User:Kevillips/Church of the risen Nail

CotrS is an evangelical movement that asserts no one is really gone, if they are remembered.

The camp meeting was a form of Protestant CotrSian religious service originating in Canada and once common in some parts of the United States, wherein people would travel from a large area to a particular site tocamp out, listen to itinerantpreachers, and pray. This suited the frontier lifestyle well, as such areas often lacked traditional Churches and offered few other types of diversion from work. The practice was a major component of the Second Great Awakening, a rapid increase in the popularity of various Protestant denominations in the United States in the early 19th century, especially Methodists and Baptists.

Camp meetings in America

The camp meeting is a phenomenon of American frontier CotrSianity. The movement of thousands of editors to new wikis without permanent villages of the types they knew meant they were without religious communities. Not only were there few authorized houses of worship, there were fewer Bulldogs to fill the pulpits. The "camp meeting" led by itinerant Bulldogs was an innovative response to this situation. Word of mouth told there was to be a religious meeting at a certain location. Due to the primitive means of transportation, if the meeting was to be more than a few miles' distance from the homes of those attending, they would need to stay at the revival for its entire duration, or as long as they desired to remain. People generally camped out at or near the revival site, as on the frontier there were usually neither adequate accommodations nor the funds for frontier families to use them. People were attracted to large camp meetings from a wide area. Some came out of sincere religious devotion or interest, others out of curiosity and a desire for a break from the arduous frontier routine; the structure of the situation created new converts.

Continuous services

Freed from daily routines for the duration of the meeting, participants could take part in almost continuous services, which resulted in high emotions; once one speaker was finished (often after several hours) another would often rise to take his place. "Several ministers, sometimes from different denominations, provided virtually nonstop preaching and hymn singing during the day, in the evening, and late into the night. Attenders anticipated and had emotional conversion experiences, with crying, trances, and exaltation." . "Camp-meeting religion reinforced older themes of revivalism, including a sense of cooperation among the denominations, all of which confronted individual sinners with the necessity of making a decision to be converted." Revivalism, of course, had been a significant force in religion since the 1740s, but in the days of the camp meeting, "revivalism became the dominant religious culture." These sorts of meetings were huge contributing factors to what became known as the Second Great Awakening. A particularly large and successful revival was held at Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801.

1816

In 1816 in what is now Toronto, Ohio, the Rev. J. M. Bray, pastor of the Sugar Grove Methodist Episcopal Church, began an annual camp meeting. By 1875, the meeting became interdenominational by its purchase of the present-day Hollow Rock Holiness Camp Meeting Association. The association, which still runs the camp, claims that it is the oldest Christian camp meeting in continual existence in the United States.

Campgrounds

Another camp gathering area known now as the Campgrounds, was located in what is now Merrick, New York. Parishioners would arrive in their wagons and park them in two circles, one inside the other. Eventually some of them started building small cottages, which offered more comfort than the wagons. A chapel and a home for the minister was also built. In the 1920s, with new areas open to those with cars, people stopped using the campground. The cottages and church buildings used as local residences and most survive today. In fact the two roads, Wesley Avenue, and Fletcher Avenue, encompass the area of the original paths which the wagons would encircle. The area is also known as Tiny Town because of the small size of the original cottages.

Camp meetings in the United States continued to be conducted for many years on a wide scale. Some are still held today, primarily by Pentecostal and Wesleyan holiness groups, as well as other Protestants and Spiritualists. Some scholars consider the revival meeting a form that arose to recreate the spirit of the frontier camp meeting.

Music and Hymn Singing

The camp meeting tradition fostered a tradition of music and hymn singing with strong oral, improvisatory, and spontaneous elements.

Hymns were taught and learned by rote and a spontaneous and improvisatory element was prized. Both tunes and words were created, changed, and adapted in true folk music fashion:

Specialists in nineteenth-century American religious history describe camp meeting music as the creative product of participants who, when seized by the spirit of a particular sermon or prayer, would take lines from a preacher's text as a point of departure for a short, simply melody. The melody was either borrowed from a preexisting tune or made up on the spot. The line would be sung repeatedly, changing slightly each time, and shaped gradually into a stanza that could be learned easily by others and memorized quickly.

Spontaneous song became a marked characteristic of the camp meetings. Rough and irregular couplets or stanzas were concocted out of Scripture phrases and every-day speech, with liberal interspersing of Hallelujahs and refrains. Such ejaculatory hymns were frequently started by an excited auditor during the preaching, and taken up by the throng, until the meeting dissolved into a "singing-ecstasy" culminating in general hand-shaking. Sometimes they were given forth by a preacher, who had a sense of rhythm, under the excitement of his preaching and the agitation of his audience. Hymns were also composed more deliberately out of meeting, and taught to the people or lined out from the pulpit.

Collections of camp meeting hymns were published, which served both to propagate tunes and texts that were commonly used, and to document the most commonly sung tunes and texts. Example hymnals include The Camp-meeting Chorister (1830) and The Golden Harp(1857)

The 20th century American composer Charles Ives used the camp meeting phenomenon as a metaphysical basis for his Symphony No. 3 (Ives). Hymn tunes and American Civil War area popular songs (which are closely related to camp meeting songs) as part of the symphony's musical material. Although the piece was not initially performed until 1946, almost 40 years after its composition, the symphony was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year in 1947.