125th Article Series: The Shearer Schoolhouse Revival
“At this time I was a member of the Baptist church and none of us believed in sanctification although I attended this revival. I noticed how those who claimed sanctification would go to their fellowmen and fix everything right, making their confession to one another…. I began seeking God definitely for an experience I had never attained to. The spirit within me would cry out, “Give me the blessing like those other few have received.” …When I got all on the altar, one Thursday morning about 9:00 o’clock, I was sanctified while sitting in my saddle on my horse. In that same year many of us received the Holy Ghost.”
W.F. “Will” Bryant
By David Roebuck
Throughout our history God has blessed the Church of God with revival. One of our earliest revivals took place in Camp Creek, North Carolina. In the spring of 1896, four evangelists preached a ten-day revival in that community’s Shearer Schoolhouse. They were William Martin, Billy Hamby, Joe Tipton and Milton McNabb. Billy Hamby was the brother-in-law of R.G. Spurling, who had established the Church of God ten years earlier as the Christian Union. Milton McNabb was the cousin of a local farmer, Will Bryant.
The evangelists preached a new doctrine for the Camp Creek community. They proclaimed the necessity of holiness and called for their hearers to seek sanctification. They were “given to much prayer and fasting,” preached earnestly, and throngs of people responded. Church of God Historian Charles W. Conn wrote, “Almost from the start of the meeting, the altars were filled with repentant sinners and seekers for the experience of sanctification. Many skeptics of holiness were convinced, and many more rough-living sinners were converted.”
Will Bryant was among those seeking sanctification. Bryant had already been conducting home Bible studies and worship services because the Liberty Baptist Church, where he attended, only met one Sunday a month. When the revival concluded, he began a Sunday school in the Shearer Schoolhouse. Opponents of the sanctification message fought these meetings, however. Those who testified that they were sanctified suffered violent persecution. Their churches excluded them, and they were forced to meet in homes and makeshift, log houses of worship.
In the midst of this persecution God honored their hungry hearts. A.J. Tomlinson later recorded, “The people earnestly sought God, and the interest increased until unexpectedly, like a cloud from a clear sky, the Holy Ghost began to fall on the honest, humble, sincere seekers after God. . . . [O]ne after another fell under the power of God, and soon quite a number were speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
The Lord had done an extraordinary work in their lives. Historian Conn wrote that it would be some time later before they “would understand the doctrine, person and nature of the Holy Spirit.” But despite the remoteness of their mountain community, God poured out a revival at the Shearer Schoolhouse, and Will Bryant and the Church of God were forever changed.
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Church of God Historian David G. Roebuck, Ph.D., is director of the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center and assistant professor of the history of Christianity at Lee University. This “Church of God Chronicles” was first published in the December 2008 Church of God Evangel.
