Charles Finney

Charles Grandison Finney was born in 1792 in Warren, Connecticut, and grew up in upstate New York. He trained as a lawyer, but after a religious conversion in 1821 he left the law to become a Presbyterian preacher. In the 1820s and 1830s he led revivals in the towns of upstate New York, an area later called the 'burned-over district' because of its many revivals, and then in cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Rochester. He used 'new measures', such as the 'anxious bench' for those concerned about their souls and allowing women to pray aloud in mixed meetings, and his Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) argued that revivals could be promoted by the right means. Finney opposed slavery and supported reform movements. In 1835 he became a professor of theology at the new Oberlin College in Ohio, which admitted both Black and women students, and he served as its president from 1851 to 1866. He died in Oberlin in 1875.

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Faith: Evangelist licensed as a preacher by the Presbyterians. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica