OPEN-AIR
MEETINGS (R.A. Torrey)
1. Their
importance and advantages.
1. They
are Scriptural. Jesus said, "Go out quickly into the streets and
lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the
halt, and the blind." Every great preacher of the Bible was an
open-air preacher. Peter was an open-air preacher, Paul was an open-air
preacher, and so were Elijah, Moses and Ezra. More important than all,
Jesus Christ Himself was an open-air preacher, and preached for the most
part out of doors. Every great sermon recorded in the Bible was preached
in the open air; the sermon on the Day of Pentecost, the Sermon on the
Mount, the sermon on Mars Hill, etc. In this country we have an idea that
open-air preaching is for those who cannot get any other place to speak,
but across the water they look at it quite differently. Some of the most
eminent preachers of Great Britain preach in the open air.
2. Open-air meetings are portable, you can carry them around. It
would be very difficult to carry a church or mission building with you,
but there is no difficulty about carrying an openair meeting with you. You
can get an open-air meeting where you could by no possibility get a
church, mission hall or even a room. You can have open-air meetings in all
parts of the city and all parts of the country.
3. Open-air meetings are more attractive in the summer than hot,
sweltering halls or churches. When on my vacations, I used to attend a
country church. It was one of the hottest, most stifling and sleepy places
I ever entered. It was all but impossible to keep awake while the minister
attempted to preach. The church was located in a beautiful grove where it
was always cool and shady, but it seemed never to enter the minds of the
people to go out of the church into the grove. Of course only a few people
attended the church services. One day a visiting minister suggested that
they have an open-air meeting on the front lawn of a Christian man having
a summer residence near at hand. The farmers came to that meeting from
miles around, in wagons, on foot and every other way. There was a splendid
crowd in attendance. The country churches would do well in the summer to
get out of their church building into some attractive grove near at hand.
4. Open-air meetings will accommodate vast crowds. There are few
church buildings, especially in the country, that will accommodate more
than one thousand people; but people by the thousands can be accommodated
by an open-air meeting. It has been my privilege to speak for several
summers in a small country town with less than a thousand inhabitants. Of
course the largest church building in the town would not accommodate more
than five hundred people. The meetings, however, were held in the open
air, and people drove to them from forty miles around, and at a single
meeting we had an attendance of 15,000 people. Whitefield was driven to
the fields by the action of church authorities. It was well that he was.
Some of his audiences at Moorfields were said to number 60,000 people.
5. Open-air meetings are economical. You neither have to pay rent
nor hire a janitor. They do not cost anything at all. God Himself
furnishes the building and takes care of it. I remember that at a
Christian Workers' Convention a man was continually complaining that no
one would hire for him a mission hall in which to hold meetings. At last I
suggested to him that he had all outdoors, and could go there and preach
until some one hired him a hall. He took the suggestion and was greatly
used of God. You do not need to have a cent in your pocket to hold an
open-air meeting. The whole outdoors is free.
6. You can reach men in an open-air meeting that you can reach in no
other way. I can tell of instance after instance where men who have
not been at church or a mission hall for years have been reached by
open-air meetings. The persons I have known to be reached and converted
through open- air meetings have included thieves, drunkards, gamblers,
saloon-keepers, abandoned women, murderers, lawyers, doctors, theatrical
people, society people, in fact pretty much every class.
7. You can reach backsliders and people who have drifted away from the
church. One day when we were holding a meeting on a street comer in a
city, a man in the crowd became interested, and one of our workers dealt
with him. He said, "I am a backslider, and so is my wife, but I have
made up my mind to come back to Christ." He was saved and so was his
brother-in-law.
8. Open-air meetings impress People by their earnestness. How often
I have heard people say, "There is something in it. See those people
talking out there on the street. They do not have any collection, and they
come here just because they believe what they are preaching." Remarks
like this are made over and over again. Men who are utterly careless about
the Gospel and Christianity have been impressed by the earnestness of men
and women who go out on to the street and win souls for Christ.
9. Open-air meetings bring recruits to churches and missions. One
of the best ways to fill up an empty church is to send your workers out on
the street to hold meetings before the church service is held, or better
still, go yourself. When the meeting is over, you can invite people to the
church (or mission). This is the divinely appointed means for reaching men
that cannot be reached in any other way (Luke 14:21). All Christians
should hear the words of Christ constantly ringing in their ears, "Go
out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither
the poor," etc.
10. Open-air meetings enable you to reach men. One of the great
problems of most ministers of the Gospel to-day is how to get hold of the
men. The average church audience is composed very largely of women and
children. One of the easiest ways to get hold of the men is to go out on
the streets, where the men are. Open-air meetings are as a rule composed
of an overwhelming majority of men.
