Take a trip with me through the 20th century American Church.

On this episode and a few more to come, we're going to be looking at institutions that were very large,

dominating the landscape of whether it was fundamentalism at the beginning

of the century or evangelicalism in the second half of the century of the American Church.

And for this first stop along our way, we are going to look at Christian conference centers

and camps. Well, they began just before the turn of the 20th century,

but they didn't come in a vacuum. Their roots go all the way back to the camp meetings,

and the roots of those camp meetings go back to the Scottish Communion season.

This was a time in the life of the church where many churches

would gather together for a week long of sermons culminating in the annual taking of the Lord's

Supper. The first such camp meeting in America was in 1776, but these really took off along the frontier in the early

1800s. Well, let's fast forward from there to 1895. To Winona Lake in Michigan. This was the year

of the first Bible conference. In these days, dispensationalism was becoming more and more

popular, so much of the teaching at this conference was about prophecy. In the successive years,

the Winona conference grew in popularity, built hotels to accommodate all the guests, a rail line

carried passengers direct from Chicago, and it was always packed over the summertime.

Bigger and bigger meeting houses were built, including the Billy Sunday Tabernacle.

In the 1910s, it spun off camps for teens.

Also in the 1880s, Dwight L. Moody held a Bible conference

in Northfield, Massachusetts. It also soon spawned a camp in conference center and camps for teens

and kids, and then the camps moved far west. In 1905, the Mount Hermann Christian Conference

Center was founded in California.

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