The Stadium Era, and What Came After It

The modern shape of the evangelist grew out of successive waves of Protestant revival: the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, associated with preachers such as George Whitefield, credited with popularising open air preaching to crowds far larger than any church building could hold, and the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, whose camp meetings and professionalised revival techniques under figures like Charles Finney set the template later evangelists refined.

Radio and then television gave the office a reach earlier revivalists could not have imagined, and the mid to late twentieth century produced both the stadium crusades of Billy Graham, whose events drew millions over decades, and a series of televised ministries whose financial and personal scandals in the 1980s did lasting damage to public trust in the title, particularly in the United States. Stadium-scale crusade evangelism has declined sharply in North America and Europe since, while the office continues to grow in parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia, where large open-air and televised campaigns remain a significant feature of expanding Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, often led by evangelists whose reach now runs through satellite television and social media rather than a physical crusade.