11. Open-air meetings are good for the health. An English preacher
was told that he must die, that he had consumption. He thought he should
make the most of the few months he had allotted to live, so he went out on
the streets and began preaching. The open-air preaching cured his
consumption, and he lived for many years, and was the founder of a great
open-air society.
II. Where to
hold open-air meetings.
To put it in
a single word, that you wish to reach. But a few suggestions may prove
helpful.
1. Where the crowds pass. Find the principal thoroughfare where the
crowds throng. You cannot hold your meeting just at that point, as the
police will not permit it, but you can hold it just a little to one side
of that point, and the crowds as they pass will go to one side and listen
to you.
2. Hold them near crowded tenements. In that way you can preach to
the people in the tenements as well as on the street. They will throw open
their windows and listen. Sometimes the audience that you do not see will
be as large as the one you do see. You may be preaching to hundreds of
people inside the building that you do not see at all. I knew of a poor
sick woman being brought to Christ through the preaching she heard on the
street. It was a hot summer night, and her window was open, and the
preaching came in through the window and touched her heart and won her to
Christ. It is good to have a good strong voice in openair preaching, for
then you can preach to all the tenements within three or four blocks. Mr.
Sankey once sang a hymn that was carried over a mile away and converted a
man that far off. I have a friend who occasionally uses in his open-air
meetings a megaphone that carries his voice to an immense distance.
3. Hold meetings near circuses, baseball games, and other places where
the people crowd. One of the most interesting meetings I ever held was
just outside of a baseball ground on Sunday. The police were trying to
break up the game inside by arresting the leaders. We held the meeting
outside just back of the grand stand. As there was no game to see inside,
the people listened to
the singing and preaching of the Gospel outside. On another Sunday we
drove down to Sell's circus and had the most motley audience I ever
addressed. There were people present from almost every nation under
heaven. The circus had advertised a "Congress of Nations," so I
had provided a congress of nations for my openair meeting. On that day I
had a Dutchman, a Frenchman, a Scotchman, an Englishman, an Irishman and
an American preach. We took care at the open-air meeting to invite the
people to evening meeting at the mission. That night a man came who told
us that he was one of the employes of the circus, and was touched that
afternoon by the preaching of the Gospel, and had come to learn how to be
a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. He accepted the Saviour that night.
4. Hold meetings in or near parks or other public resorts. Almost
every city has its resorts where people go on Sunday. As the people will
not go to church, the church ought to go out to the people. Sometimes
permission can be secured from the authorities to bold the meetings right
in the parks. Wherever this is impossible they can be held near at hand.
One who is now a deacon of our church spent his Sundays at Lincoln Park
before he was converted; an open-air meeting was held close at band, and
here he heard the Gospel and was converted.
5. Hold meetings in groves. It would be well if every country
church could be persuaded to try this. Get out of the church into a grove
somewhere, and you will be surprised at the number of people who will come
who would not go near the church at all.
6. Hold open-air meetings near your missions. If you have a
mission, be sure to bold an open-air meeting near it. It is the easiest
thing in the world to keep a mission full, even during the summer months,
if you hold an open-air meeting in connection with it, but it is almost
impossible to do so if you do not.
7. Hold open-air meetings in front of churches. A good many of our
empty churches could be filled if we would only hold openair meetings in
front of them. Years ago, when in London, I went to hear Newman Hall
preach. It looked to me like a very orderly and aristocratic church, but
when I left the church after the second service, I was surprised to find
an open-air meeting in full blast right in front of the church, and people
gathered there in crowds from the thoroughfare.
8. Be careful about the little details in connection with the location.
On a hot day, hold the meeting on the shady side of the street On a cool
day, on the sunny side. Make it as comfortable for the audience as
possible. Never compel the audience to stand with the sun shining in their
eyes. Preach with the wind, and not against it. Take your own position a
little above the part of the audience nearest you, upon a curbstone,
chair, platform, rise in the ground, or anything that will raise your head
above others so that your voice will carry.
III. Things
to get.
1. Get it
thoroughly understood between yourself and God that He wants you to do
this work, and that by His grace you are going to do it whatever it costs.
This is one of the most important things in starting out to do open-air
work. You are bound to make a failure unless you settle this at the start.
Open-air work has its discouragements, its difficulties and its almost
insurmountable obstacles, and unless you start out knowing that God has
called you to the work, and come what will, you will go through with it,
you are sure to give it up.
2. Get permission from the powers that be to hold open-air meetings.
Do not get into conflict with the police if you can possibly avoid it. As
a rule it is quite easy to get this permission if you go about it in a
courteous and intelligent way. Find out what the laws of the city are in
this regard, and then observe them. Go to the captain of the precinct and
tell him that you wish to hold an open-air meeting, and let him see that
you are not a disturber of the peace or a crank. Many would-be open-air
preachers get into trouble from a simple lack of good sense and common
decency.
