Kraig McNutt

The summer Billy Sunday found the platform: 1903

A year of small towns, growing purses, and the quiet beginning of the Chautauqua decade that would change everything.

If 1902 was the year Billy Sunday became Billy Sunday, then 1903 was the year he started learning what kind of Billy Sunday he was going to be. The previous year had handed him three breakthroughs: a documented preaching style, a working business model, and a public conversation about whether he might be the next Moody. 1903 was the year he had to do something with all of that.

By the documented record, he held only seven multi-week campaigns and Chautauqua appearances that year — a smaller schedule than 1902. But every one of them mattered, and one of them, a single afternoon talk in September, opened the door to the decade-long platform run that would carry him from regional tent revivalist to national headliner.

Osceola and Marengo: the work continues

The year opened where the previous one had ended — in a small Illinois town, in cold weather, in a four-week revival campaign. At Osceola, between January and February, Sunday drew a $710 purse against $1,100 in campaign expenses and recorded 410 conversions. The local paper noted that he was making “several times over” the salary of a professional baseball player. The Leon Journal-Reporter put a finer point on it in mid-January: he was “attracting enormous congregations.”

From there to Marengo, Illinois in March, where something quietly remarkable happened on Sunday, March 29. Billy preached to men only. Helen Sunday preached to women only. Sixty converts came forward that day across the two services.

Helen had been managing the Sunday household for years, and she would eventually become her husband’s chief organizational lieutenant on the road. But March 29, 1903 is, as far as the curated newspaper record shows, one of the earliest documented occasions when she stepped into a public preaching role of her own. The Belvidere Daily Republican noted it without much fanfare. Three years later, when she announced she would join Billy on the campaign trail full-time, she described her future role as taking “charge of women Bible classes, organizing girl Bible classes and giving personal care to converted persons.” Marengo 1903 was the prototype. She had already been doing it.

Centerville: a town transformed

The defining revival of 1903 came in June at Centerville, Iowa — a small county seat in the southern Iowa coalfields. Sunday preached there for just over two weeks, between June 14 and June 30, and the impact on the town was, by every contemporary measure, immense.

851 conversions across the campaign. 615 of them came in the final week. 219 on Sunday, June 28 alone. 230 on the closing night, June 30. The crowds were enormous for a town that size. On June 29 Sunday preached to 1,500 people, some of whom had driven more than twenty miles to be there. At the men-only meeting earlier in the campaign, 1,200 men came; 155 of them were converted in a single service. Sunday’s purse for the two-week run was $1,500.

But the more telling numbers came after he left town. The Evening Times-Republican reported on July 11 that 428 new church members had joined Centerville’s congregations as a direct result of the revival. First United Methodist alone took in 67. One Centerville church’s regular weekly offering more than doubled in the weeks after Sunday’s departure. Almost every denomination in town began discussing new building plans to accommodate the new attendance. And on July 23, the Oskaloosa Herald reported that a brand new Centerville YMCA had been founded with 150 members — expanding to 250 within a few days.

This was the model working at full force. A two-week campaign generating not just conversions but durable institutional change — new church members, new buildings under discussion, a new YMCA chapter. The Centerville revival also produced one of the period’s most quotable Sunday biographical glimpses. Speaking with a reporter from the Evening Times-Republican on June 26, Sunday described his own childhood: he had been “raised in an infidel neighborhood up in Story County. His grandfather was an infidel and never went to church. Cursings and damnings were heard on all hands.” It is the kind of personal-origin detail that rarely surfaces in his own words elsewhere.

There was also a political dimension. During the Centerville campaign, more than 100 attendees withdrew their names from a local saloon-approval petition — early evidence that Sunday’s revivals were not just spiritual events but civic interventions that reshaped local temperance politics. Toward the close of the campaign Sunday ordered a new tent capable of seating 2,000 people. The local press, with characteristic dry wit, observed that he “proposes that no guilty man escape.”

“The splendid success which has been achieved by “Billy” Sunday at Centerville and at other points in Iowa as an evangelist is contradictory to the conclusions of those who have contended that revivals are a thing of the past and no longer efficacious. They are as effective now as they ever have been, with this difference that a larger share of ability and personality is required to influence the unsaved and bring them to repentance and salvation. People are wider read and more intelligent than they were. A higher order of clerical ability is exacted, and the church is supplying it. Strong, forceful, able and broad-minded evangelists are in greater demand that at any time heretofore and are invariably as successful in winning converts to Christianity as they ever have been.”

– The Courier (Waterloo, Iowa) · Wed, Jul 8, 1903 · Page 4.

The summer turn

The most consequential thing Sunday did in 1903 occurred in August and September. He took his first Chautauqua bookings.

On August 9 he appeared at Bloomington, Illinois — a single date on the Bloomington Chautauqua program. On September 7 he appeared at Ottawa, Illinois, where the Dwight Star and Herald reported that his subject was a denunciation of two-faced church gossipers. Both engagements were modest by the standards he would soon set. But both put him onto the summer platform circuit that would, by 1909, be paying him $43,000 a year and putting him in front of audiences of 8,000 to 15,000 in a single afternoon.

The Chautauqua movement in 1903 was already a national institution. Each summer, thousands of small Midwestern towns hosted ten-day Chautauqua assemblies under canvas — featuring lectures, music, religious programming, scientific demonstrations, and visiting speakers. The platform was hungry for evangelists who could draw a crowd without alienating the family-friendly audience. Sunday’s blend of muscular preaching, ex-baseball-player charisma, and crowd-tested theatricality turned out to be exactly what the format wanted.

A 1903 Sunday Chautauqua appearance was just a single afternoon talk — a long way from the multi-week revival campaigns that had been his core work. But the summer tour had one advantage that the revival circuit did not: scale. A single revival meant one town for a month. A single Chautauqua summer meant a dozen towns in three months, each with its own audience, its own newspaper coverage, and its own check. By September of 1903, Sunday had taken the first steps onto a platform that would carry him through the next decade.

Carthage: a new high

The fall return to revival work brought Sunday to Carthage, Illinois, where he preached from October through November 1 in a pole-and-canvas tabernacle built near the town square by local volunteers. His purse for the month-long campaign was $2,100 — at the time, the largest he had ever received. The Muncie Star Press flagged this as an editor’s note, treating the figure as newsworthy in its own right.

Three years later, in March 1906, the Mattoon Journal Gazette and Times-Courier would publish a stickiness analysis of Sunday’s earlier revivals — looking at how many of his converts remained in the faith years after the campaigns ended. Carthage came in at 80 percent still “living the new life” three years later. It was one of the strongest results in the entire study.

For a 41-year-old evangelist still mostly working the small-town Midwest circuit, the $2,100 Carthage purse was a meaningful threshold. The previous high had been Fairmount’s $1,600 the prior spring. Carthage put Sunday’s compensation on a clear trajectory — by 1907 he would routinely draw $6,000 purses, by 1909 over $10,000 — and the fact that the Muncie paper flagged the figure as “largest ever” tells us the regional press was already keeping score.

What 1903 was for

It is tempting to read 1903 as a quiet year. Only seven documented engagements survive in the curated archive, none of them generated the kind of national press coverage Sunday’s 1902 ministry totals had attracted, and the Chautauqua bookings looked at the time like modest summer side work. The story of 1903, if you were skimming the year for headlines, is thinner than 1902 on its face.

But three things happened in 1903 that mattered more than the headline count suggests, and each one set up something that would define Sunday’s career for the next decade.

Centerville proved the institutional model worked. The 1902 Fairmount campaign had shown that the stock-company funding mechanism could work. Centerville, a year later, showed that the durable institutional effects — new church members, new buildings, new YMCA chapters, lasting political consequences — were not flukes. Sunday’s revivals were not just emotional events. They were civic re-engineering exercises that small towns wanted and would pay for.

Carthage put Sunday’s earnings on a new escalator. $2,100 in a single month, on a model where the local stock company underwrote expenses and the closing collection went to Sunday personally, was no longer a regional curiosity. It was the kind of money that could only come from a campaign delivering real economic value to a town and its churches. By the end of 1903 Sunday was no longer asking communities whether they could afford to host him. He was being courted.

Bloomington and Ottawa opened the Chautauqua door. Two modest summer engagements in 1903. Twenty Chautauqua appearances in 1906. Eighty-six lectures in 1907. The Chautauqua decade — the platform run that would make Sunday a national-newspaper name well before the urban tabernacle campaigns of the 1910s — began with those two unassuming afternoons. Without 1903 there is no 1907. Without 1907 there is no 1909 Spokane, no Patterson Springs $3,600 record, no first meeting with Homer Rodeheaver at Winfield, Kansas.

The 1902 narrative had been about emergence — about a 40-year-old preacher publicly figuring out who he was. The 1903 narrative is harder to see because the changes are quieter. But by the time Sunday closed his Carrollton, Illinois campaign in November and moved on to start the Jefferson, Iowa campaign in mid-December, the trajectory of his ministry was no longer in question. The next ten years were already implied in the platforms he had just learned how to stand on.

The Chautauqua had a hold of him now. So did the small-town Midwest. And so, increasingly, did the watching national press.

All dates, figures, purse amounts, conversion counts, and contemporary press quotations in this post are drawn from the Sunday Master Speaking List, an ongoing research database compiled from period newspapers and archival sources, 2025–2026.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Summer Billy Sunday Found the Platform: 1903.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 7, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/07/the-summer-billy-sunday-found-the-platform-1903/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Summer Billy Sunday Found the Platform: 1903.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 7 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/07/the-summer-billy-sunday-found-the-platform-1903/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 7). The summer Billy Sunday found the platform: 1903. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/07/the-summer-billy-sunday-found-the-platform-1903/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Summer Billy Sunday Found the Platform: 1903.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 7, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/07/the-summer-billy-sunday-found-the-platform-1903/.

“Fix It Up With God Afterward”: The Footrace That Tested a New Convert

Third in a series drawn from Lindsay Denison’s profile of Billy Sunday in The American Magazine, September 1907.

A new convert’s faith is rarely tested by something so simple as a temptation to sin. More often it is tested by an obligation he took on before he believed — a promise made by the old self that the new self has to honor or break. For Billy Sunday, that test came in the form of a footrace, a pile of other men’s money, and Cap Anson refusing to take no for an answer.

It is one of the best stories in Lindsay Denison’s 1907 profile, and Sunday told it on himself.

AI-generated image based on the story in this blogpost.

The bet

Before his conversion, Sunday had been matched in a hundred-yard race against Arlie Latham of the St. Louis Browns. The stakes were serious: $500 a side plus the gate money, with the race to be run in St. Louis on a Sunday at the close of the season. His captain, Cap Anson, had backed him heavily — and so had a great many of Anson’s friends. By Sunday’s own recollection, something like $75,000 was riding on the outcome.

Then Sunday walked into the Pacific Garden Mission and everything changed. Suddenly a man who had just resolved to live as Christ would have him live found himself committed to running a high-stakes gambling spectacle — on a Sunday, no less.

The prayer that wouldn’t resolve

This is the detail that makes the episode ring true. Sunday did not simply decide. He agonized.

He prayed over the race night after night, he told Denison, and still could not see his way clear. There was no clean answer. Backing out would betray Anson and the friends who had staked their money on him in good faith, long before his conversion. Going through with it meant a new Christian publicly running a Sunday gambling match. Either road ran against something he valued.

Unable to resolve it in prayer, he finally went to Anson and told him flatly that the captain would have to let him out of the race.

Anson’s answer

Anson would not hear of it. His first move was to needle Sunday’s pride — he wasn’t going to turn yellow and quit, was he? Sunday tried to explain himself. Anson wouldn’t listen.

What Anson said next is, in its rough way, one of the most quietly fascinating lines in the whole article — a piece of folk theology from a man who admitted he wasn’t much for religion. He told Sunday he’d backed him for thousands, and so had his friends, and then he reasoned it out: he didn’t believe God would want Sunday to begin his new life by throwing down his friends over a contract he’d signed before he ever went with God. So here was the plan. Sunday should go down to St. Louis, run the race — and then fix it up with God afterward.

It is the line that gives this post its title, and it deserves a moment’s attention. Anson, the irreligious ballplayer, was making a genuine moral argument: that a debt of honor incurred by the old self still binds the new one, and that a faith worth having shouldn’t begin with a betrayal. Whether or not the theology holds, the loyalty behind it is unmistakable.

“And, well, friends — I did”

So Sunday did exactly that. He went to St. Louis. He ran the race. He won it.

And then he came straight back to Chicago, went before the session of his church, and owned up to the whole thing. When the elders heard the full story, they let him off. He went on to serve as an elder of that same church for a good many years afterward.

What makes the story land is the order of operations. Sunday did not arrive at a tidy principle and then act on it. He wrestled, failed to find an answer, deferred to a friend’s blunt counsel, did the deed, and then submitted himself to his church’s judgment after the fact. It is conversion as a real human process — messy, compromised, and honest about the compromise — rather than a clean before-and-after.

Why he told it

It is worth asking why Sunday repeated a story that, on its face, shows him running a Sunday gambling race as a brand-new Christian. The answer is probably the same reason it works on us a century later: it made him believable.

A preacher who claimed to have gone instantly spotless from the moment he rose off that curb would have been easy to disbelieve and easy to resent. A preacher who admitted he prayed over a problem for nights, couldn’t crack it, ran the race anyway, and then went and confessed it — that man was telling the truth about how hard the early going had been. The audiences who heard him preach trusted him in part because he handed them stories like this one.

The footrace, in other words, was not a blemish Sunday hid. It was evidence he offered.

Next in the series: Preaching the Devil in Plain English — inside Billy Sunday’s pulpit style.

The year Billy Sunday became Billy Sunday: 1902

Twelve months that took a 40-year-old former baseball player from regional tent revivalist to publicly recognized “foremost of Evangelists” in America.

On January 18, 1902, William A. Sunday opened a five-week revival in the small Iowa town of Audubon. By the end of December, when he started his next campaign in Glidden, Iowa, he had preached eleven multi-week campaigns across four states, taken in roughly $7,500 in personal purses, watched at least 3,000 people walk down the aisle as converts, and become the subject of a serious national newspaper conversation about whether he might be the next Dwight L. Moody.

He was 40 years old. He had been an independent evangelist for less than six years. And 1902 is the year — more than any other in his pre-Chautauqua decade — when you can actually watch him stop being a regional curiosity and start becoming a national figure.

A businessman’s revival

The most consequential thing Sunday did in 1902 had nothing to do with theology. It had to do with the way he organized a revival meeting.

At Fairmount, Indiana — a town of barely 2,000 people where Sunday preached from March 20 through April 28 — The Indianapolis News documented what it called Sunday’s “new and practical idea that appeals to business men.” The local supporters calculated four weeks of campaign expenses at $825. They organized a stock company for exactly that amount and sold shares to attendees, with basket contributions buying up the stock. Sunday took the last Sunday’s contributions as his personal compensation. When it was announced that the closing basket was for him, $1,640 was dropped into it.

It was a self-funding revival. Local risk underwritten by local capital, the evangelist’s purse paid by the same people who had benefited from his preaching, and the whole arrangement transparent enough that newspaper editors thought it was newsworthy. Sunday would refine this model for the next decade. By 1907 he would be the highest-paid evangelist in America, and the Fairmount stock-company structure — extended, scaled, professionalized — was the engine that got him there.

The 1902 archive shows him testing the model in five other towns. At Audubon in January and February he drew a $1,500 purse and 434 converts on a four-denomination joint sponsorship. At Atlantic, Iowa in February and March, $1,400. At Fairmount itself, $1,600. At Wheaton, Illinois in May, $813. At Iowa Falls in October, $749. At Woodstock, New York in December, $600. The purses were not uniform — Wheaton and Iowa Falls underdelivered, Fairmount overdelivered — but the structure was the same. And the numbers were big enough that they were getting noticed.

The leap up the aisle

In May of 1902 Sunday brought his revival to Wheaton, Illinois, and preached out of Gary Memorial Church with a 100-voice choir under his music director Fred G. Fischer. He stayed four weeks. He preached afternoon and evening every day for thirty days — over sixty sermons in all. He took apart Sabbath-breaking, named the Chicago Golf Club by name, and went after dance and card playing.

On June 4, the Omaha Daily News carried this sentence, buried halfway down a column that described his preaching at Wheaton:

On another occasion while preaching he made a run, leaped high into the air and landed twenty feet up the aisle, ran around the church, kept on preaching and shouted that he wanted to get in among the people to wake them up.

This is, as far as the curated newspaper record goes, the first contemporary documentation of the pulpit theatrics that would define Billy Sunday’s preaching for the next three decades. The leaping. The running. The breaking through the formal boundary between pulpit and pew. The athletic identity of his old baseball career — repurposed into evangelism in a way no preacher in American history had quite done before.

He had been preaching for six years. He was 40 years old. And he had just figured out the move.

“Foremost of Evangelists”

By late June of 1902, after closing a three-week campaign at Farmington, Illinois — Sunday’s smallest purse of the year at just $200 — a newspaper described him as the “foremost of Evangelists.” The phrase was almost certainly premature. There were better-known revivalists working the country in 1902. But the fact that any newspaper would apply that phrase to him, in print, in 1902, is the data point that matters.

The recognition got louder over the summer. In late June and early July he appeared at Winona Lake, Indiana for the first National Young People’s Bible Conference — the inaugural year of an event Sunday would return to for the rest of his life. J. Wilbur Chapman, the senior evangelist who had been Sunday’s mentor and employer through the 1890s, was also on the program. They were peers now.

On July 26 the Muscatine Journal carried what may be the most revealing single article of Sunday’s 1902 year. It was a ministry update in which Sunday spoke about his own income, by campaign, in his own words:

“God has been good to us,” is the way Mr. Sunday puts it. “He gave us $600 for a month’s work in Belvidere, Illinois; $200 for the same length of time in Farmington, and even frosty Wheaton, where there are costly Chicago millionaires, we drew $800 in thirty days.”

It was the kind of disclosure most preachers would never make. Sunday was happy to make it. The same article went on to say that out in Iowa, where Sunday had converted “more than 10,000 persons” over his ministry, “people assert that he is destined to be a greater evangelist than Mr. Moody.”

Two weeks later, on August 10, The Missoulian carried the more definitive number. Since Sunday had become an evangelist — going independent from Chapman’s organization in 1896 — he had taken in approximately $12,000 total. For context, a successful lawyer or doctor in 1902 made between $3,000 and $5,000 a year. The most successful corporate executives in America made between $10,000 and $25,000 a year. Sunday, at six years into his independent ministry, was on a trajectory to enter the top tier of American earners within another year or two. The Missoulian was not the only newspaper running these numbers. The story was syndicating.

A poem from Iowa

Somewhere along the way that spring — probably during the Atlantic, Iowa campaign in March — a writer named J.F. Lewis published a poem in a small Iowa newspaper called The Telegraph. The Leon Journal-Reporter reprinted it on April 17. Three years later, in 1905, The Des Moines Register reprinted it again. It is the earliest known poetic tribute to Billy Sunday:

Oh, Billy he’s a dandy,
A spade, a spade, he calls;
He’s a powerful hard hitter —
He practiced on base balls.

He trained with old Pap Anson,
A name well known to fame,
And they tell us Billy Sunday
Put up a pretty good game.

His triumphs in his present league,
The angels doth record;
His diamond is the world of sin,
His captain is the Lord,
And when the season’s ended
And the last ball has been passed,
I’ll bet you Billy Sunday
A home run makes at last.

There is no surviving record of who J.F. Lewis was. But the existence of the poem in 1902, in a small Iowa town newspaper, is itself the story. The baseball-to-pulpit framing — the conversion of athletic identity into religious metaphor — was already so well-established in Sunday’s public persona by April 1902 that an Iowa newspaper poet could turn out a quick eight-stanza tribute and assume his readers would get every reference.

The fall slowdown

The second half of 1902 was thinner. After the burst of June and July recognition, Sunday took two unusual engagements — a mid-August week at a Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, where the local paper said “at every meeting he has made hits that brought a run of Christians across home plate,” and a three-week revival at Harvard, Massachusetts in September that produced 190 converts. Both events were small. Neither generated the kind of headlines the spring campaigns had.

Then back to the Iowa rhythm: Iowa Falls in October at the Metropolitan Opera House (200 converts, a $749 purse), Woodstock, New York in November and early December (350 converts, $600 purse), and finally the December opening at Glidden, Iowa. The year ended quietly, on the small-town circuit where it had begun.

But the trajectory had changed permanently. The Chautauqua bookings — which would explode into the cornerstone of Sunday’s summer schedule starting in 1903 — were already being negotiated. The income story was syndicating. The pulpit-theatrics moment had been documented. The stock-company business model had been printed in a major Indianapolis newspaper for other preachers and other communities to read and copy. And a working evangelist in his own state was being told he might be greater than Moody.

What 1902 actually was

It is tempting to read 1902 as just one more year in a long apprenticeship. Sunday would not become a household name until the big-city campaigns of the 1910s — Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York. But that reading misses what the contemporary newspaper record actually shows.

1902 was the year Sunday’s preaching style locked into its mature form, with the Wheaton leap recorded in print for the first time. It was the year his revival business model was documented at Fairmount and explicitly described as a model other communities should imitate. It was the year his earnings reached a level that made him a serious financial story in regional papers. It was the year the Moody comparison entered print. It was the year a small-town Iowa poet wrote eight stanzas about him. It was the year he stood alongside J. Wilbur Chapman at Winona Lake not as Chapman’s protégé but as Chapman’s peer.

Most of the work of becoming the Billy Sunday of American memory was still ahead of him — the Chautauqua circuit, the steel-tabernacle campaigns, Homer Rodeheaver, the great urban revivals. But the architecture was now in place. By the time he opened his next revival at Glidden in December, the man who would fill 20,000-seat tabernacles a decade later was already, recognizably, the same man. 1902 was the year he became him.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Became Billy Sunday: 1902.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 5, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/05/the-year-billy-sunday-became-billy-sunday-1902/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Became Billy Sunday: 1902.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 5 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/05/the-year-billy-sunday-became-billy-sunday-1902/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 5). The year Billy Sunday became Billy Sunday: 1902. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/05/the-year-billy-sunday-became-billy-sunday-1902/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Became Billy Sunday: 1902.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 5, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/05/the-year-billy-sunday-became-billy-sunday-1902/.

From Center Field to the Pulpit: The Conversion of Billy Sunday

Second in a series drawn from Lindsay Denison’s profile of Billy Sunday in The American Magazine, September 1907.

Before he was the man who made New England shiver and the cornfields cheer, Billy Sunday was a poor boy from Iowa with a dead father and a gift for running.

Lindsay Denison’s 1907 profile lays out the bare facts of that early life with a plainness that almost undersells them. Sunday was born in 1863 in Storey, in Ames County, Iowa. His father was a Union soldier, killed in battle before the boy was even born. He grew up in the Davenport Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home and was later apprenticed out to Col. John Scott — a state senator and former lieutenant-governor — before learning the furniture trade in Marshalltown.

It was an unremarkable beginning for a man who would become anything but unremarkable. And the thing that lifted him out of it was not religion. It was baseball.

Discovered by Cap Anson

AI-generated from period images of Anson and Sunday.

While Sunday was working in Marshalltown, the famous Captain Anson of the Chicago White Stockings spotted the makings of a great ballplayer in him. Anson brought him to Chicago in 1883, and for the next five years Sunday played right field for one of the dominant teams of the era — fast enough that Denison calls him the quickest base-runner the National League ever knew.

He was, in short, a professional athlete in his prime in a major American city. Which makes what happened next all the more surprising.

The curb on Van Buren Street

The conversion story is the hinge of Sunday’s entire life, and Denison opens the whole article with it.

One afternoon — nineteen years before the article was written — Sunday sat with three fellow ballplayers on a curb on Van Buren Street in Chicago, directly across from the Pacific Garden Mission. The men were Mike Kelly, Johnny Ward, and Buck Ewing, all famous names of early baseball. The mission’s windows were open, and the sound of the organ and the hymns rolled out into the street.

When the singing stopped, Sunday told the others he guessed he didn’t want another drink. He waved them a laughing good-bye, crossed the street, and walked into the mission. Ever since, Denison writes, he had been trying to live as he believed Christ would have him live.

There was no thunderclap in the telling — just a man getting up off a curb and walking toward something. The drama would come later.

What the ballplayers thought

Sunday’s own account of the aftermath is one of the most human passages in the article, and it turns on fear. The shakiest moment, he admitted, came the day the Chicago papers broke the news of his joining the church, as he walked down to the ballgrounds dreading what his teammates would say.

He needn’t have worried. Anson shook his hand and said, “Good for you, Billy.” Mike Kelly told him to stick to it. Fred Pfeffer and John Clarkson were just as warm. And George Gore — the one Sunday feared most — grabbed him with both hands and told him it was the best thing he had ever done. Finding that men he respected respected him the more for becoming a Christian, Sunday said, braced him up more than he could express.

(One more test of that new faith was still ahead of him — a footrace, a heavy bet, and a memorable bit of advice from Cap Anson. That’s a story worth its own post, and it’s coming next.)

The cost of the calling

What Denison documents next is the part that answered, years in advance, the critics who would later call Sunday a money-grubber.

After Chicago, Sunday played three more seasons with the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia clubs of the National League, preaching from a pulpit on Sunday nights in whatever town he found himself, firing a locomotive between seasons to stay in condition, and taking courses at Northwestern University. Then, in 1891 — in answer, he believed, to prayer about his future — he secured his release from the Philadelphia team.

Cincinnati immediately offered him $500 a month to keep playing. He turned it down. Instead he became director of the Chicago YMCA at $83 a month — and during the hard times of 1893, his salary went unpaid for seven months running. He was so poor he walked downtown in the morning and home again at night because he could not afford the car fare.

Sunday recalled all this to Denison with a touch of grim humor that says everything about how the later “grafter” accusations stung him: nobody, he noted, was calling him a grafter in those days.

From the YMCA to the pulpit

The final step came four years before the article appeared, when the Presbytery of Chicago received Sunday into the ministry. He had served for a time under the Rev. Dr. J. Wilbur Chapman, one of the leaders of the wave of evangelization then sweeping the Mississippi valley — the mentor under whom the ballplayer-turned-secretary finished becoming a preacher.

From an orphanage in Iowa to right field in Chicago to a tabernacle pulpit in a hundred small towns: it is an improbable arc, and Denison tells it as one. The boy who got up off a curb because he didn’t want another drink had, within two decades, become the man the whole Middle West was talking about.

Next in the series: “Fix It Up With God Afterward” — the footrace, Cap Anson, and the bet that tested a new convert.

Four sermons, every town: how Billy Sunday cracked the Chautauqua circuit

Between 1903 and 1909, Billy Sunday turned the summer Chautauqua platform into a repeatable performance machine. The secret was simpler than anyone expected.

In September of 1903, Billy Sunday stood on a Chautauqua platform at Ottawa, Illinois and preached against two-faced church gossipers. It was, as far as the newspaper record can tell us, his first Chautauqua engagement that anyone bothered to write up by subject. There was no title, no famous catchphrase, no broadside poster — just a single afternoon talk by a former baseball player turned evangelist, slotted somewhere between a band concert and a temperance lecture in a small Illinois town.

Six years later, in the summer of 1909, Sunday was delivering the same four sermons in twelve different towns across nine states, packing 6,000-seat tabernacles and pulling $500 paydays per lecture. He had figured out the trick. The trick was this: stop writing new sermons.

1907 Postcard. Globe Park. Freeport, Illinois.

The platform problem

Chautauquas were the strangest preaching venue of Sunday’s career. Unlike his weeks-long revival campaigns — where he could pace himself, develop themes across services, and let an emotional arc build over a month in one town — the Chautauqua format was a one-and-done. You arrived in town, walked onto the platform, gave one talk (maybe two), collected your purse, and left for the next town the following morning. The audience came expecting entertainment as much as religion. They had paid a quarter at the gate and were sitting under canvas alongside crop demonstrations and a forty-piece band. The pressure to perform was relentless, and so was the pace.

Most evangelists who tried the Chautauqua circuit either burned out fast or watered down their content into harmless inspiration. Sunday did neither. He treated the circuit as a laboratory and, over six summers, ran an experiment: which sermons worked everywhere, in front of any crowd, in any town?

The experimental years

The first surviving titled Chautauqua sermon came in August 1904, when Sunday closed out the Sycamore, Illinois assembly with “Old Time Religion.” It was a safe choice — a familiar phrase, a sentimental hook. But it tested the format, and Sunday took notes.

By the following summer, in 1905, he was experimenting more aggressively. At Globe Park in Freeport he preached on Baseball and the Atonement on alternating days, splitting the rhetorical register between personal-story-as-evangelism and straight theology. At Springfield he tried “The Bible” as a stand-alone theme. And at Sterling on July 16, 1905, in front of a crowd of 15,000 — the largest he had ever drawn to a platform — he set aside the sermon entirely and spent half an hour publicly demolishing Elbert Hubbard, the East Coast magazine editor who had recently called him a “grafter.” Coat off, vest off, sleeves rolled, fist in the air. The audience cheered almost every sentence. It was theater, not preaching, and Sunday seems to have realized two things at once: the Chautauqua crowd loved confrontation, and his own personality could carry a platform as well as any sermon he wrote.

By August of 1905 he had decided. A Rockford newspaper carried the announcement: Sunday was “so pleased with the results of his work among the Chautauquas during the summer that he has decided to devote a portion of all summers in the future to Chautauqua work.” He signed with a booking bureau. He was, formally, a Chautauqua headliner now.

