Chapter 1:
New York City, 1857.
The streets smelled of horse dung and cold smoke, the air thick with the sound of merchants shouting, wheels clattering over cobblestones, and the distant hum of factories that never slept.
It was a city of stvers, of dreamers, of men who came to make their fortunes, and women who worked themselves to exhaustion in cramped tenements. But beneath the surface of all that ambition, something dark was stirring.
The economy was beginning to tremble.
Banks were failing, businesses collapsing, and fear was spreading like a cold wind through the crowded streets.
And in the midst of this restless, anxious city, there was a man no one would have chosen. His name was Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier.
He was fourty-eight (48) years old. And by every measure the world cared about, he had failed. He had spent his life working in textiles and tailoring, trying to build something stable, something respectable, something that would last.
But in 1842, his clothing business collapsed, taking with it his savings, his pride, and whatever dreams of success he still carried.
Fifteen (15) years had passed since then, and he had never recovered.
Jeremiah was not a pastor, not a theologian, not a man of letters or influence. He had never attended seminary, never stood behind a pulpit, never been ordained by any church.
He sang in choirs because he loved to worship, and he visited neighbours because he cared about people, but he had no titles, no credentials, no reason anyone should listen to him.
He was just a failed merchant with graying hair and a warm smile, living quietly in a city that didn't notice him. But God had been watching.
And in July of 1857, 2:04 something shifted.
The old North Dutch Reformed Church on Fulton Street was dying.
Once a thriving congregation in the heart of Manhattan, it had slowly emptied as families moved away and businesses took over the neighborhood.
The building was old, the finances were desperate, and the spiritual atmosphere was cold. The church leaders knew they needed something, someone, anything to breathe life back into that place.
So they hired Jeremiah Lanphier, not as a pastor, but as a lay missionary, a city missionary, someone who would walk the streets, knock on doors, visit shops and homes, and invite people back to church.
It was humble work, the kind of work no one notices, the kind of work that produces no immediate results. And Jeremiah accepted it quietly with the same gentle humility he had carried through every disappointment of his life.
He began walking the streets of lower Manhattan. Every day up and down the narrow alleys, past warehouses and counting houses into shops where clerks barely looked up from their ledgers. He handed out invitations, spoke to strangers, knocked on doors that were often slammed in his face. He smiled kindly, spoke gently and invited everyone he met to come to church on Sunday. But no one came. Week after week he walked those streets and week after week the church remained empty as few who attended were elderly, discouraged and tired. There was no youth, no energy, no fire.
Jeremiah prayed every morning before he left his room, asking God to open hearts, to soften the soil, to send laborers into the harvest. But the harvest seemed barren. By late summer, he was exhausted, not physically, but spiritually. He felt the weight of futility pressing down on him.
The quiet voice of doubt whispering that maybe he had been mistaken. Maybe God hadn't called him to this after all. He had failed in business. And now it seemed he was failing in ministry, too.
But in that discouragement, something stirred. A thought, a whisper, a gentle nudge that felt both small and immense at the same time. What if people didn't need another sermon? What if they needed a place to pray?
The idea came to him one afternoon as he walked through the crowded streets, watching men rushing from one appointment to the next, their faces tight with worry, their shoulders bent under invisible burdens.
These were businessmen, clerks, merchants, laborers, men who spent their days chasing profit and fearing loss.
They had no time for long church services, no patience for theological debates. But perhaps they needed something simpler. Perhaps they needed one quiet hour in the middle of the day to stop, to breathe, to lift their eyes toward heaven.
Jeremiah didn't wait for permission. He didn't form a committee or consult with church leaders.
He simply printed small hand bills on cheap paper and began handing them out on the streets. The message was plain, almost blunt in its simplicity.
A prayer meeting is held every Wednesday from 12 to 1:00 in the Consisery building in the rear of the North Dutch Church, Fulton Street.
This meeting is intended to give merchants, mechanics, clerks, strangers, and businessmen generally an opportunity to stop and call upon God amid the perplexities incident to their respective avocations.
