They Couldn’t Have Known VIII

In the late 1800s Logan County Kentucky was as wild as wild could be. It’s nickname was Rogue Harbor. If you were a murderer or thief or any kind of criminal in the big cities of the east you knew that if you made it to Kentucky you would be safe. It was a lawless and reckless land. BUT GOD. Thankfully God in His grace chose to send there a praying preacher with only one (obvious) claim to fame. He was extremely ugly. His name was James McGready and my family owes him an eternal debt of gratitude but I will get to that in a minute. First, listen to J. Edwin Orr tell about him.

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“There was a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian minister named James McGready whose chief claim to fame was he was so ugly that he attracted attention. It was reported that people sometimes stopped in the street to ask: ‘What does he do?” “He’s a preacher.” Then they reacted, saying: “A man with a face like that must really have something to say.” McGready settled in Logan County, pastor of three little churches. He wrote in his diary that the winter of 1799 for the most part was “weeping and mourning with the people of God.” Lawlessness prevailed everywhere. McGready was such a man of prayer that, not only did he promote the concert of prayer every first Monday of the month, but he got his people to pray for him at sunset on Saturday evening and sunrise Sunday morning. Then in the summer of 1800 came the great Kentucky revival. Eleven thousand people came to a communion service. McGready hollered for help, regardless of denomination. Baptists and Methodists came in response and the great camp meeting revivals started to sweep Kentucky and Tennessee, then spread over North and South Carolina, along the frontier. Out of that second great awakening after the death of John Wesley came the whole modern missionary movement and its societies. Out of it came the abolition of slavery, and popular education, Bible societies and Sunday schools, and many social benefits accompanying the evangelistic drive.”
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What Pastor McGready couldn’t have known when he started his people praying in 1879 and that is incidental to the world but monumental to my family is that two young men, a Mr. Yarbrough and a Mr. Harrison would be greatly impacted by the revival that issued from those prayers. Mr. Yarbrough would become an evangelist preaching under the brush arbors of those camp meeting revivals in Tennessee. Mr. Harrison and his family who lived on the Tennessee/Georgia border would sing and pray in many of those camp meetings. Many of their offspring for generations would be preachers and mighty women of God of whom my wife and I are examples for her great-grandfather was Mr. Yarbrough and my great-grandfather was Mr. Harrison the two patriarchs of our respective families and both had an incalculable spiritual effect on our lives. To God be the glory.