1. A.W. Tozer
   • Highest education: a few weeks of high school
2. John Bunyan
   • Learned only to read and write – no formal higher education of any kind
   • Never learned Greek or Hebrew
   • “The Pilgrim’s Progress – ‘next to the Bible, perhaps the world’s best-selling book . . . translated into over 200 languages.’” -Piper
3. Dwight Moody
   • without higher education, founded three schools;
   • without theological training, reshaped Victorian Christianity;
   • without radio or television reached 100 million people.
4. Charles Spurgeon
   • Little formal education (some college)
   • Began preaching at 16
5. William Carey
   • No formal education – self taught
6. Andrew Fuller
   • Farm raised
   • “He had no formal theological training but became the leading theological spokesman for the Particular Baptists in his day.” -Piper
7. Hudson Taylor
   • No theological education
   • Some medical education
   • Gathered missionaries which other mission societies rejected as too uneducated
8. John Newton
   • 2 years of boarding school, after which he went to sea with his father
   • Self educated in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
9. David Brainerd
   • Expelled from seminary in his third year
10. Leonard Ravenhill
    • Educated at Cliff College in England
    • Said it was advantageous for pastors to not attend Bible school
    • Yet taught himself for a time at Bethany College of Missions

John Owen (who not only attended but taught seminary) believed that the first and main purpose of all of a student’s studies and meditations is to cultivate communion with God. He says that the study of scriptures, “should always be conducted in order to learn from them our duty and, understanding that, let it proceed to practice holy communion with God as we experience to the depths of our souls the power of the Spirit mightily manifesting in us His grace and light.” Without this, he says, “our studies are useless.”

If there were seminaries which taught God-besottedness (such as Owen desired of all theological learning), I wonder if Christ’s Church would so often stand in need of uneducated lay-ministers. Regardless of my speculations, we can be confident of this: that if seminaries will not produce such men, then God will supply his Church with them out of his own stores. As Richard Baxter puts it;

As to supply of pastors, Christ will take care of that. … He who himself undertook the work of our redemption, and bore our transgressions, and hath been faithful as the chief Shepherd of the Church, will not lose all his labor and suffering for want of instruments to carry on his work … he will provide men to be his servants and ushers in his school, who shall willingly take the labor on them, and rejoice to be so emplyed, and account that the happiest life in the world which you account so great a toil, and would not exchange it for all your ease and carnal pleasure; but for the saving of souls, and the propagating of the gospel of Christ, will be content to bear the burden and heat of the day; and to fill up the measure of the sufferings of Christ in their bodies; and to work while it is day; and to do what they do with all their might; and to be the servants of all, and not to please themselves, but others, for their edification; and to become all things to all men, that they may save some; and to endure all things for the elect’s sake; and to spend and be spent for their fellow-creatures; though the more they love, the less they should be beloved, and should be accounted their enemies for telling them the truth. Such pastors will Christ provide his people, after his own heart.

Or if you prefer, consider John’s teaching to the religious teachers of his day;

And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

Perhaps best of all is the teaching of Jeremiah:

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people: “You have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds, declares the Lord. Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord.

To the seminary professors:
God does not need you. Be about his work then or he will throw you off. The work he would have of you is to raise up men who experience God to the depths of their souls. Do you know how to teach this? Or will you be content to adulterize the very word of God? Its purpose is to bring men to himself, not to fill their heads with notions. There must be a holy fire and passion in your classrooms. What God are you putting forth if not the God that wishes to bring all men to himself? As A.W. Tozer says; “It is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.”

Yet if you are hungering after God himself; finding the daily experiencing of him your chief delight; and passing the knowledge of how to live in this manner to the next generation of hungry souls: be blessed in your work, and may the God whom it is your delight to honor, honor you.

This is the only real harbinger of revival which I have been able to detect anywhere on the religious horizon. It may be the cloud the size of a man’s hand for which a few saints here and there have been looking. It can result in a resurrection of life for many souls and a recapture of that radiant wonder which should accompany faith in Christ, that wonder which has all but fled the Church of God in our day.

But this hunger must be recognized by our religious leaders. Current evangelicalism has (to change the figure) laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel. But God be thanked that there are a few who care. They are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, are yet unable to reconcile themselves to the continued absence of fire. They desire God above all. They are athirst to taste for themselves the “piercing sweetness” of the love of Christ about Whom all the holy prophets did write and the psalmists did sing.

There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.

I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real. Milton’s terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to his: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.” It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table. The truth of Wesley’s words is established before our eyes: “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.”

Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold “right opinions,” probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the “program.” This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.

This book is a modest attempt to aid God’s hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.

One minister said of this time:

From contact with this ‘wonderful work of God,’ and being honoured to take some little part in carrying it on, my spirit has been literally overwhelmed with a sense of my own deep unworthiness, and yet that God should ‘count me worthy, putting me into the ministry’ at such a precious time of abounding mercy to perishing men; and I have felt that all earthly honours pale into insignificance when compared with the highest God could confer on man, being a ‘fellow-worker with God, and with His Christ.’ It were worth living ten thousand ages in obscurity and reproach to be permitted to creep forth at the expiration of that time, and engage in the glorious work of the last six months of 1859. (Source)

What follows is one particular Ulster Revival story told by William Gibson, in his work The Year of Grace (paragraphing added).

