Dwight Lyman Moody was born on February 5, 1837, in Northfield, Massachusetts. He lost his father at age four and grew up in poverty, helping his widowed mother support eight siblings. At seventeen, he left his hometown to work as a salesman in his uncle’s shoe store in Boston.
It was in Boston that his life changed. In 1855, Sunday school teacher Edward Kimball went to the warehouse where Moody worked and spoke simply about the love of Christ. Moody was converted that day, though his faith would take years to mature.
He moved to Chicago in 1856 and soon devoted his evenings to volunteer work: he opened a Sunday school in a poor neighborhood and, during the Civil War, served Union soldiers through the United States Christian Commission, affiliated with the YMCA. He married Emma Revell in 1862.
In 1868, seven nights of preaching by the young English evangelist Harry Moorhouse on John 3:16 deeply marked Moody. He began to preach more and more about the love of God, not only about judgment, a shift that would define his style for the rest of his life.
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed his church and his home. Moody quickly rebuilt the work, and from 1873 onward he held long evangelistic campaigns in Britain alongside the singer Ira Sankey, drawing crowds and becoming internationally known.
Not everything in his path is a source of pride. On tours through the American South starting in 1876, Moody accepted the advice of coworkers and began holding separate meetings for Black and white audiences, a retreat from the integrated practice of his earlier years, criticized by Black leaders of the time.
In 1879 and 1881, he founded the Northfield and Mount Hermon schools; in 1886, he started the Chicago institute that, after his death, would be renamed the Moody Bible Institute, training generations of workers and missionaries. That same year, a student conference at Mount Hermon gave rise to the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions.
Moody preached his last sermon in Kansas City in November 1899 and died in Northfield, surrounded by his family, on December 22 of that year. His insistence on uniting simple preaching, practical training, and the mobilization of young people for the nations continues to influence missionary evangelicalism today.