It will continue for 1 hour, but it is also designed for those who may find it inconvenient to remain more than five or ten (10) minutes as well as for those who can spare the whole hour.
The necessary interruption will be slight because anticipated. And those who are in haste can often expedite their business engagements by halting to lift their voice to the throne of grace in humble grateful prayer. All are invited to attend.
He set the date. September 23rd, 1857. A Wednesday noon. He prepared the room carefully, placing chairs in a circle, setting out Bibles, lighting a small lamp, even though it was midday. He prayed over that space, asking God to meet them there, to fill it with His presence, to draw hearts that were hungry and broken.
And then he waited.
Noon came. The clock on the wall ticked loudly in the silence. Jeremiah sat alone in that small room, hands folded, eyes on the door. Five (5) minutes passed, ten (10) minutes, fifteen (15), no one came. twenty (20) minutes, still nothing.
He closed his eyes and whispered a prayer. Lord, if this was from you, send someone, even one.
And then at twelfth (12) o'clock, the door creaked open. A man stepped inside, hesitant, looking around as if he wasn't sure he was in the right place. Jeremiah stood, smiled, and extended his hand. Welcome, friend. Come and pray with me. The man nodded and sat down.
A few minutes later, another man entered. Then another,then three more.
By the end of the hour, six men sat in that circle. Six strangers who didn't know each other, who had never prayed together before, but who knelt in that small room and lifted their voices to God. They prayed for their families, for their businesses, for their city. They confessed their fears, their failures, their need for grace.
And when the hour ended, they stood in silence, as if something sacred had just happened, something none of them could name, but all of them felt.
Jeremiah walked them to the door, shook each man's hand, and invited them to return the following Wednesday. They did, and they brought others. The following Wednesday, twenty (20) men came, then ...
Chapter 2:
By the fourth week, the room could no longer hold them. Jeremiah stood at the door, welcoming each person by name when he knew it, and with a warm handshake when he didn't. He watched as merchants in fine coats knelt beside labourers with calloused hands. He saw clerks who had never spoken to each other pray side by side.
And he realized something profound was happening, something that had nothing to do with him. The prayer meetings were simple, almost shockingly so. There were no long sermons, no theological debates, no famous preachers brought in to stir the crowd.
Jeremiah had established just a few basic rules and he guarded them carefully.
Prayers must be short, no more than 5 minutes. Anyone could pray, but no one was forced to. The meeting would last exactly 1 hour, no more, no less. And above all, this was a place for prayer, not performance.
Men who had never prayed aloud in their lives found their voices in that room.
Some prayed with confidence, others with trembling words, but every prayer was heard. Every cry was honored.
There was no hierarchy here. No distinction between the successful and the struggling.
In that circle, every man was equally desperate, equally needy, equally welcome. And as they prayed, something began to shift in the atmosphere of the city itself.
Outside, the panic of 1857 was tightening its grip. Banks were collapsing one after another, their doors closing suddenly, their depositors left standing in the streets with nothing.
Businesses that had seemed unshakable crumbled overnight. Unemployment spread like a plague, and men who had been confident just weeks before now walked the streets with hollow eyes, wondering how they would feed their families.
Fear hung over New York like a fog. And in that fear, people began to remember something they had forgotten.
They began to remember God.
By October, the prayer meeting had grown too large for the small room at the back of the church. Jeremiah moved it to the main sanctuary, and still it wasn't enough. Men stood in the aisles, pressed against the walls, crowded into the doorway just to be part of what was happening.
And then something unprecedented occurred. Other churches in the city began opening their doors at noon. Not for their own congregations, but for anyone who wanted to pray. Methodist churches, Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches, Episcopal churches, denominations that had barely spoken to each other for decades suddenly found themselves united in a single simple purpose.
They opened their buildings, rang their bells at noon, and invited the city to stop and pray.
Within weeks, every church in lower Manhattan was filled at midday.
Theaters were rented and converted into prayer rooms. Public halls, fire stations, even shipping warehouses became sacred spaces where men and women gathered to call on God.
