This Week in Christian History: A Pope's Death, Theologian's Birth, and Preacher's Conversion

Charles Finney's Conversion Experience on Oct. 10, 1821

This week marks the anniversary of when one of the most influential preachers in American history had his conversion experience.

Charles Grandison Finney, a native of Litchfield County, Connecticut, went to the forests of Adams, New York, in October 1821 to search in solitude for deeper spiritual meaning. It was on Oct. 10 that the spiritual epiphany occurred. 

"Just at that point this passage of Scripture seemed to drop into my mind with a flood of light: 'Then shall ye go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. Then shall ye seek me and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart,'" Finney wrote in his 1876 memoir.

"I had intellectually believed the Bible before; but never had the truth been in my mind. that faith was a voluntary trust instead of an intellectual state. I was as conscious as I was of my existence, of trusting at that moment in God's veracity. Somehow I knew that that was a passage of Scripture, though I do not think I had ever read it. I knew that it was God's word, and God's voice, as it were, that spoke to me."

Finney would go on to become the most prominent preacher of the Second Great Awakening, with some estimating that as many as 500,000 people came to Christ through his ministry.