3. Get a good place to hold the meeting. Do not start out at
random. Study your ground. You should operate like a general. We are told
that the Germans studied France as a battle ground for years before the
Franco-Prussian war broke out, and when the war
broke out there were officers in the German army that knew more about
France than the officers in the French army did. Lay your plan of
campaign, study your battle field, pick out the best places to hold the
meetings, look over the territory carefully and study it in all its
bearings. There are a good many things to be considered. Do not select
what would be a good place for some one to throw a big panful of dishwater
upon you. These little details may appear trivial, but they need to be
taken into consideration. It is unpleasant, and somewhat disconcerting,
when a man is right in the midst of an interesting exhortation, to have a
panful of dishwater thrown down the back of his neck.
4. Get as large a number of reliable Christian men and women to go with
you as you possibly can. Crowds draw crowds. There is great power in
numbers. One man can go out on the street alone and hold a meeting; I have
done it myself; but if I can get fifteen or twenty reliable men to go with
me, I will get them every time. Please note that I have said reliable
Christian men and women. Do not take anybody along with you to an open-air
meeting that you do not know. A man that is in the habit of making a fool
of himself be sure to leave at home. He may upset your whole meeting. Do
not take a man or woman with you who has an unsavory reputation. Probably
some one in the crowd will. know it and shout out the fact. Take only
people who are of established reputation, and well balanced. Never pick up
a stranger out of the crowd and ask him to speak. Some one will come along
who appears to be just your sort, but if you ask him to speak you will
wish you had not done so.
5. Get the best music you can. Get a baby organ and a comet if you
can. Be sure to have good singing if it is possible. If you cannot have
good singing, have poor singing, for even poor singing goes a good way in
the open air. One of the best open-air meetings I ever attended was where
two of us were forced to go out alone. Neither of us was a singer. We
started with only one hearer, but a drunken man came along and began to
dance to our singing, and a crowd gathered to watch him dance. When the
crowd had gathered, I simply put my hand on the drunken man, and said,
"Stand still for a few moments." My companion took the drunken
man as a text for a temperance sermon, and when he got through I took him
for a text. People began to whisper in the crowd, "I would not be in
that man's shoes for anything." The man did us good service that
night. He first drew the crowd, and then famished us with a text. The Lord
turned the devil's instrument right against him that night. If you can,
get a good solo singer, or even a poor solo singer will do splendid work
in the open air, if he sings in the power of the Spirit. I remember a man
who attempted to sing in the open air, who was really no singer at all,
but God in His wonderful mercy gave him that night to sing in the power of
the Spirit. People began to break down on the street, tears rolled down
their cheeks, one woman was converted right there during the singing of
that hymn. Although the hymn was sung in such a miserable way from a
musical standpoint, the Spirit of God used it for that woman's conversion.
6. Get the attention of your hearers as soon as possible. When you
are preaching in a church, people will oftentimes stay even if they are
not interested, but unless you get the attention of your audience at once
in the open air, one of two things will happen, either your crowd will
leave you or else they will begin to guy you. In the first half dozen
sentences you must get the attention of your bearers. I was once holding a
meeting in one of the hardest places of a city. There were saloons on
three of the four comers, three breweries, and four or five Roman Catholic
churches were close at hand. There was scarcely a Protestant in that part
of the city. The first words I spoke were these, "You will notice the
cross on the spire of yonder church." By this means I secured their
attention at once, and then I talked to them about the meaning of that
cross. On holding a meeting one labor day, I started out on the subject of
labor. I spoke only a few moments on that subject, to lead them around to
the subject of the Lord Jesus Christ. Holding a meeting one night in the
midst of a hot election, near where an election parade was forming, I
started out with the question, "Whom shall we elect?" The people
expected a political address, but before long I got them interested in the
question whether or not we should elect the Lord Jesus Christ to be the
ruler over our lives.
7. Get
some good tracts. Always have tracts when you hold an open-air
meeting. They assist in making permanent the impressions and fixing the
truth. Have the workers pass around through the crowd handing out the
tracts at the proper time.
8. Get workers around in the crowd to do personal work. Returning
from an open-air meeting years ago in the city of Detroit, I said to a
minister who was stopping at the same hotel that we had had several
conversions in the meeting. He replied by asking me if a certain man from
Cleveland was not in the crowd. I replied that he was. He told me that he
thought if I looked into it I would find that the conversions were largely
due to that man, that while the services were going on, he had been around
in the crowd doing personal work. I found that it was so.
9. Get a gospel wagon if you can. Of this we shall have more to say
when we speak of Gospel Wagon Work.
IV. Don't.
1. Don't
unnecessarily antagonize your audience. I heard of a man addressing a
Roman Catholic audience in the open air and pitching into the Roman
Catholic Church and the Pope. That man did not have good sense. Another
man attempted a prohibition discourse immediately in front of a saloon. He
got a brick instead of votes.
2. Don't get scared. Let Psalm 27: 1 be your motto: "The Lord
is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength
of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?" There is not a particle need
of being scared. You may be surrounded by a crowd of bowling hoodlums, but
you may be absolutely certain that you will not be hurt unless the Lord
wants you to be hurt; and if the Lord wants you to be hurt, that is the
best thing for you. You may be killed if the Lord sees fit to allow you to
be killed, but it is a wonderful privilege to be killed for the Lord Jesus
Christ. One night I was holding a meeting in one of the worst parts of
Chicago. Something happened to enrage a part of the crowd that gathered
around me. Friends near at hand were in fear lest I be killed, but I kept
on speaking and was not even struck.
3. Don't lose your temper. Whatever happens, never lose your
temper. You ought never to get angry under any circumstances, but it is
especially foolish to do so when you are holding an openair meeting. You
will doubtless have many temptations to lose your temper, but never do it.
It is very hard to hit a man when he is serene, and if you preserve your
serenity, the chances are that you will escape unscathed. Even if a tough
strikes you, he cannot do so a second time if you remain calm. Serenity is
one of the best safeguards.
4. Don't let your meeting be broken up. No matter what happens,
hold your ground if you can, and you generally can. One night I was
holding a meeting in a square in one of the most desperate parts of a
large city. The steps of an adjacent saloon were crowded with men, many of
whom were half drunk. A man came along on a load of hay, went into the
saloon and fired himself up with strong drink. Then he attempted to drive
right down upon the crowd in the middle of the square, in which there were
many women and children. Some man stopped his horses, and the infuriated
man came down from the load of hay and the howling mob swept down from the
steps of the saloon. Somehow or other the drunken driver got a rough
handling in the mob, but not one of our number was struck. Two policemen
in citizens' clothes happened to be passing by and stopped the riot. I
said a few words more, and then formed our little party into a procession,
behind which the crowd fell in, and marched down to the mission singing.
5. Don't fight. Never fight under any circumstances. Even if they
almost pound the life out of you, refuse to fight back.
6. Don't be dull. Dullness will kill an open-air meeting at once.
Prosiness will drive the whole audience away. In order to avoid being
dull, do not preach long sermons. Use a great many striking illustrations.
Keep wide awake yourself, and you will keep the audience awake. Be
energetic in your manner. Talk so people can bear you. Don't preach, but
simply talk to people.
7. Don't be soft. One of these nice, namby-pamby, sentimental sort
of fellows in an open-air meeting the crowd cannot and will
not stand. The temptation to throw a brick or a rotten apple at him is
perfectly irresistible, and one can hardly blame the crowd.
8. Dont read a sermon. Whatever may be said in defence of reading
essays in the pulpit, it will never do in the open air. It is possible to
have no notes whatever. If you cannot talk long without notes, so much the
better; you can talk as long as you ought to. If you read, you will talk
longer than you ought to.
9. Don't use "cant." Use language that people are
acquainted with, but do not use vulgar language. Some people think it is
necessary to use slang, but slang is never admissible. There is language
that is popular and easily understood by the people that is purest
Anglo-Saxon.
10. Don't talk too long. You may have a number of talks in an
open-air meeting, but do not have any of them over ten or fifteen minutes
long. As a rule do not have them as long as that. Of course there are
exceptions to this, when a great crowd is gathered to bear some person in
the open air. Under such circumstances I have beard a sermon an hour long
that held the interest of the people, but this is not true in the ordinary
open-air meeting.
V. Things
absolutely necessary to success.
1. Consecrated
men and women. None but consecrated men and women will ever succeed in
open-air meetings. If you cannot get such, you might as well give up
holding open-air meetings.
2. Depend upon God. There is nothing that will teach one his
dependence upon God more quickly and more thoroughly than holding open-air
meetings. You never know what is going to happen. You cannot lay plans
that you can always follow in an openair meeting. You never know what
moment some one will come along and ask some troublesome question. You do
not know what unforeseen event is going to occur. All you can do is to
depend upon God, but that is perfectly sufficient.
3. Loyalty to the Word of God. It is the man who is absolutely
loyal to God's Word, and who is familiar with it and constantly uses it,
who succeeds in the open air. God often takes a text that is quoted, and
uses it for the salvation of some hearer. Arguments and illustrations are
forgotten, but the text sticks and converts.
4. Be frequently filled anew with the Holy Spirit. If any man needs
to take advantage of the privilege of fresh infillings of the Holy Spirit,
it is the open-air worker. Spiritual power is the great secret of success
in this, as in all other Christian work.
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