Jeremiah moved from place to place, quietly facilitating, gently guiding, never drawing attention to himself.
He was not the leader of this movement in the way the world understood leadership. He was more like a gardener, tending a fire he had not lit, watering a seed he had not planted.
He prayed constantly, often kneeling alone in the early morning hours before anyone else arrived. He carried a worn notebook where he recorded prayer requests, and he prayed over each one by name.
When people thanked him, he shook his head and said softly, "It is not me. It is God who hears and God was hearing.
The newspapers began to notice. Reporters who had come to mock stayed to weep. Editors who had sent journalists to expose fanaticism found themselves printing testimonies of transformed lives. Instead, the New York Herald, one of the most secular papers in the city, ran daily reports on the prayer meetings. They published the numbers. 20,000 people gathering at noon across Manhattan. They documented the stories. Hardened criminals weeping in repentance. Wealthy businessmen confessing greed. Families reconciling after years of bitterness. Crime rates began to drop. Taverns reported fewer customers. Divorce filings decreased. And churches that had been dying suddenly found themselves overflowing with new believers.
What began in a small room in lower Manhattan could not be contained. The fire that Jeremiah Lanphier had tended so carefully was now spreading beyond anything he could have imagined.
By December 1857, the revival had reached Philadelphia, then Boston, then Chicago, then westward, carried by travelers, by letters, by newspaper reports, by the simple testimony of those who had experienced it.
In Philadelphia, 10,000 people gathered daily for prayer.
In Boston, theaters and concert halls were converted into prayer rooms.
In Chicago, the noon meetings filled every available building. And it wasn't just the cities. The fire spread to small towns, to rural communities, to frontier settlements where churches had barely existed.
Farmers gathered in barns to pray. School teachers led their students in prayer before lessons. Entire towns experienced waves of conviction, repentance, and transformation.
Historians would later estimate that within one year, more than 1 million people came to Christ across the United States, one (1) million souls in a nation of just 30 million. It was the largest urban revival in American history. And it had begun with six men praying in a room that no one had noticed But Jeremiah Lanphier never sought credit.
When people asked him to speak, he declined.
When churches invited him to preach, he quietly suggested they keep praying instead.
When journalists wanted to interview him, he redirected them to the testimonies of those who had been changed.
He was content to remain in the background, faithful to the one thing he knew God had called him to do, facilitate prayer.
Those who knew Jeremiah personallv described him as one of the gentlest men they had ever met. He was not loud, not forceful, not given to grand gestures or dramatic speeches. His voice was soft, his manner calm, his presence peaceful.
He had a way of making people feel seen, feel heard, feel valued.
When someone shareda burden, he listened with his whole attention. His eyes filled with compassion.
When someone wept, he wept with them.
When someone confessed sin, he spoke words of grace that came not from theological training, but from a heart that had tasted mercy.
He never pretended to have all the answers.
He never claimed special insight or spiritual superiority.
He was simply a man who had learned through years of failure and disappointment that prayer was not a last resort but a first response.
His own life had taught him that God does not need the successful, the educated, the impressive.
God uses the willing, the humble, the broken.
And so he prayed and he invited others to pray and he watched in quiet wonder as God answered in ways that defied all human logic.
Some nights after the meetings ended and the crowds dispersed, Jeremiah would walk the streets of New York alone.
He would look up at the darkened windows of tenements and offices, at the gas lamps flickering in the fog, at the distant ships anchored in the harbour, and he would whisper the same prayer he had prayed for years. " Lord, let them know you are here."
As winter turned to spring in 1858, the revival showed no signs of slowing.
If anything, it intensified.
Reports flooded in from across the nation.
In Cincinnati, 5,000 people gathered daily for prayer.
In Pittsburgh, churches held multiple prayer meetings throughout the day to accommodate the crowds.
In Richmond, 19:06 slaveholders and enslaved people prayed together, a site unthinkable in the divided South.
Even in places where no formal meetings were held, the atmosphere had changed. People spoke more softly, treated each other with more kindness, carried themselves with a humility that had been absent before.
