Exhortation

I am working on a video on Exhortation. I have a document that contains the rules to govern
the Cripple Creek camp meeting on 09/12/1823. On the ninth rule it is stated, “No persons or persons are to occupy the stand except the preachers and the exhorters.”

The Methodist in those days had a class of minister called exhorters. These so called "Exhorters" would encourage and help breathe life into the camp meeting of the day. And what importance they put on exhortation as the exhorter class had a place with the preachers and evangelists and would sit to the left and right of them on the stage during divine service!

The Exhorter of the time was typically uneducated. And to describe such a man we turn to DL Moody....

Dwight Lyman Moody was born the sixth child of Edwin and Betsy Holton Moody in Northfield, Mass. on February 5, 1837. Dwight's formal education ended in the fifth grade, and he rapidly tired of life on the farm. He left home at age 17, seeking employment in Boston. Failing to secure a desirable position, he asked his uncle for a job. Reluctantly, his uncle hired him to work in the retail shoe store he owned. Employment was conditional upon his attendance at the Mt. Vernon Congregational Church and Sunday School taught by Edward Kimball. Kimball spoke to Moody of the love of Christ. Shortly thereafter, Moody accepted that love and devoted his life to serving God. The following year brought Moody to Chicago with dreams of making his fortune in the shoe business. As success in selling shoes came, so did an interest in providing Sunday school for Chicago's children and the local YMCA. With the equivalent of a grade school education, he went from Sunday School teacher to evangelist, preaching to millions. His lack of education never hindered him. Most of his life he struggled to spell properly, use correct punctuation, and speak with proper grammar. Action, not reading theology was the hallmark of his life.

At age 62, a few weeks before his death, he was still preaching up to six times a day. Although he read the Bible diligently, he read little theology or church history, other than the writings of his friend, C.H. Spurgeon. Pragmatism,or practical application, not the life of the mind, engaged his interest. Second, he was never ordained. He was a businessman type evangelist. While all of his great evangelist predecessors were ordained ministers, Moody broke the mold. Technically, he was a lay preacher, and he insisted that people call him, “Mr. Moody.”

Dwight L Moody began as a simple exhorter with a wonderful gift of encouraging others in the Christian faith. Moody would become a great evangelist preaching to millions. When DL Moody was in England a jealous American preacher, annoyed and embarrassed over Moody’s miss-use of the English language, asked an Englishman why the English loved the shoe salesman when there were so many greater educated preachers in the United States. The Englishman’s reply was, “Because the shoe salesman preaches with tears.”

 

George Clark Rankin describing the old exhorter, Robert Sayers Sheffey, at the Cripple Creek camp meeting around 1870….

The rarest character I ever met in my life I met at that campmeeting (Cripple Creek) in the person of Rev. Robert Sheffey, known as Bob Sheffey. He was recognized all over Southwest Virginia as the most eccentric preacher of that country. He was a local preacher; crude, illiterate, queer and the oddest specimen known among preachers. But he was saintly in his life, devout in his experience and a man of unbounded faith. He wandered hither and thither over that section attending meetings, holding revivals and living among the people. He was great in prayer, and the Cripple Creek campground was not complete without Bob Sheffey. They wanted him there to pray and work in the altar. He was wonderful with penitents. And he was great in following up the sermon with his exhortations and appeals.

He would sometimes spend nearly the whole night in the straw with mourners; and if the meeting lagged he would go out on the mountain and spend the entire night in prayer, and the next morning he would come rushing into the service with his face all aglow shouting. And then the meeting always broke loose with a floodtide. He could say the oddest things, hold the most unique interviews with God, break forth in the most unexpected spasms of praise, use the homeliest illustrations, do the funniest things and go through with the most grotesque performances of any man born of woman.

It was just Bob Sheffy, and nobody thought anything of what he did and said, except to let him have his own way and do exactly as he pleased. In anybody else it would not have been tolerated for a moment. In fact, he acted more like a crazy man than otherwise, but he was wonderful in a meeting. He would stir the people, crowd the mourner's bench with crying penitents and have genuine conversions by the score. I doubt if any man in all that conference has as many souls to his credit in the Lamb's Book of Life as old Bob Sheffey.

 

One of the exhorters in our church was an old saint by the name of Dallas….

1. He was a very happy man and would shout in church and run the aisles.
2. In his religion was a, “Joy unspeakable and full of glory.”
3. He would shout like none other
4. He was a good husband and family man
5. Though not book learned, he was very mechanically inclined and a large soul. He and his wife were close all of their time together.
6. You can hear Dallas shouting in the attached video

Going to church was enjoyable in those days. The people would stay at the altar until the Holy Spirit came upon them. In which some would shout, some would run the aisles, some would speak in tongues. Every blessing was unique, which made going to church fun as we did not know what God was going to do next. Dallas was a joy to have in church and his shouting was very merry. I use to love going over to his place as we are neighbors and would help them at their small dairy farm, and they would always offer me something to eat. I would work the restaurant of the morning, the hayfield in the afternoon, and then go to revival at night. And after a summer of that the good Spirit came on me as well.

Dallas was a large soul who had such a joy and love for Christianity, this is the life I will use as a reference point of an Exhorter…

1. An Exhorter possesses a wonderful joy
2. An Exhorter is sanctified, and very clean in all his ways.
3. An Exhorter is filled with the Holy Ghost, possessing all the fruits thereof.
4. An Exhorter is industrious, and takes delight in all his surroundings.
5. Exhorters are good altar workers, and take to it with great delight
6. Exhorters have no fear, and if a weapon is launched against them will simply… “Ride it home to Glory!”
7. Exhorters are very much spiritual and loving. They would sit back in their pews in the church and weep. If one of them were to look back and catch the amazed look in my eye they would weep, “The Holy Ghost!” “The Holy Ghost” while pointing to souls laid out about the altar.
8. Exhorters have no delight in evil, do not care much for the news, have little political ambition, are not members of the “what’s wrong with the church” club, do not gossip, or run any kind of political game behind an established leaders back.

Dallas...

And a picture of the old Virginian saint, RS Sheffey. I am thankful for our Pentecostal Holiness church for keeping the methods of exhortation alive, as it was given to them by the Methodist church 100 years before them...



And a video of Dallas shouting in church...

 

And the full video on Exhortation. Hope she does a million views!