasper River meeting.

The "heavenly fire," as it was called, came upon the assemblage. McGready indicates that in the last meeting, " ...ministers and experienced Christians were everywhere engaged in praying, exhorting, conversings and trying to lead enquiring souls to the Lord Jesus." The "fire" fell upon meeting after meeting. First the western states were touched by it, then the eastern seaboard states. A general spiritual awakening became evident to all attentive observers.

What had prompted it? From a human perspective, McGready's role appears paramount. But let us remember who he was: a committed country preacher, recently booted out of his ministry in North Carolina, who decided to preach to some tough Kentucky backwoodsmen, who saw them converted, and who began to pray with them in a disciplined fashion. In response to their prayers, the Holy Spirit moved through the land and began to heal its people.