The year everything became baseball

1906 is the year you can see Sunday’s strategy lock into place. Of his five documented Chautauqua appearances that summer, four featured “Baseball.” Belvidere on June 22 — 8,000 attendees at a 2:30 afternoon talk. Globe Park on July 8 — anchored on a text from First John, of all things. Janesville on July 29 — 4,000 spell-bound listeners. Sycamore on August 26 — spoke twice. The sermon was the same; the towns were different. Sunday had stopped writing new material and started repeating what worked.

At Muscatine on August 4 he debuted a second sermon: “Nuts for Skeptics.” It was a defense-of-the-faith talk aimed at the educated doubt that the Chautauqua audience — middle-class, literate, often Methodist — was most likely to bring with them. With Baseball anchoring the front half of his rotation and “Nuts for Skeptics” handling the back half, Sunday now had two reliable sermons. Two was already more than most evangelists managed.

The brutal summer of 1907

In 1907 Sunday delivered 86 Chautauqua lectures across roughly 30 sites for about $43,500 in earnings — the equivalent of roughly $1.5 million in 2026 dollars. He was the highest-paid evangelist in America that year, and possibly the highest-paid Chautauqua attraction of any kind. He was also exhausted.

The 1907 newspaper record is strangely thin on sermon titles. Of those 86 lectures, only three titles survive in the curated archive: “The Devil’s Boomerang” at Miami Valley, Ohio on July 23; “Amusements” at Sycamore on August 25; and “Grounders Hot Off the Bat” at the brand-new 4,000-seat steel auditorium at Joliet’s Dellwood Park on August 30. The thin record is itself telling — newspapers were so used to seeing Sunday on every regional platform that they had stopped describing what he preached. He was just Billy Sunday. He was the show.

“The Devil’s Boomerang” matters in retrospect, because it appears to be the first version of what would become the most-delivered sermon of Sunday’s Chautauqua career. The temperance crusade was tightening across the Midwest, and Sunday had found a sermon — eventually retitled simply “Booze” or sometimes “Get on the Water Wagon” — that channeled it. The third sermon in his rotation was now in place.

At Joliet at the end of August, after the steel-auditorium opening, Sunday told the press he was going to cut back on Chautauqua speaking after the season. The constant travel — overnight trains, missed sleep, hay fever, the relentless pace of a fresh town every day or two — was eating into the rest he needed for his revival work. He was 44 years old.

The full rotation

He did not, in fact, cut back. The 1908 Chautauqua titles have not survived in the archive, but by the summer of 1909 Sunday was running a tighter, more disciplined, and more deliberate rotation than ever. Across nine documented summer Chautauqua engagements between July 5 and August 25, 1909, he delivered just four sermons:

Booze — the temperance sermon, preached at Waterloo, Winfield, Trenton, Shelbyville, Petersburg, and originally scheduled at Clinton. Sometimes titled “Get on the Water Wagon.” The most-delivered Chautauqua sermon in Sunday’s archive.

Nuts for Skeptics to Crack — the defense-of-the-faith sermon. Albert Lea, Kearney, Litchfield. The expanded title is the only thing that changed between its 1906 debut and 1909.

Forces that Win — the surprise addition. Three appearances in 1909 (Winfield, Litchfield, Shelbyville), no documented earlier instances. Sunday appears to have developed it specifically for the 1909 summer circuit. The mystery sermon.

Baseball — still in the rotation but no longer dominant. By 1909, the temperance movement had given Sunday a sharper, more politically resonant sermon, and the personal-story sermon receded.

Four sermons. Nine engagements. Maybe two or three of these sermons were on offer at any given stop. The audience got whichever one Sunday thought would land best in their town. At Clinton on August 25, after he had already been booked to preach “Booze,” he changed his mind on the platform and switched to “Skepticism” instead — reading the room, pulling a different sermon from the rotation. The mid-stride change is the cleanest proof of the system: he was not preaching from notes that night. He was performing a known piece from memory, and he picked the one he wanted.

What the rotation tells us

It is tempting to read this as evidence of laziness or commercialism. Sunday found four sermons that worked, the argument might go, and ran them into the ground for the money. But the archive does not support that reading.

What Sunday was actually doing was solving a problem that traveling preachers had wrestled with for a century: how do you sustain emotional and rhetorical intensity across a punishing travel schedule, in front of audiences who have never heard you before? Moody used the same handful of sermons for decades. Sankey sang the same hymns. Sam Jones rotated a fixed set. Sunday’s innovation was not the repetition itself — it was the deliberate, almost engineering-grade winnowing process he ran from 1903 through 1908 to identify which sermons survived contact with audiences of every kind. By 1909 the rotation was tested. The Big Four were not lazy choices. They were the four sermons that had outlasted every other sermon he ever tried on a Chautauqua platform.

There is one more thing worth noticing. The arc of the four sermons traces the arc of American Protestantism between 1903 and 1909 with surprising precision. Baseball — the personal-conversion-story sermon — anchors the rotation early, when Sunday is still selling himself as a novelty. Nuts for Skeptics — the apologetics sermon — comes online in 1906, the same year that liberal theology and the rise of Higher Criticism are pressing hardest on evangelical preachers. Booze rises in 1907 and dominates by 1909, as the temperance movement accelerates toward what would become national prohibition in 1919. Forces that Win arrives in 1909 with no documented backstory — possibly Sunday’s own attempt to articulate what made his methods succeed, possibly a Memorial Day style civic sermon, possibly something else entirely. Whatever it was, it joined the rotation at exactly the moment when Sunday was preparing to make his transition to the big-city revivals that would define the rest of his career.

Four sermons. Every town. The Chautauqua circuit taught Billy Sunday what the big-city campaigns would soon prove: that a small, refined repertoire delivered with overwhelming conviction beats a large, polished one delivered with caution. By the time he walked off the Clinton, Illinois platform on August 25, 1909, with “Skepticism” still ringing in the audience’s ears, the apprenticeship was over. The career-defining decade was about to begin.

All sermon titles, dates, attendance figures, and contemporary press quotations in this post are drawn from the Sunday Master Speaking List, an ongoing research database compiled from period newspapers and archival sources, 2025–2026.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “Four Sermons, Every Town: How Billy Sunday Cracked the Chautauqua Circuit.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 3, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/03/four-sermons-every-town-how-billy-sunday-cracked-the-chautauqua-circuit/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “Four Sermons, Every Town: How Billy Sunday Cracked the Chautauqua Circuit.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 3 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/03/four-sermons-every-town-how-billy-sunday-cracked-the-chautauqua-circuit/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 3). Four sermons, every town: How Billy Sunday cracked the Chautauqua circuit. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/03/four-sermons-every-town-how-billy-sunday-cracked-the-chautauqua-circuit/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “Four Sermons, Every Town: How Billy Sunday Cracked the Chautauqua Circuit.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 3, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/03/four-sermons-every-town-how-billy-sunday-cracked-the-chautauqua-circuit/.

“He Is Doing God’s Work”: A 1907 Magazine Discovers Billy Sunday

First in a series drawn from Lindsay Denison’s profile of Billy Sunday in The American Magazine, September 1907.

In the autumn of 1907, a New York journalist named Lindsay Denison stepped off a train into a tidy, prosperous Iowa town of about five thousand people. He had come a long way to watch a man preach.

The town was Fairfield. The man was the Rev. William A. “Billy” Sunday — former professional ballplayer, ordained Presbyterian minister, and the most electric revivalist the American Midwest had ever produced. Denison’s assignment was to explain him to the readers of The American Magazine, a national publication based a thousand miles east of the cornfields where Sunday did his work.

