Religion: Rebirth in Virginia

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The weather was forbidding as Lay Preacher Thomas Rankin arrived this Sunday at White's Chapel southwest of Petersburg, Virginia. He had planned to hold an open-air meeting, with shade trees shielding the congregation from the blazing southern sun. But it was raining, so he had to pack the worshipers into the chapel, while about 400 more clustered in the rain at the doors and windows. Then, as Rankin orated on Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones, the mixed crowd of whites and blacks began moaning and crying to God for mercy, some kneeling, some falling on their faces. Rankin repeatedly begged his listeners to compose themselves, but his words were drowned out.

This was no isolated event. Similar paroxysms befell another congregation the previous Sunday, Rankin's first in the area, when he held two meetings at nearby Boisseau's Chapel. Indeed, at a series of May meetings at Boisseau's Chapel, says the Reverend Devereaux Jarratt, Anglican ally of the current revival, "the windows of heaven were opened and the rain of Divine influence poured down for more than 40 days."

While a political revolution has been in the making, a religious revolution has stirred Virginia, where many of the tax-supported Anglican clergy are known locally for their laziness, snobbery and even immorality. Indeed, many back-country Virginians never see an Anglican priest at all. Jarratt was shocked by the clerical convention in Williamsburg two years ago when his colleagues treated Christian doctrines with what he called "ridicule and profane burlesque."

The vacuum left by Anglican apathy has already attracted a number of new movements. First came "New Side" Presbyterians, preaching the "new birth," a life-changing experience of salvation. Then the Baptists, with a similar message. Now come the Methodists —not a new denomination at this point but an order of Anglican laymen who preach the revivalist Gospel and establish prayer cells. Rankin, who arrived from England in 1773, is their current American leader. Although some see them as "a church within a church," the Methodists profess religious loyalty to the Church of England. In fact, one hot-head was ejected from a Methodist society recently for usurping the clergy's role and offering Communion.

Methodism began when Oxford-trained John Wesley, newly back from a missionary tour in Georgia, felt his heart "strangely warmed" during a reading of Luther's preface to Romans at a service in London in 1738. Unlike the usual Anglican priest, Wesley set out to spread assurance of salvation to Britons of all classes. Still indefatigable at his 73rd birthday last month, Wesley also insists on "doing good of every possible sort" for the needy. He requires a puritanical code of his flock: no swearing, Sabbath work, buying or selling liquor, brawling, or wearing of rich apparel.