Businessmen began gathering in their offices to pray before making decisions.
Factory workers prayed during lunch breaks.
Families that had never prayed together began kneeling in their living rooms each evening.
Prayer had become for a brief and sacred moment the center of American life.
And through it all, Jeremiah Lanphier remained the same. Quiet, faithful, consistent.
He still walked the streets, still visited those who were sick or discouraged, still welcomed newcomers to the prayer meetings with the same warm handshake he had offered that first lonely Wednesday.
People began calling him Brother Lanphier. Though he never asked for the title, he signed his letter simply Jay Lanphier, as if his name carried no weight.
But those who watched him closely saw something that couldn't be hidden. They saw a man who lived in constant communion with God, whose prayers were not performances but conversations, whose faith was not a doctrine but a relationship.
One observer wrote, "He prays as naturally as he breathes. There is no strain, no effort, no attempt to impress. He simply speaks to God as a child speaks to a father. And you sense that God listens.
Chapter 3:
But carrying the weight of a nation's spiritual hunger exacts a price that few can see.
Jeremiah Lanphier was no longer simply a lay missionary walking the streets of Manhattan. He had become almost against his will a symbol of something much larger than himself.
And the burden of that role pressed down on him in ways that no one fully understood. He slept little, often waking at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning with a sense of urgency he couldn't explain.
He would kneel by his bed in the darkness and pray for the meetings, for the people who would come that day, for those who were still wandering in spiritual darkness.
His days were filled with constant motion. He moved from meeting to meeting, from church to church, answering letters, responding to requests, offering counsel to those who sought him out.
Everyone wanted something from him. A word of encouragement, a prayer, a moment of his time. And he gave it freely, never turning anyone away, never showing impatience, never complaining about the exhaustion that was slowly consuming him.
Those closest to him began to worry. They saw the weariness in his eyes, the weight he was losing, the way his hands sometimes trembled when he thought no one was watching.
Friends urged him to rest, to delegate, to let others carry some of the load.
But Jeremiah would only smile gently and say, "How can I rest when so many are still seeking?"
He understood something profound about the nature of revival. It does not sustain itself. It requires constant tending, constant prayer, constant faithfulness.
The moment someone tries to control it or capitalize on it or turn it into something organized and manageable, the fire begins to die.
And so he remained faithful to the simplicity that had birthed it all.
No programs, no committees, no hierarchy, just prayer.
As 1858 progressed, the revival began to touch places that seemed impossible to reach.
In the American South, where slavery still held its cruel grip, the prayer meetings transcended the colour line in ways that shocked observers.
White plantation owners and black laborers knelt side by side in some gatherings, though such moments remained rare and fragile.
But seeds were being planted. Seeds of conviction about the dignity of every human soul. Seeds that would later bear fruit in the abolition movement and the struggles for justice that would reshape the nation.
In the frontier territories, where civilization felt thin and faith even thinner, circuit riders carried news of the revival from town to town. They told stories of what God was doing in New York, in Philadelphia, in Boston.
And rough men who had lived by the gun and the alcohol bottle found themselves weeping in crude log churches, surrendering their lives to Christ.
Missionaries preparing to sail for foreign lands attended the prayer meetings and carried that same spirit of revival with them.
Within months, reports began arriving from China, from India, from Africa, from South America. The fire that began on Fulton Street was now burning on distant continents.
And always at the center of it all in New York, there was Jeremiah Lanphier. Not as a celebrity, not as a leader demanding allegiance, but as a faithful servant who simply refused to stop praying.
He kept a journal during those years, though he never intended it for publication. The entries were simple, almost mundane, lists of prayer requests, names of people who had come seeking God, brief notes about answered prayers.
But woven through those pages was a thread of deep humility. "Lord, I am nothing," he wrote one night. "But You are everything. Use me as You will. and when You are finished with me, let me fade without regret."
By late 1858, the intensity of the revival began to shift, not because God had withdrawn His presence, but because the initial urgency that had driven people to their knees was beginning to normalize. The economic panic had eased.