That distance is the whole story. In 1907, Billy Sunday was a regional sensation — a small-town, big-tent evangelist who worked a tight circuit through Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado. But the fact that a New York magazine sent a reporter “all the way from New York,” as Sunday himself noted in one of his prayers, tells you something was shifting. The country was beginning to take notice.

A reluctant convert among the clergy

The article opens not with Sunday’s own voice but with the voice of a man he had thoroughly rattled: the Rev. Pearse Pinch, pastor of Fairfield’s Congregational church. Pinch’s testimony is one of the most striking things in the whole piece, precisely because it is so conflicted.

Sunday, by Pinch’s account, had trampled all over his theology and “kicked my teachings up and down that platform like a football.” The man had offended every refined notion the pastor held about his sacred profession. And yet — Pinch could not argue with the results. His congregation would grow by hundreds. So he humbled himself, gave the credit to Sunday and to God, and reached a conclusion he could not escape: the man was doing God’s work, and that he knew.

It is a perfect frame for the series ahead, because it captures the central tension of Billy Sunday’s whole career. Refined clergymen were horrified by his slang, his theatrics, his shirt-sleeve oratory. And then they watched the converts pour down the aisles, and they stopped arguing.

The numbers that made people look twice

Denison did not bury the lead. By 1907, Sunday had spent twelve years converting more than one hundred thousand men and women to a public profession of faith — and, crucially, he sent them into the churches and they stayed. A survey of ministers in eleven towns where Sunday had held revivals came back unanimous: the share of backsliders was small, even negligible.

This is what separated Sunday from the caricature of the fly-by-night tent preacher. He was, in Denison’s framing, making more church members than all the ministers of the Middle West working together. And he funneled converts not only into his own Presbyterian rolls but into the Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Congregationalist, Roman Catholic, and Christian churches as well.

A man, not a “theological phonograph”

What made him work? Part of the answer, Denison found, was that Sunday never behaved like a clergyman descending on sinners. When he first arrived in Fairfield, he walked the stores around the public square and talked shop — cloth, horses, shoe leather, Chicago trade prices — and he knew his subjects well enough to impress the tailor, the livery man, and the shoe dealer.

By the time those introductory calls were done, the town had reached its verdict: Bill Sunday was a human being, not a theological phonograph. That instinct — to meet ordinary people as a peer rather than to preach down at them — is the thread that runs through everything else, from his plain-spoken sermons to the popular tunes his choir sang.

Why this series

Over the next several posts, we’ll work through Denison’s 1907 profile piece by piece: Sunday’s improbable journey from center field to the pulpit, the famous footrace that tested his new faith, the pulpit style that scandalized and converted in equal measure, the carnival-bright music of his meetings, the hard questions about money, and the unforgettable final day of the Fairfield revival.

Read as a whole, the article is more than a snapshot of one revival in one Iowa town. It is an early national notice of a man about to become one of the most famous preachers in America — caught at the very threshold, just before the rise steepened.

As Denison put it in his closing line, the spiritual ferment Sunday helped lead was spreading and intensifying across the country. What it would all come to, he wrote, was no part of his business to guess.

But it was worth watching.

Next in the series: From Center Field to the Pulpit — the conversion of Billy Sunday.

What about being a church member?

Billy Sunday’s revival pulpit, 1902–1909

A sermon-by-sermon look at what Billy preached when he wasn’t on a Chautauqua platform — drawn from contemporary newspaper coverage across eight formative years.

Billy Sunday sermon notes. Grace College. Morgan Library. 2025

By the time Billy Sunday stepped onto a Chautauqua stage in 1903, he had already been preaching revival meetings for nearly a decade. The Chautauqua circuit got the broadside posters, the souvenir programs, and the syndicated newspaper coverage — but the revivals were where the real work happened: multi-week tabernacle campaigns, day-after-day preaching, and the slow accumulation of converts that built his reputation. The titles below are what newspapers actually named when they covered those revivals (and a handful of related events). Where the press only gave a topic or a Bible text, that’s all we get.

1902 — Wheaton, Illinois

No formal titles, but the Chicago Tribune and the Waterloo Courier flagged the subjects Sunday was hitting that May:

Sabbath-breaking (with specific shots at the Chicago Golf Club)
Dance
Card playing

A June 4 Omaha Daily News dispatch — the first newspaper record of his pulpit theatrics — describes him leaping twenty feet up the church aisle mid-sermon. The titles weren’t memorable yet; the delivery already was.

1903 — Marengo, Illinois

On Sunday, March 29, Billy preached to men only while Helen Sunday preached to women only. Sixty converts that day. No titles preserved for either sermon — but Helen’s appearance is one of the earliest documented instances of her in a public preaching role, three years before her formal full-time commitment to the campaign trail.

1904 — Rockford, Illinois

Across fifty services in a 5,000-seat tabernacle, two key sermons stood out in the press coverage:

“Square your lives by the Bible”
A denunciation of evolution as “all rot” and a “damnable theory”

The evolution sermon is significant. This is the first public documented instance of Sunday taking on evolution — six full years before the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy reached its peak.

1904 — Richmond, Indiana

Sunday afternoon, September 4, at the Chautauqua Grove (a revival-style setting on the Chautauqua grounds), Sunday preached on a text from the Gospels:

Text: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass away”

The Daily Palladium described his manner as “full of fire, enthusiasm, truth, with an unusual use of the language which is startling in effect.” A second evening address followed; no title preserved.

1905 — Mason City, Iowa

January 29 men-only afternoon:

“Chickens Come Home to Roost” / “Hot Cakes on the Griddle”

Fifty immediate conversions from a crowd of two thousand men. The double-titling in the press suggests Sunday may have used either phrase to refer to the same sermon — or that he riffed between the two metaphors during delivery. Either way, this is the earliest colorful, slangy sermon title in the archive — a hint of the homespun pulpit voice that would define his later style.

1906 — Rochester, Minnesota

Opening weekend (Saturday December 30, 1905 and Sunday December 31), three sermons in the span of a day and a half:

“Revival” (opening Saturday evening)
“Christian Warfare” (Sunday afternoon)
“Answered Skeptics” (Sunday evening)

Opening night quote, captured by the Olmsted County Democrat: “I don’t pretend to preach like your preachers, if I did, you wouldn’t need me.”

1906 — Prophetstown, Illinois

Among the major sermons in this 28-day campaign — which converted 714 people in a town of just 1,200 — was:

“Evolution a Sham”

Two years after Rockford, the evolution sermon now had a formal title and a regular slot in the revival rotation.

1906 — Salida, Colorado

When the revival tent collapsed under snow in early October, Sunday relocated to a local church and then to a 400-seat opera house. Among the featured talks:

A eulogy for Abraham Lincoln
A tribute to President Theodore Roosevelt
“Read good books and keep good company” — a moral admonition: “Every gambler and drunkard became so by imitating the gang he went with.”

1907 — Kankakee, Illinois

The Streator Times for January 26, 1907 carried extended transcription under the headline “REV. BILLY SUNDAY DEFINES WHAT HE TERMS SOCIETY OF THE PRESENT DAY” — a sermon comparing high-society Pompeii imagery to back-room beer joints, with the famous line:

I fear that cursed gang of society more than I do all the town loafers in that beer joint.

