Welome To Pray For Newark-History of Newark

Habakkuk 2:14 tells us that the presence of God will one day fill the entire earth: "For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea." The Spiritual Highway (Isaish 35:8) is the one-dimensional approximation to Habakkuk 2:14 (which is also the message of Isaiah 11:9). In 1856 2000 ‘no-name’ individuals began to walk highways of holiness in New York City and Brooklyn, under the auspices of the New York Sunday School Union. The goal of this "systematic visitation" program was to visit every house in New York so that every child had the opportunity to attend a Sunday School class. One of these ‘no-name’ volunteers was Jeremiah Lanphier, whose assigned area was the part of Lower Manhattan that included the North Dutch Reformed Church. As these 2000 no-name individuals completed their assignment to pray for every street and household in Manhattan in the middle of 1857, they established a grid of holiness over the entire city. This was a two-dimensional approximation to Habakkuk 2:14.

Then in September 1857, God lit a spark of revival on Fulton Street that filled the city with "the knowledge of the glory of the LORD," which we today call the Third Great Awakening, the Businessmen's Prayer Revival, and similar names. Historians have not done justice to the fact that the revival did not occur when earlier Noon Prayer meetings were started in the John Street Methodist Church and other places in Manhattan in 1856 and the first half of 1857- it only occurred after the spiritual grid of no-name prayers was established. That is why the Bible tells us to "build up a highway" -- this is God's first step in filling the earth with His glory.

In 1858 Dr. Henry Clay Fish (First Baptist Church) and Rev. James Scott (Reformed Church) gave a report on the progress of the revival in Newark. In an article appearing in the New York Times, these pastors stated that more than 3000 residents of Newark came to Christ during the past 6 months - out of a population of 70,000 in that city. These two churches are still life-giving "wells of revival" in downtown Newark.

Newark has several other "old wells" of spiritual revival that need to be redug, by reminding the people about what God has done in their churches in past generations. Second Presbyerian Church in Newark was created when Dr. Edward Dorr Griffin returned to Newark during the Second Great Awakening. First Presbyterian Church was the place where David Brainerd was commissioned to be a Presbyterian Missionary to the Indians, and it was also the pulpit from which George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards spoke during the First Great Awakening. Every national spiritual awakening in American has rejuvenated the Church in Newark - and there are many reasons to that this will happen again in the next great move of God.