Banks were reopening. Businesses were recovering. And as material security returned, spiritual hunger began to fade.
The crowds at the noon prayer meetings, which had once numbered in the thousands, began to shrink. Not dramatically, not suddenly, but gradually. 5,000 became 3,000. 3,000 became 1,000. 1,000 became several hundred.
Jeremiah noticed, of course, but he did not panic. Did not try to manufacture excitement or create programs to draw people back. He simply continued, "Same time, same place, same faithful prayers."
He understood something that many revivalists forget. God does not measure success by the size of the crowd. He measures it by the faithfulness of the heart.
And so the meetings continued year after year, long after the newspapers stopped reporting on them, long after the historians declared the revival officially over.
Jeremiah Lanphier kept praying.
The years passed and New York City moved on.
The Civil War came, tearing the nation apart in ways that no amount of prayer seemed able to prevent. (April 12, 1861 - May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"). Blood was shed. Families were destroyed and the unity that the revival had briefly created seemed like a distant dream.
But the seeds remained. The million souls who had come to Christ during those extraordinary years did not forget. They raised their children in the faith. They built churches, started ministries, sent missionaries. They carried with them the memory of a time when God had moved in power, when heaven had felt close, when prayer had been the most important thing in the world.
And Jeremiah Lanphier continued his quiet work. He never sought fame, never wrote a memoir, never tried to capitalize on his role in the revival. He remained a lay missionary, a man of prayer, a faithful servant who showed up day after day, even when no one was watching.
In his later years, he reflected on what had happened with a mixture of gratitude and wonder. I was simply a man who failed at everything the world values, he said to a friend. But God took that failure and used it to teach me the one thing that matters. How to pray.
He lived simply, never accumulating wealth or possessions. His greatest treasure was the worn Bible he carried everywhere, its pages marked with prayers and tears.
When younger men asked him for advice on ministry, on how to create revival, on how to move crowds, he would shake his head gently.
Don't seek revival, he would say. Seek God.
Don't try to move crowds. Pray alone until God moves. And when He does, get out of the way.
The details of Jeremiah Lanphier's final years are sparse, recorded only in fragments. He continued his work until his body would no longer allow it.
He attended the noon prayer meetings as long as he could walk to them. And when he could no longer walk, he prayed from his bed, keeping the same schedule he had kept for decades.
Noon every day, one hour.
Those who visited him in his final illness said he seemed to be living in two worlds at once, present in the room, but also somewhere else, somewhere deeper.
His prayers had become softer, more intimate, more like whispers shared between the closest of friends.
And when he finally passed from this world, there were no grand funerals, no monuments erected in his honour. He died as he had lived, quietly, humbly, faithfully.
But the prayer meetıng he had started contınued. Not because of him, but because of what God had begun through him.
For years after his death, men and women continued gathering at noon in that same building on Fulton Street.
They prayed for their city, for their nation, for the world.
And they remembered the failed businessman who had shown them that God does not need success. He needs surrender.
More than a century and a half has passed since that first Wednesday when six men gathered to pray. The old North Dutch Reformed Church no longer stands.
The buildings of Lower Manhattan have been torn down and rebuilt a dozen times. Fulton Street itself has changed beyond recognition.
But the legacy of Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier remains.
Not in monuments or museums, but in the countless prayer meetings that have been inspired by his example. In the noon prayer gatherings that still meet in cities around the world. In the humble believers who understand that prayer is not a supplement to ministry, but the foundation of it.
Historians estimate that the revival sparked by those prayer meetings led to one (1) million conversions in a single year.
But numbers can never capture the full impact.
How many of those million went on to raise godly children?
How many became missionaries, pastors, teachers, servants of Christ?
How many lives were touched by the ripple effect of that single prayer meeting?
The answer is known only to God.
But this much is certain. A failed businessman who had no reason to believe his life would matter, showed the world something it desperately needed to remember.
That God does not call the qualified. He qualifies the called.
