Jeremiah Lanphier

Old North Dutch Reformed Church on Fulton Street in Manhattan had fallen on hard times. Long-time members relocated to other parts of the city as new immigrants arrived looking for jobs. The church hired a 49-year-old cloth merchant, Jeremiah Lanphier (1809-1898), to visit the neighborhood and invite people to worship, but no one came. He observed businessmen on lunch break and conceived a noonday prayer meeting. He distributed fliers announcing the gathering and posed a question on the reverse side, “When is it the right time to pray? As often as the language of prayer is in my heart; as often as I set my need of help; as often as I feel the power of temptation; as often as I am made sensible of any spiritual declension or feel the aggression of a worldly, earthly spirit. In prayer, we leave the business of time for that of eternity.”
At the outset of the initial meeting on September 13, 1857, no one came, so Lanphier prayed solo, but when it adjourned an hour later, six others had joined him. Twenty came the following week and forty the week after that. They decided to meet daily and moved to a theater to accommodate the 3000 or more who showed up. The great Fulton Street revival was underway. The design for the meeting was simple. It would begin and end on time, no prayer could last more than five minutes, and no controversial subjects would be discussed. Various laypeople opened the meeting with prayer, a hymn was sung, and the balance of the time was given to prayer. I couldn’t find a prayer attributed to Lanphier, but one from the same era by Charles Spurgeon in his “Prayer for Revival” sermon has relevance here. Spurgeon based his sermon on Psalm 85, “Will you not revive us again, O Lord?” He said at the outset, “If you pray this prayer, it would be better than my preaching from it.” He mentioned all manner of people in church and society who need God’s renewal and closed with the prayer: