Who Was D. L. Moody? Shoe Clerk, Evangelist, School Founder

Biography Evangelism Holy Spirit Revival

Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–1899) was an American evangelist, the best known preacher of the gospel in the English-speaking world in the late 1800s. He was a farm boy from Massachusetts with very little schooling who became a shoe salesman, then gave up business to work full time for Christ. He led large meetings in Britain and America with the singer Ira D. Sankey, and he founded schools at his home in Northfield, Massachusetts, and the Bible institute in Chicago that now carries his name. He was never ordained. He preached as a layman all his life.

His books are still read, and TheWay Library has many of them free on his author page. The best place to start is Secret Power, his short book on the Holy Spirit, which he finished at Northfield in 1881.

Northfield and a hard childhood

Moody was born on February 5, 1837, in Northfield, a farming town on the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts. His father died when Dwight was four, leaving his mother with a large family and debts. Moody remembered it plainly years later:

My father died a bankrupt, and the creditors came and swept everything we had. They took everything, even the kindling wood …
The Life and Work of Dwight Lyman Moody, chapter IV

His mother kept the children together on the farm, and Chapman's biography gives her a whole chapter. The boy worked from an early age and had only a few years of school. He grew up quick, strong and restless, more fond of a joke than of books.

The Boston shoe store

At seventeen Moody went to Boston and, after some trouble getting hired, went to work in his uncle Samuel Holton's shoe store. His uncle made him promise to go to church and Sunday school, and he joined a Bible class at the Mount Vernon Congregational Church. His teacher, Edward Kimball, decided one day in 1855 to go to the store and speak to the young clerk about Christ. Kimball told the story after Moody died:

I found Moody in the back part of the store wrapping up shoes in paper and putting them on shelves.
The Life and Work of Dwight Lyman Moody, chapter V

Kimball said his plea was "a very weak one." He simply told the boy of Christ's love. "There at once in the back of that shoe store in Boston," Kimball said, Moody gave himself and his life to Christ.

Moody tells what the next morning was like in chapter I of Secret Power:

I remember the morning I came out of my room after I had first trusted Christ, and I thought the old sun shone a good deal brighter than it ever had before; I thought that the sun was just smiling upon me, and I walked out upon Boston Common, and I heard the birds in the trees …
Secret Power, Chapter I

When he first asked to join the church, the committee put him off, since he could say so little about what he believed. He was received into membership some months later.

Chicago: shoes, Sunday school and the YMCA

In 1856 Moody moved to Chicago and sold shoes there. He was good at it and wanted to be rich. In Secret Power he admits it: "I used to pray for one hundred thousand dollars; that was my aim."

His heart was turning to other work, though. He rented pews and filled them with young men. In 1858 he started a Sunday school for poor children in the North Market Hall, gathering pupils off the streets himself. It grew to hundreds, and in 1860 the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, visited it and spoke to the children. That same year Moody gave up business to give all his time to Christian work, with no salary.

He threw himself into the Young Men's Christian Association. During the Civil War he worked with the United States Christian Commission, preaching to soldiers in camps and on battlefields. In 1862 he married Emma C. Revell, a teacher in his mission. Out of the Sunday school grew a church, the Illinois Street Church, which later became the Chicago Avenue Church and is today the Moody Church. In 1866 he became president of the Chicago YMCA and helped build Farwell Hall, its large meeting place.

Sankey, the Great Fire and a new power

In June 1870, at a YMCA convention in Indianapolis, Moody heard Ira D. Sankey lead singing at a prayer meeting and soon asked him to come to Chicago. Sankey did, and the two worked together for most of the next three decades.

In 1871 two women in his meetings told Moody they were praying that he would receive power. He thought he already had it. But a hunger grew in him for the anointing of the Holy Spirit for service. In October 1871 the Great Chicago Fire burned Farwell Hall, the Illinois Street Church and his own home. He went East to raise money to rebuild, and in New York City he had the experience he rarely spoke about:

I can only say, God revealed himself to me, and I had such an experience of His love that I had to ask Him to stay His hand.
The Life and Work of Dwight Lyman Moody, chapter XXVI

He said afterward that his sermons were no different and he presented no new truths, "and yet hundreds were converted." That experience is the background of everything he wrote in Secret Power about the Spirit "upon" a believer for service.

Britain with Sankey

In June 1873 Moody and Sankey sailed for England with their families. Two of the men who had invited them had died before they arrived, and the first meetings, in York, were small. Then the work spread to Sunderland and Newcastle, and in Scotland the meetings in Edinburgh and Glasgow drew enormous crowds. They went on to Ireland and English cities, ending with months of meetings in London in 1875. Sankey's gospel songs, sung as solos, became famous, and the songbooks from these campaigns spread across Britain and America.

Moody came home a well known man. For the next several years he held long meetings in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston and other American cities. He returned to Britain for another long campaign in the early 1880s. In chapter II of Secret Power he remembers his first Bible reading in England, where a minister went home, "cried mightily to God that he might be emptied of himself and filled with the Spirit," and came back preaching with new power.

The Northfield schools and conferences

Moody made Northfield his home again and built his work there. In 1879 he opened the Northfield Seminary for girls, many of them farm girls who could not otherwise afford an education. In 1881 he opened the Mount Hermon School for boys across the river. Beginning in 1880 he held summer conferences at Northfield for Bible study and prayer. A gathering of college students at Mount Hermon in 1886 led to the Student Volunteer Movement, which sent many young people overseas as missionaries.

The Chicago Bible Institute

Moody wanted a school to train ordinary men and women, who were not headed for seminary, to know their Bibles and do the work of evangelism in cities. Out of the Chicago Evangelization Society came the Bible institute, which opened for regular work in 1889. He chose R. A. Torrey to lead it. After Moody's death it was renamed the Moody Bible Institute.

His last campaign and death

In November 1899 Moody went to Kansas City for a series of meetings. He was ill and had to stop partway through. He went home to Northfield and died there on December 22, 1899, with his family around him. His friends gave his last words in slightly different forms, each with the thought that earth was receding and heaven opening. He was buried on Round Top, the hill at Northfield where he had loved to speak.

Why God used him

Torrey worked beside Moody for years and later wrote Why God Used D. L. Moody. His first answer is the one he thought mattered most:

The first thing that accounts for God's using D. L. Moody so mightily was that he was a fully surrendered man.
Why God Used D. L. Moody

Torrey also names his prayer, his study of the Bible, his humility, his freedom from the love of money, his passion for the lost, and his anointing with the Holy Spirit. Moody would have pointed to the last of these. It is the subject of Secret Power, which you can read in an evening.

Secret Power summary, chapter by chapter
D. L. Moody quotes from his own books
D. L. Moody's books: which to read first
The Life and Work of Dwight Lyman Moody, the full 1900 biography by J. Wilbur Chapman