That revival does not begin with great preachers or elaborate programs. It begins with one person who decides to pray to God, regularly, faithfully.
That the most powerful thing a human being can do is not build an empire or amass wealth or achieve fame.
It is to kneel before the throne of grace and cry out for God to move.
Jeremiah Lanphier had no seminary degree, no ordination, no platform.
He had only two things, a failed past and a faithful heart. And God took those two things and used them to change a nation.
Perhaps you are reading this story and seeing yourself in Jeremiah Lanphier.
Perhaps you too have failed at the things the world values.
Perhaps you too feel ordinary, unremarkable, unqualified.
Perhaps you too wonder if God could ever use someone like you. This story is your answer.
The same God who heard the prayers of a failed merchant in 1857 is listening right now.
The same spirit that fell on Fulton Street is still moving, still searching, still looking for hearts willing to surrender.
You don't need credentials.
You don't need a platform.
You don't need to fix yourself first or become someone impressive.
You only need to do what Jeremiah did.
Start praying. Not with eloquence or theological precision, but with honesty, with hunger, with faith that God hears.
Maybe your prayer meeting will start with zero people like his did.
Maybe you'll wait alone for thirty (30) minutes before anyone comes.
Maybe nothing will happen for weeks or months or years.
Or maybe, just maybe, God is waiting for you to take that first step, to print those simple invitations, to set out those chairs, to kneel in that empty room and pray as if heaven itself is listening, because it is.
The fire that burned in 1857 has never gone out.
It has only been waiting for the next ordinary, broken, faithful person to tend it.
Choose now and walk with us through the lives of men and women who learn that the greatest movements begin with the smallest acts of obedience.
Tell us, what have you been waiting to start?
What prayer has God placed on your heart that you've been afraid to pray?
Because the same God who turned six praying men into a million transformed souls is still in the business of doing the impossible.
And maybe, just maybe, He is calling you to be the next person who simply refuses to stop praying.
From a failed businessman to a million souls.
From an empty room to a nation transformed, from a single prayer to a movement that changed history.
That is the story of Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier.
But perhaps it is also the beginning of yours.
" Lord, let them know You are here."
"Lord, I am nothing, But You are everything. Use me as You will. and when You are finished with me, let me fade without regret."
"Same time, same place, same faithful prayers."
Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier (September 3, 1809 – December 26, 1898) was an American lay missionary in New York City, popularly regarded as having been instrumental in instigating the American religious revival of 1857–58.
Early life and conversion
Jeremiah Lanphier was born in Coxsackie, New York, the son of Samuel F. Lanphier, a farmer and currier, and Jane Ross Lanphier, whose parents had emigrated from Holland. At sixteen, Lanphier apprenticed as a tailor in Albany and later also studied music there under one George Andrews. In 1833, Lanphier and Andrews became partners as cloth merchants in Lower Manhattan. They entered a highly competitive market for ready-made clothing, and after extending credit in an attempt to attract customers, they went bankrupt in the spring of 1842.
While Lanphier worked as a cloth merchant, he also joined the choir at Broadway Tabernacle (a church organized by Lewis Tappan for revivalist Charles Grandison Finney), where Lanphier became an evangelical Christian. He then joined the choir at Market Street Church, pastored by noted Presbyterian clergyman Theodore L. Cuyler, and later the choir at the Pearl Street Presbyterian Church, where he made many friends and took an active interest in the work of the church.
Entering ministry
During the 1850s, prosperous churches with wealthy congregants moved uptown to more fashionable neighborhoods. Pearl Street Church closed in 1853, and Lanphier joined Duane Street Presbyterian Church, pastored by theologian and advocate of religious revival James Waddel Alexander. Duane Street Church had itself moved northward twice, although Lanphier continued to live in lower Manhattan where the number of unchurched residents increased. When a member of the consistory of the nearby North Dutch Church (with an entrance on Fulton Street) offered Lanphier a position as lay missionary, Lamphier closed his business and began his work for the church on July 1, 1857.
Although Lanphier had no theological training, he was a remarkably good candidate for such a ministry. He never married, and he had no children. A contemporary described him as "tall, well made, with a remarkably pleasant, benevolent face; affectionate in his disposition and manner, possessed of indomitable energy and perseverance, having good musical attainments; gifted in prayer and exhortation to a remarkable degree; modest in his demeanor, ardent in his piety, sound in his judgment; having good common sense, a thorough knowledge of human nature, and those traits of character that make him a welcome guest in any house".
Fulton Street Prayer Meeting
Although Lanphier distributed tracts, visited local businesses, invited children to Sunday school, and encouraged hotels to refer guests to the church on Sunday, he found that his time spent in prayer brought him the most peace and resolve, and he determined to start a weekly noon prayer meeting for businessmen that would take advantage of the hour when businesses were closed for lunch. The handbill he had printed read: "[Wednesday] prayer meeting from 12 to 1 o’clock. Stop 5, 10 or 20 minutes, or the whole time, as your time admits." On September 23, 1857, he set up a signboard in front of the church. No one came to the appointed room, and Lanphier prayed by himself for thirty minutes. At 12:30 another man joined him, four more by the end of the hour.
The next week there were twenty men, forty the following week. In October the prayer meetings became daily, and in January 1858, a second room had to be used simultaneously, by February, a third. By then as many as twenty noon prayer meetings were being held elsewhere in the city. In mid-March Burton's Theatre, capable of holding 3,000, was crowded for the prayer meetings. By the end of March every downtown New York church and public hall was filled to capacity, and ten thousand men were gathering daily for prayer.
Revival of 1857–59
The telegraph and newspapers spread the news of this religious excitement in New York, and the Panic of 1857 undoubtedly added a sense of uncertainty and urgency to gatherings of businessmen. Similar prayer meetings were organized across the country. J. Edwin Orr, a student of the revival, estimated that perhaps as many as a million people were converted in 1858 and 1859, more than 3% of a contemporary United States population of less than thirty million.[9] Not long before his death, the thoughts of the late 19th-century evangelist Dwight L. Moody turned to this religious revival of his youth. "I would like before I go hence", he said, "to see the whole Church of God quickened as it was in '57."
Although it has been common in the 21st century to attribute the beginning of the revival to Lanphier's prayer meeting, his former pastor James Alexander believed that when Lanphier and "a few liked-minded servants of God" first met, "Revival was already begun. God had already poured out the Spirit of grace and of supplications. We doubt not there was a simultaneous effusion on other groups and in other places." And as Iain Murray has suggested, the extent to which the revival was a "layman's revival" has also probably been exaggerated.
Later career and death
Meanwhile, throughout the revival and for years afterward, Lanphier continued to hold his daily prayer meeting in lower Manhattan. As The New York Times wrote after his retirement in 1893, "success did not elate him, nor was he discouraged by indifference". There were few simple rules for the prayer meeting that Lanphier politely but firmly enforced: that those praying out loud were to be limited to five minutes and that no controversial topics were to be discussed. Women did attend the meetings and could make requests but were not permitted to pray out loud. In the early days, hundreds of prayer requests came in to the Fulton Street meeting from all parts of the country sparking a fear that "a kind of superstitious feeling might be encouraged in those who send these communications". But it was decided not to refuse any request and to pray for them all in humility.
When Lanphier finally retired because of age and his declining vision, it was estimated that he had presided at more than 11,000 prayer meetings, at which more than a half million people had attended over 36 years, and that 56,000 prayers had been offered and 225,000 written requests for prayer had been submitted, besides those made verbally. Lanphier died on December 26, 1898, and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.
To honor the 150th anniversary of the Prayer Meeting Revival, sculptor Lincoln Fox was commissioned to create a statue of Lanphier. The sculpture, first placed outside the headquarters of the American Bible Society and near the location where the prayer meetings had been held, depicts Lanphier seated on an (anachronistic) park bench, Bible in hand, inviting passersby to pray with him. After the ABS left New York City, the statue was moved to the lobby of The King's College.
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