Roanoke: The Second Great Awakening

“It is a dangerous thing for a church to grow faster in members than [how] she organizes those members into living factors,” a Methodist leader once warned in Roanoke. Most churches, both then and today, would love to have to deal with a problem of overly fast growth compared to a stagnant or declining membership. Yet, for a church like Greene Memorial Methodist Church, swift expansion was a reality that needed to be handled carefully. Far outpacing most churches in Roanoke, Greene Memorial reached a peak in membership during the founding era in 1908 with an astounding 1,504 worshipers having joined as members. Membership slightly declined in succeeding years, probably due to other church plants that began from the initiative of Greene Memorial

Of course, Methodists and Baptists alike experienced massive growth as a result of the Second Great Awakening, leading to what has sometimes been referred to as the “Bible Belt” in the South. Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt highlighted this evangelical phenomenon, but as Heyrman noted, “[B]y the most generous estimate, less than one-fifth of all southern whites over the age of sixteen and fewer than one-tenth of all African Americans had joined Baptist, Methodist or Presbyterian churches by the 1810s.” She continued in saying, “There was, then, nothing inevitable about the triumph of evangelicalism in the South. In fact, reimagining it as a religious movement that faltered at first by failing to compel the loyalties of ordinary men and women raises the question of how—and how completely—it later succeeded.” With the Methodists not having as great of competition as the Baptists did among the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), the nineteenth century proved especially successful in terms of church growth. Heyrman explained this unsuspecting growth as having resulted, at least partially, in the following

Revival meetings, in particular, offered some of the most potent methods of winning converts to Methodism. On one occasion, for example, an astounding fifty-six people were converted at just one of the Methodist churches. These meetings were planned, but often open to a prolonged timeframe. And it was not simply white Methodists who orchestrated these revival services either. In the summer of 1896, black Methodists had originally planned for a ten-day revival, yet it ended up lasting three weeks. Preaching, too, evidently remained a highly prized aspect of the Methodist religious experience in Roanoke. When Dr. J. J. Tiger, a book editor for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, came to Greene Memorial Methodist Church in Roanoke, it was noted about the long-winded preacher, “For nearly two hours the people who were compelled to stand eagerly drank in every word that fell from his lips. At times his voice resembled the roll of distant thunder, and then it came down as soft and plaintive as a child’s.” Likewise, Bishop W. J. Gaines of the A.M.E. denomination preached a sermon in Roanoke, in which, “For fifty minutes he swayed the great congregation at will, delivering a most powerful sermon all aglow with the love of Jesus, while from