“Coleraine—Strange Excitement in a School-room

“There is one incident so striking in the commencement of the movement in Coleraine, that it cannot be omitted in any the most cursory statement on the subject. It is impossible to present it in a better form than has been done by Mr. Arthur, in one of his Tracts on the Revival, in these words. After narrating an impressive scene witnessed by one of his brethren, a Methodist minister in the town, he says:—

“Not far from the spot where this took place stands a large school, belonging to the corporation of London, or that body connected with it, known as the Irish Society, who are landlords of Coleraine, and of much property around. In it a boy was observed under deep impressions. The master, seeing that the little fellow was not fit to work, called him to him, and advised him to go home, and call upon the Lord in private. With him he sent an older boy, who had found peace the day before.

“On their way they saw an empty house, and went in there to pray together. The two schoolfellows continued in prayer in the empty house till he who was weary and heavy-laden felt his soul blessed with sacred peace. Rejoicing in this new and strange blessedness, the little fellow said, ‘I must go back and tell Mr. ____.’

“The boy, who, a little while ago, had been too sorrowful to do his work, soon entered the school with a beaming face, and, going up to the master, said, in his simple way, ‘O Mr. ____, I am so happy; I have the Lord Jesus in my heart.’ Strange words, in cold times! Natural words, when upon the simple and the young the Spirit is poured out, and they feel what is meant by ‘Christ in you the hope of glory,’ and utter it in the first terms that come!

“The attention of the whole school was attracted. Boy after boy silently slipped out of the room. After a while, the master stood upon something which enabled him to look over the wall of the playground. There he saw a number of his boys ranged round the wall on their knees in earnest prayer, every one apart. The scene overcame him.

“Presently he turned to the pupil who had already been a comforter to one schoolfellow, and said, ‘Do you think you can go and pray with these boys ?’ He went out, and, kneeling down among them, began to implore the Lord to forgive their sins, for the sake of Him who had borne them all upon the cross. Their silent grief soon broke into a bitter cry. As this reached the ears of the boys in the room, it seemed to pierce their hearts, as by one consent they cast themselves upon their knees, and began to cry for mercy.

“The girls’ school was above, and the cry no sooner penetrated to their room than, apparently well knowing what mourning it was, and hearing in it a call to themselves, they, too, fell upon their knees and wept. Strange disorder for schoolmaster and mistress to have to control!

“The united cry reached the adjoining streets. Every ear, prepared by the prevailing Spirit, at once interpreted it as the voice of those who look upon Him whom they have pierced, and mourn for Him. One and another of the neighbours came in, and at once cast themselves upon their knees and joined in the cry for mercy. These increased, and continued to increase, till first one room, then another, then a public office on the premises, in fact, every available spot, was filled with sinners seeking God. Clergymen of different denominations, and men of prayer, were sought, and they spent the day in pleading for the mourners;—sweetest of all the toils that this earth doth witness, when men, themselves enjoying heavenly peace, labour in intercession for those who are now, as they were once, broken-hearted by a sight of their sins, and striving to enter in at the strait gate, in order to walk in the narrow way!

“Thus passed hour after hour of that memorable day. Dinner was forgotten, tea was forgotten, and it was not till eleven o’clock at night that the school premises were freed from their unexpected guests.”

Here ends the account. May God do as much in our midst.

For more information about the 1859 Ulster Revival, this web page provides a brief, favorable history; and the next page of this post contains a Presbyterian historian’s view, which is a bit more skeptical.

What does revival take? Does it not take the blood, sweat, and tears of the saints?

When John Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides, was in route to his mission station, he thought of how, not twenty years earlier, the earliest missionaries to the region were eaten by cannibals. He wrote;

Alas! Within a few minutes of their touching land, both were clubbed to death ; and the savages proceeded to cook and feast upon their bodies. Thus were the New Hebrides baptized with the blood of Martyrs ; and Christ thereby told the whole Christian world that He claimed these Islands as His own. His cross must yet be lifted up, where the blood of His saints has been poured forth in His name!

Oh to be surrounded by men who think like this. The blood of martyrs is Christ’s blood to the nations! When we see it, do we only see a tragic death? When we think of our own possible suffering for Christ’s sake do we see merely what cost it will exact? Or are those thoughts secondary to the surpassing joy of how God will use the sacrifices of His people to transform this world into His kingdom?

The reason I bring this up is to lead into and give support for what I’m about to claim, which is: if there is not at least someone in a local church who yearns for its revival so badly that he is willing to trade his house, his income, his wealth, his own life, or even the lives of his children for the sake of that revival, then that church does not really want revival. Furthermore, I would speculate that a church that doesn’t yearn for its revival, for its salvation, for its sanctification, has no business existing in the first place. It is like the tree with the axe laid at the roots. What will save such a tree? Is your church such a tree?

Yearn for revival.

Did not the pre-messianic Jews yearn for their savior? Did they not plead with God for His day. And yet when He came, they rejected Him. Are we so different? God offers us revival. He offers us sanctification. We who plead for revival, are we willing to accept the cost that revival will come by? Or will we, like the Jews of old, reject that revival because it is not made according to our design? Why do we gather to pray for revival if we are not willing to accept it in whatever form God chooses to send it?