1907 — Fairfield, Iowa

The densest single-day sermon documentation in the entire 1902–1909 run came on Sunday, April 28, when Sunday preached three sermons in a single day — each anchored on a different Bible text. Adding the campaign opener three weeks earlier, the Fairfield set looks like this:

Opening sermon (April 4) — “Revive Us Again”
April 28 morning — John 14:15–16, “If ye abide in me…”
April 28 afternoon — “Choose you this day whom you will serve”
April 28 evening — Hebrews 9:27, “It is appointed unto man once to die”

1907 — Gibson City, Illinois

Both of these were preached during the Gibson City revival (June 13 – July 14) and transcribed in regional newspapers in August:

Sermon on John 7:17 (transcribed August 23)
Sermon on “Hell” (transcribed August 30)

Worth noting: Sunday’s brother died in early July during this campaign, and Billy could not leave the revival to attend the funeral. His son was also born on the opening day of the same campaign — a stark personal bookend to the month.

1909 — Spokane, Washington

The first revival Sunday ever held in a city of more than 100,000. Two sermons stand out:

“Tomorrow” — preached as the final sermon. This is the first documented use of “Tomorrow” as a closing sermon, the dramatic emotional close that would become a signature pattern of his big-city campaigns.
“Booze” — delivered twice during the campaign, tied directly to a local political moment: 110 representative men were sent on a special train to Olympia to lobby for a county-unit option bill while Sunday gave the sermon.

1909 — Springfield, Illinois

During a campaign that produced 4,729 converts over six weeks, one sermon was singled out by the press for its size and effect:

“Judgment” — a Sunday afternoon sermon preached to 8,000 men. 300 conversions from that single message.

On the final day, April 11, Sunday saw 774 conversions in a single day — the largest single-day total of his career to that point. The title of that sermon wasn’t preserved.

Patterns worth noting

Across eight years of revival work, the named sermon archive divides cleanly into three groups:

Named sermons

Roughly ten distinct titles documented across the period: “Chickens Come Home to Roost,” “Revival,” “Christian Warfare,” “Answered Skeptics,” “Evolution a Sham,” “Revive Us Again,” “Choose you this day whom you will serve,” “Tomorrow,” “Booze,” “Judgment.” These are the sermons newspapers cared enough to name.

Scripture-anchored, title unknown

Six sermons documented only by their Bible text: John 14:15–16, Hebrews 9:27, John 7:17, the “Hell” sermon, “Heaven and earth shall pass away,” and “Square your lives by the Bible.” The press recorded the verse but not the rhetorical hook.

Topic-only documentation

A larger group documented only by subject: Sabbath-breaking, dance, card playing, evolution, the Lincoln eulogy, the Roosevelt tribute, the “Society of the Present Day” sermon. The newspaper covered what he talked about, not what he called it.

Two milestones stand out from this sermon archive. The first is the evolution opposition, traceable from 1904 Rockford forward — Sunday was hitting evolution on the revival circuit a full half-decade before it would become a national fundamentalist flashpoint. The second is the premiere of “Tomorrow” at Spokane in February 1909, used for the first time as a final sermon. That single rhetorical pattern — the emotional closing call framed around the word tomorrow — would anchor his big-city campaigns for the next twenty years.

A note on what’s missing: the multi-week revivals at Decatur (1908), Cedar Rapids (1909), and Joplin (1909) collectively produced hundreds of sermons that the press summarized in numbers — 178 messages at Cedar Rapids alone — but rarely titled individually. Future digging in local Iowa and Missouri papers for those campaigns may surface a richer sermon catalog.

Source: data curated from contemporary newspaper coverage, Sunday family records, and the Wheaton archives, compiled in the Sunday Master Speaking List, 2026.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “Billy Sunday’s Revival Pulpit, 1902–1909.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 1, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/01/billy-sundays-revival-pulpit-1902-1909/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “Billy Sunday’s Revival Pulpit, 1902–1909.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 1 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/01/billy-sundays-revival-pulpit-1902-1909/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 1). Billy Sunday’s revival pulpit, 1902–1909. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/01/billy-sundays-revival-pulpit-1902-1909/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “Billy Sunday’s Revival Pulpit, 1902–1909.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 1, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/01/billy-sundays-revival-pulpit-1902-1909/.

What Billy Sunday Borrowed from Chapman — and What He Made His Own

When Billy Sunday stepped out on his own as an evangelist in 1896, he did not start from nothing. He started from a kit. Much of that kit had been handed to him by the man he had served as advance agent and understudy, the polished Presbyterian revivalist J. Wilbur Chapman. Sunday himself never hid this. The interesting question is not whether he borrowed — it is what he borrowed, how long he kept it, and what he eventually built in its place.

A close comparison of Sunday’s early preaching record against Chapman’s own published sermon portfolio lets us answer that question with something better than impression. The picture that emerges is not a story of a man trapped inside his mentor’s material. It is a story of an apprentice spending down an inheritance and, year by year, replacing it with a voice that was unmistakably his own.

The starting kit, 1895

In the years he was still working closest to Chapman, Sunday’s preaching looks the most borrowed. Several of his 1895 titles are not merely similar to Chapman’s — they are the same sermon. “Is It Well With Thee?” runs on the same text Chapman used. “How Shall We Escape?” matches Chapman title-for-title and verse-for-verse. The sermon on receiving the Holy Spirit lands on the same subject Chapman had already put into print.

The rest of 1895 is standard revival stock of the period — the familiar parables of the lost sheep, the publican and the Pharisee, Zaccheus, the laborers in the vineyard. This is not yet a body of original work. It reads like a young evangelist preaching the sermons he had heard his mentor preach, in the order he had learned them.

1896: the borrowed frame, the new flesh

The year Sunday went solo, his sermon list more than doubles. The reason is simple and human: a man running his own multi-week campaign suddenly needs enough material to fill it, and the cheapest place to find that material was the well he already knew. So the Chapman skeleton is still doing real work in 1896 — the surrendered-life sermon on Kadesh-Barnea, the cluster on the unpardonable sin, the sermon on Christ’s first converts, the warnings to backsliders, the “decide now, don’t wait until tomorrow” appeal.

But 1896 is also the year you can first hear the other Billy Sunday — the one the country would eventually pack tabernacles to see. Alongside the inherited sermons sit titles with no parallel anywhere in Chapman’s portfolio: a sermon against drink, a broadside against the “isms and cults,” and a pair of plain, muscular talks about effort and preparation. The frame is still Chapman’s. The flesh on it is starting to be Sunday’s.

1897: the gospel of judgment turns personal

By 1897 the balance has tipped. Only one clear Chapman carryover survives in the record, and the center of gravity has moved hard toward judgment, hell, and eternity — “After death, the judgment,” “There is a hell,” “Where will you spend eternity?” — together with a frontal attack on infidelity and loose living.

This is the emerging Sunday brand, and it is worth noting what it is not. It is not Chapman’s measured, doctrinal, teaching voice. Chapman the careful Presbyterian taught his hearers what a Christian is and what the gospel means. Sunday kept the part of Chapman that pressed for a decision and quietly dropped the part that paused to instruct. He kept the closer and let go of the teacher.

The Chautauqua years: Chapman all but disappears

Now jump ahead to Sunday on the Chautauqua circuit between 1901 and 1911 — the popular lecture platform where he spoke to general crowds rather than revival congregations. Here the transformation is nearly complete.

Across more than two dozen documented Chautauqua appearances, the old Chapman material has effectively vanished. In its place stands a repertoire that is entirely, recognizably Sunday’s: the baseball talk, the temperance assault under titles like “The Devil’s Boomerang” and “Get on the Water Wagon,” the skeptic-bashing of “Nuts for Skeptics to Crack,” and the brisk motivational lecture “Forces That Win.” Conversion-and-judgment preaching, the very heart of the revival sermons, almost never appears on this stage. The platform audience came for a performance and a point of view, not an altar call, and Sunday gave them exactly that.

