Twenty Thousand People in a Kentucky Field

Cane Ridge is in Bourbon County, Kentucky, and in 1801 there was almost nothing there.

That is the first thing worth establishing, because the number that comes next only means something against it. Kentucky had been a state for nine years. Lexington, the largest town in the region, had a population somewhere around eighteen hundred. The country was thinly settled, the roads were bad, and people lived a long way from each other.

And in August 1801, a sacramental meeting was held at the Cane Ridge meeting house, organized by a Presbyterian minister named Barton W. Stone, who left his own written account of it in his autobiography.

A sacramental meeting was not unusual. It was a communion season, advertised locally, of a kind that had been held in that tradition for generations.

People started arriving on Friday 6 August. And they kept arriving.

How many came is genuinely contested, and I am going to say so plainly rather than repeat a figure as though it were counted. Contemporary estimates run from about ten thousand to more than twenty thousand. Nobody took a census. The people who wrote the numbers down were estimating a crowd in a field at night, and modern historians treat the figures with caution.

What is not in dispute is that a very large number of people, in a very thinly settled part of the country, came to a communion service in a field and stayed for days.

Nobody planned this

Here is what I want you to have out of it, and it is not the number.

Nobody arranged this. Stone had organized a communion season, which was an ordinary item on the calendar of that tradition. He had not advertised a revival, because that is not a thing a person can advertise.

Preachers from several denominations ended up preaching at the same time in different parts of the field. Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, from stumps and wagons, to overlapping crowds, for days.

And the location was a place nobody would have chosen. A meeting house on a ridge in a frontier county, reachable by bad roads, in the summer heat.

You are not living somewhere God has ruled out. Acts 2:17 says I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one named in that verse rather than any particular place or century.

Here is the verse.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesyActs 2:17, King James Version

Upon all flesh. Not upon a region. Not upon a period.

You have a promise with no address on it, and Acts 2:17 was quoted by a fisherman in a city he did not own to a crowd that had come from everywhere. The written word says all flesh and stops, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the reason a bad road has never been a disqualification.

Now the honest part, because this category is held to it.

The physical phenomena at Cane Ridge were disputed at the time and remain disputed. Accounts describe people falling, and involuntary movements that were later called the jerks, and other things besides. Some observers regarded these as evidence of God at work. Others, including serious and devout people in the same decade, regarded them as crowd behavior, or worse.

I am not going to settle that. The written record contains both assessments, from people who were present, and it is not mine to adjudicate two hundred and twenty years later.

You have been handed a record with the argument still in it, and neither side of it is being scored here. The written accounts of 1801 disagree with each other, and the same Spirit who allowed both to survive is the reason nobody has to pretend the history is tidy.

What I will say is what happened afterward, because that is documented.

Barton Stone and others later left the Presbyterian structure they had been part of, and a movement came out of that which is still going. Methodist and Baptist growth in that region accelerated. The camp meeting became a fixture of American religious life for a century.

Whatever anybody thinks of the jerks, a field in Bourbon County changed the shape of religion in that country.

And it is worth pausing on how unglamorous the mechanics were. People came in wagons and slept under them. They cooked over open fires. Somebody had to organize water for that many people and animals in August, and the written accounts mention the practical difficulties as much as anything else. Whatever else it was, it was days of hard, dusty, uncomfortable logistics in a field, and the people who came knew that in advance and came anyway.

You have been counted out of a story that started in a place with worse roads than yours. Acts 2:17 says all flesh and names no location, and it is His Spirit who is the reason geography has never been the qualification.