Bible Conference Movement

The Bible Conference Movement was an interdenominational network of Protestant gatherings that began in the last decades of the nineteenth century and played an integral role in the rise of fundamentalism and the success of evangelicalism in the twentieth century. Audiences flocked to hear well known religious personalities and Bible teachers speak on popular theological currents, missionary themes, end-times speculation, and renewal. Bible conferences combined elements of earlier Christian revivalism, efforts for social reform, and recreation.

According to historian Mark Sidwell, Bible Conferences may have tapped into the historical impulse for the Pietist “ecclesiola in Ecclesia” or “little church within the church.” Antecedents also included the frontier Camp Meetings of the Second Great Awakening and Keswick Convention meetings. There were elements that resembled the Chautauqua Movement and Bible Conferences were part of the legacy of evangelicalism’s “Benevolent Empire” which was embodied in social reform efforts including the Temperance Movement and abolitionism. Bible Conferences were also intertwined with the rise and formation of Protestant fundamentalism in the last decades of the 19th century.

It is generally agreed that the formative Bible Conferences were the Niagara Bible Conference, first held in 1883 and organized by George Needham, D. L. Moody’s Northfield Bible Conference in Massachusetts, and a series of Bible and Prophecy Conferences that were organized between 1878 and 1914 with the support of a veritable “who’s who” of fundamentalist leaders including James Brookes, A. J. Gordon, and Arthur Tappan Pierson, to name a few.

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