Many people have felt that quiet doubt about whether their own faith is real or fleeting. John Wilbur Chapman lived through that same question before becoming one of the most well known evangelists in the United States, and it was in answering it that he found the direction of his ministry.
Born on June 17, 1859, in Richmond, Indiana, Chapman grew up between a Quaker school and a Methodist Sunday school before joining the Presbyterian Church as a teenager. He graduated from Lake Forest College and studied theology at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati.
In 1878, at a meeting held by D. L. Moody in Chicago, Chapman confessed that he sometimes felt saved and sometimes doubted. Moody pointed him to John 5:24 and asked whom he was really doubting: Christ’s own word. Chapman later said that from that day on, he never again questioned his acceptance before God.
Ordained in 1881, he pastored churches in Ohio, Indiana, and New York State before taking charge of Bethany Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, where the Sunday school grew to more than six thousand students. By 1893 he was already preaching alongside Moody at the Chicago World’s Fair, and it was there that he hired the young Billy Sunday, then an employee of the Chicago YMCA, as a campaign assistant.
Starting in 1895, leading the Presbyterian General Assembly’s Committee on Evangelism, Chapman began coordinating dozens of evangelists across hundreds of cities. In 1904 he tested a new idea in Pittsburgh: dividing the city into nine districts, each with its own preacher, all working during the same week.
In 1907 he joined singer and choir leader Charles M. Alexander, forming the Chapman-Alexander Simultaneous Campaign. The method came to include counseling rooms staffed with trained workers who talked and prayed one on one with those who responded to the invitation, trading the impact of the moment for personal follow-up.
The 1908 Philadelphia campaign brought together 21 preacher-and-singer pairs across 42 districts of the city. The following year, Chapman and Alexander took the model to Australia, the Philippines, China, Korea, and Japan, on a crusade that lasted from March to November.
In 1909, by then a recognized leader, Chapman argued that evangelists who doubted the inerrancy of Scripture should be removed from ministry, a rigid stance that exposed the theological tensions within Presbyterianism at the time. Elected moderator of the General Assembly in 1918, he died months later, on December 25, after emergency surgery, leaving behind a model of organized evangelism that would carry on through the following century.
