The camp meeting is a form of Protestant Christian religious service originating in Britain and once common in some parts of the United States, wherein people would travel from a large area to a particular site to camp out, listen to itinerant preachers, and pray. This suited the frontier lifestyle well, as such areas often lacked traditional churches and offered few other types of diversion from work. The practice was a major component of the Second Great Awakening, a rapid increase in the popularity of various Protestant denominations in the United States in the early 19th century, especially Methodists and Baptists.
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The camp meeting is a phenomenon of American frontier Christianity. The movement of thousands of settlers to new territories without permanent villages of the types they knew meant they were without religious communities. Not only were there few authorized houses of worship, there were fewer ordained ministers to fill the pulpits. The "camp meeting" led by itinerant preachers was an innovative response to this situation. Word of mouth told there was to be a religious meeting at a certain location. Due to the primitive means of transportation, if the meeting was to be more than a few miles' distance from the homes of those attending, they would need to stay at the revival for its entire duration, or as long as they desired to remain. People generally camped out at or near the revival site, as on the frontier there were usually neither adequate accommodations nor the funds for frontier families to use them. People were attracted to large camp meetings from a wide area. Some came out of sincere religious devotion or interest, others out of curiosity and a desire for a break from the arduous frontier routine; the structure of the situation created new converts.
Freed from daily routines for the duration of the meeting, participants could take part in almost continuous services, which resulted in high emotions; once one speaker was finished (often after several hours) another would often rise to take his place. "Several ministers, sometimes from different denominations, provided virtually nonstop preaching and hymn singing during the day, in the evening, and late into the night. Attenders anticipated and had emotional conversion experiences, with crying, trances, and exaltation.".[1] "Camp-meeting religion reinforced older themes of revivalism, including a sense of cooperation among the denominations, all of which confronted individual sinners with the necessity of making a decision to be converted." [1] Revivalism, of course, had been a significant force in religion since the 1740s, but in the days of the camp meeting, "revivalism became the dominant religious culture." [1] These sorts of meetings were huge contributing factors to what became known as the Second Great Awakening. A particularly large and successful revival was held at Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, where the Restoration Movement began to be formalized. This camp meeting was, in fact, that which many contend to be the pioneering event in the history of frontier camp meetings in America.[1] What made camp meetings successful and multiplying quite rapidly "were their emphases upon revivalism and morality, de-emphasis upon formal theology, clergy sharing the worldview of the frontier dwellers, and respect for common people.[1] The camp meetings gained wide recognition and a substantial increase in popularity in the aftermath of the American Civil War, as a result of the first holiness movement camp meeting in Vineland, New Jersey in 1867. Ocean Grove, New Jersey, founded in 1869, has been called the "Queen of the Victorian Methodist Camp Meetings." At the end of the nineteenth century, believers in Spiritualism also established camp meetings throughout the United States.
In 1816 in what is now Toronto, Ohio, the Rev. J. M. Bray, pastor of the Sugar Grove Methodist Episcopal Church, began an annual camp meeting. By 1875, the meeting became interdenominational by its purchase of the present-day Hollow Rock Holiness Camp Meeting Association. The association, which still runs the camp, claims that it is the oldest Christian camp meeting in continual existence in the United States.
Another camp gathering area known now as the Campgrounds, was located in what is now Merrick, New York. Parishioners would arrive in their wagons and park them in two circles, one inside the other. Eventually some of them started building small cottages, which offered more comfort than the wagons. A chapel and a home for the minister was also built. In the 1920s, with new areas open to those with cars, people stopped using the campground. The cottages and church buildings used as local residences and most survive today. In fact the two roads, Wesley Avenue, and Fletcher Avenue, encompass the area of the original paths which the wagons would encircle. The area is also known as Tiny Town because of the small size of the original cottages.
Camp meetings in the United States continued to be conducted for many years on a wide scale. Some are still held today, primarily by Pentecostal and Wesleyan holiness groups, as well as other Protestants and Spiritualists. Some scholars consider the revival meeting a form that arose to recreate the spirit of the frontier camp meeting.
On Sunday 31 May 1807 the first Camp Meeting was held in England at Mow Cop. The Wesleyan Methodists disapproved and subsequently expelled Hugh Bourne "because you have a tendency to set up other than the ordinary worship" which led eventually to the formation of the Primitive Methodist Church.
Lorenzo Dow brought reports of Camp Meetings from America during his visits to England. Hugh Bourne, William Clowes and Daniel Shoebotham saw this as an answer to complaints from members of the Harriseahead Methodists that their weeknight prayer meeting was too short. Bourne also saw these as an antidote to the general debauchery of the Wakes in that part of the Potteries, one of the reasons why he continued organising Camp Meetings in spite of the opposition from the Wesleyan authorities.
The pattern of the Primitive Methodist Camp Meeting was as a time of prayer and preaching from the Bible. In the first Camp Meeting, 4 separate "preaching stations" had been set up by the afternoon, each with an audience, while in between others spent the time praying. Their emphasis on the Bible is a clear distinction from the spiritualist strand of American camp meetings.
From May 1807 to the establishing of Primitive Methodism as a denomination in 1811, a series of 17 Camp Meetings was held.[2] There were a number of different venues beyond Mow Cop, including Norton-in-the-Moors during the Wakes in 1807 (Hugh Bourne's target venue), and Ramsor in 1808.
After Hugh Bourne and a significant number of his colleagues, including the Standley Methodist Society, had been put out of membership of the Burslem Wesleyan Circuit, they formed a group known as the Camp Meeting Methodists until 1811 when they joined with the followers of William Clowes, the "Clowesites".
Camp Meetings were a regular feature of Primitive Methodist life throughout the 19th century,[3] and still have existence in other forms today. The annual late May Bank Holiday weekend meetings at Cliff College[4] are one example, with a number of tents around the site, each with a different preacher.
The camp meeting tradition fostered a tradition of music and hymn singing with strong oral, improvisatory, and spontaneous elements.
Hymns were taught and learned by rote and a spontaneous and improvisatory element was prized. Both tunes and words were created, changed, and adapted in true folk music fashion:[5]
Collections of camp meeting hymns were published, which served both to propagate tunes and texts that were commonly used, and to document the most commonly sung tunes and texts.[7] Example hymnals include The Camp-meeting Chorister (1830) [8] and The Golden Harp (1857)[9]
The 20th century American composer Charles Ives used the camp meeting phenomenon as a metaphysical basis for his Symphony No. 3 (Ives). Hymn tunes and American Civil War area popular songs (which are closely related to camp meeting songs) as part of the symphony's musical material. Although the piece was not initially performed until 1946, almost 40 years after its composition, the symphony was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year in 1947.