Six Men at Noon on Fulton Street

Start with the half hour, because the half hour is the article.

In the summer of 1857, a man named Jeremiah Lanphier was employed as a lay missionary by the North Dutch Church on Fulton Street in New York. He was in his forties, he had been a businessman, and the job was to visit people in a part of the city where the church's own membership was moving away.

He found it hard. That is in the accounts. It was discouraging work and it was not producing much.

So he printed a handbill. It advertised a prayer meeting for businessmen, at noon, in an upper room of the church, and said that people could come for the whole hour or for five minutes, whatever their work allowed.

The first meeting was on Wednesday 23 September 1857.

He went up and sat in the room and waited, and for the first half hour nobody came.

Thirty minutes with nobody in the room

I want to stay with that half hour, because everything anybody knows about Fulton Street sits on top of it.

A man in his forties, in a job that was not working, sat alone in a room at lunchtime having invited a city that had not come.

He did not leave. At about half past twelve, one man came up the stairs. Then another. By the end of the hour there were six.

Six, out of a city that at the time held more than half a million people. If anybody had been keeping score that day, the score would have read as a failure. A man had printed handbills, distributed them through a commercial district, and drawn six.

The following week there were about twenty. The week after that, about forty, and they decided to meet daily rather than weekly. By early the next year the meetings had spread across the city and then to other cities, held in churches, halls and theaters at midday.

You are not wasting the half hour. Zechariah 4:10 asks who hath despised the day of small things, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that question off the page and puts it into an empty room at a quarter past twelve.

Here is the verse.

For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth.Zechariah 4:10, King James Version

It is a question rather than a statement, and it is asked of people who were rebuilding something much smaller than what had been there before.

You have been asked a question rather than given a scolding, and the verse is aimed at the despising rather than at the smallness. Zechariah 4:10 puts it as who hath despised, and the same Spirit who kept it in that form is the reason nobody is being told their small thing is secretly large.

Now the honest part, and this category requires it.

The numbers claimed for the revival of 1857 and 1858 are not verifiable. Figures for conversions circulated at the time and afterward that ran into the hundreds of thousands and beyond, and modern historians treat them with considerable caution. There was no mechanism for counting.

Historians also differ about causes. The financial panic of October 1857, which came a few weeks after that first meeting, closed banks and put men out of work, and how much that contributed is genuinely argued about.

I am not going to settle either question. What is documented is the handbill, the date, the room, and the six.

You have a record where the beginning is verifiable and the scale is not, and this site tells you which is which. The written accounts of 23 September 1857 agree on the small facts and disagree about the large ones, and it is His Spirit who is the reason the small facts are the ones you can stand on.

There is one more thing about the handbill that I love.

It said people could come for five minutes.

That is a man who understood exactly who he was inviting. Not the devout with an hour to spare. Clerks and traders and porters with a break and a walk each way, who might be able to give a few minutes and would not come at all if the terms were larger.

He built the door small enough for the people he actually wanted.

That is a decision anybody can copy. Most of what keeps people out of a good thing is not the thing itself; it is the size of the entry. A meeting that requires an hour excludes everybody whose life is measured in fifteen minute pieces, and the people whose lives run that way are usually the ones carrying the most.

You have been invited on terms you can meet, and the man who printed that handbill made sure of it. The written notice specified five minutes as acceptable, and the same Spirit who preserved that detail is the reason nobody has to have capacity to begin.