And yet one thread runs all the way through. The single Chapman sermon still standing on the Chautauqua circuit is “How Shall We Escape?” — the same sermon that had been a word-for-word borrowing back in 1895. It is at once the strongest early borrowing and the lone survivor a half-decade later. Of everything Chapman handed him, essentially this one sermon endured. The rest he had outgrown.

What was actually his

So which sermons were truly Sunday’s own — the small original core he built on while the borrowed material fell away?

The most reliable test is not simply “absent from Chapman’s list.” It is durability: which non-Chapman subjects appeared early and survived into his independent, mature preaching. By that measure, three themes stand out, and all three are visible by 1896:

Drink. The early anti-saloon sermon becomes the most-repeated subject of his Chautauqua years. If any single theme is the signature of the independent Billy Sunday, this is it.
Skepticism and infidelity. The early swipe at “isms and cults” hardens into a recurring, crowd-pleasing attack on doubt and unbelief.
Effort and will. The plain talks on having a mind to work and on need, opportunity, and preparation point straight ahead to “Forces That Win.”

These are the sermons that were his, because these are the ones he kept when he no longer had to lean on anyone. The borrowed gospel of judgment got him started; this original core is what he became.

A note on the work behind this

This comparison rests on a sermon-by-sermon crosswalk of Sunday’s documented early titles against Chapman’s published portfolio, sorted into tiers — word-for-word borrowings, shared subjects, looser thematic echoes, and sermons original to Sunday. The early record (1895–1897) and the Chautauqua window (1901–1911) are well represented. The crusade years in between are still being reconstructed, and as that record fills in, parts of this picture may sharpen or shift. But the overall shape is already clear: Billy Sunday left his mentor carrying a borrowed kit, drew on it hardest in his first solo year, and over the following decade made himself almost entirely into his own creation.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “What Billy Sunday Borrowed from Chapman, and What He Made His Own.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), May 30, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/30/what-billy-sunday-borrowed-from-chapman-and-what-he-made-his-own/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “What Billy Sunday Borrowed from Chapman, and What He Made His Own.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 30 May 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/30/what-billy-sunday-borrowed-from-chapman-and-what-he-made-his-own/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, May 30). What Billy Sunday borrowed from Chapman, and what he made his own. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/30/what-billy-sunday-borrowed-from-chapman-and-what-he-made-his-own/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “What Billy Sunday Borrowed from Chapman, and What He Made His Own.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). May 30, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/30/what-billy-sunday-borrowed-from-chapman-and-what-he-made-his-own/.

When Billy Sunday Joined Sam Jones: The Fonda Revival of June 1897

For years the standard accounts have told us that Billy Sunday and Sam Jones never actually worked together. The biographers grant that Jones influenced Sunday — the coarse humor, the slang, the theatrical pulpit manner — but they stop there. Jones is treated as a stylistic ancestor Sunday admired from a distance, not a man he ever shared a platform with.

The record says otherwise. In June 1897, in the small town of Fonda, Iowa, Billy Sunday joined Sam Jones for a joint revival that ran at least ten days. It is the earliest documented collaboration between the two evangelists, and it deserves a place in any serious telling of Sunday’s early years.

The departure from Lincoln

The story opens not in Fonda but at a railroad platform. On June 18, 1897, Sunday and his co-worker French Earl Oliver left Lincoln, Nebraska, bound for Fonda to join Sam Jones. A newspaper account of the send-off captured the scene in a single, telling sentence:

“As many people were down to see him leave as witnessed the departure of the Bryan train for Chicago prior to the democratic convention.”

Sit with that comparison for a moment. The reporter is measuring Sunday’s farewell crowd against the throng that saw William Jennings Bryan off to the 1896 Democratic National Convention — the journey that produced the “Cross of Gold” speech and Bryan’s nomination. In the tri-state corner around Sioux City and eastern Nebraska, Bryan was a regional hero, and his departure was a public event. To put Sunday’s crowd “on the order of” Bryan’s is to say that a man barely a year into his solo evangelism was already a genuine draw, well before the big-city tabernacle campaigns the histories love to dwell on.

A campaign, not a guest sermon

From Lincoln, Sunday and Oliver traveled to Fonda — roughly ninety miles east of Sioux City, in Pocahontas County — to meet Jones. The Sioux City Journal of June 19, 1897 (page 6) reports the meeting beginning, and the record shows Sunday still preaching there as of June 27. That gives us a documented floor of about ten days, and the campaign may well have run longer.

The length matters. This was not a one-off where Sunday gave a single talk and moved on. It was a sustained, multi-day revival — a full campaign shared by two evangelists, one a rising unknown working the Iowa “kerosene circuit,” the other a national headliner. For a week and a half, Sunday was in the same services, on the same platform, as Sam Jones, at the exact moment he was still forming his own identity as a preacher.

French Earl Oliver belongs in this picture too. He was a recurring co-worker of Sunday’s in these years — documented again at Stuart in 1898 and Elliott in 1900 — and at Fonda he made three figures of real significance sharing one revival: the future giant of American evangelism, his steady early collaborator, and the southern preacher whose style the whole country was talking about.

Why this changes the story

Here is the part that should interest anyone who has read the Jones literature. Kathleen Minnix, in her scholarly biography Laughter in the Amen Corner, names Jones as a key influence on Sunday and a generation of evangelists. But that claim, as biographers usually make it, rests on resemblance: the two men preached alike, Sunday came afterward, therefore Jones must have shaped him. It is a reasonable inference — and it is circumstantial. What it has generally lacked is a documented occasion of contact.

Fonda supplies exactly that. We no longer have to argue the influence from style alone. We have ten days of shared ministry in June 1897, at the precise window when Sunday’s mature methods were taking shape.

And the contemporaries were already drawing the connection. Even before Fonda, papers were comparing the two men directly — a February 1897 notice out of Tecumseh described Sunday’s preaching as “similar to the Rev. Sam Jones.” So the Fonda revival does double duty in the historical record. It is a personal-collaboration milestone, the first time we can place the two men working side by side. And it is a stylistic-genealogy marker, hard documentary evidence behind a connection that observers were making in print at the time and that scholars have asserted ever since.

The lesson in the archive

None of this survives in the major biographies. They compress Sunday’s 1896–1908 circuit years into a sentence or two and hurry on to New York and Philadelphia. A ten-day joint revival with Sam Jones — the kind of event that would anchor a chapter — slips out of the published record entirely, even though a local paper documented it in detail the morning after.

That is the quiet argument of this blog, and Fonda makes it as well as anything I have found: the real texture of Billy Sunday’s early ministry lives in the regional newspapers, one notice at a time. The biographers gave us “Jones influenced Sunday.” The Sioux City Journal gave us the week and a half they spent preaching together.

Primary source: Sioux City Journal, June 19, 1897, p. 6. Lincoln departure account, June 1897. Additional Oliver documentation: Stuart (1898), Elliott (1900).

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “When Billy Sunday Joined Sam Jones: The Fonda Revival of June 1897.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), May 29, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/29/when-billy-sunday-joined-sam-jones-the-fonda-revival-of-june-1897/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “When Billy Sunday Joined Sam Jones: The Fonda Revival of June 1897.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 29 May 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/29/when-billy-sunday-joined-sam-jones-the-fonda-revival-of-june-1897/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, May 29). When Billy Sunday joined Sam Jones: The Fonda revival of June 1897. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/29/when-billy-sunday-joined-sam-jones-the-fonda-revival-of-june-1897/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “When Billy Sunday Joined Sam Jones: The Fonda Revival of June 1897.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). May 29, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/29/when-billy-sunday-joined-sam-jones-the-fonda-revival-of-june-1897/.