Dwight Lyman Moody (1837-1899)

Moody was born on a farm in Massachusetts in America and stayed at home until he was seventeen years old. It was a life of poverty, his father died when he was four years old. His mother then had nine children aged thirteen and under. The family survived with the help of the local church.

In 1854 Moody went to Boston and worked in his uncle's shoe store. He attended a local church but he was converted whilst at work in the shoe store by a Sunday school teacher!

Then Moody went to Chicago and became a successful salesman in a shoe business and became reasonably wealthy. All of his spare time was taken up by Christian work in the rough areas of the city. He had a large and lively Sunday school in the slums. He was deeply affected by the efforts of a teacher dying from tuberculosis to bring his class to Christ before he died. The result of this was that Moody gave up his business ambitions.

In 1861 Moody became a city missionary for the YMCA. He married Emma Charlotte Revell on August 28, 1862 and they had three children. The American civil War soon followed. Moody became a skilled personal worker and an evangelist. He spent his time on the battlefield tending to to dying soldiers.

By 1870 Moody had his own church and three children. He felt that God was moving him on to a new phase in his life. He came across Ira D Sankey who sang at Christian conventions and Moody persuaded him to team up together.

Three years later Moody and Sankey arrived, virtually unknown, in Liverpool. England and Scotland were stirred by a series of meetings which combined preaching and singing. Thousands of people attended the meetings and many were converted to Christ. Their London campaign in 1875 is one of the high points of Christianity in England.

On their return to America in August 1975 Moody and Sankey conducted a series of crusades throughout the country. Huge crowds attended these meetings.

In 1876 Dwight L. Moody realized his ambition when he opened a church in Chicago. He held a crusade in Chicago for sixteen weeks with estimates of up to 10,000 people being converted. In the following five years crusades were held in many other towns and cities. Moody returned to England in 1881 for six months and he made another short trip a few months later. But in 1883 Moody again returned to London for a crusade where two million people heard him preaching at a number of different events. After this Moody held a number of smaller crusades in America before returning to England for the last time in 1891.

In November 1899 Moody started his last crusade. He was in Kansas City in America. After one service Moody felt very unwell and went home to Northfield for a rest. He died on December 22nd.

His church in Chicago was renamed the Moody Church in 1901. The Chicago Evangelization Society later became the Moody Bible Institute.