DWIGHT L

DWIGHT L. MOODY

Shoe Salesman for God

As a youth, Dwight Moody’s ambition was to get rich. Born February 5, 1837, in Northfield, Massachusetts, he left home at age seventeen to work for his uncle in Boston as a shoe salesman. Dwight was a natural salesman, and at age twenty landed a job in Chicago with C. E. Wisell, the shoe tycoon.

But young Dwight also had a heart for the kids in Chicago’s slums. He helped organize a Sunday school, which eventually grew into the Illinois Street Independent Church. After a few years he gave up selling shoes entirely, because "selling kids on God" was much more exciting.

The Young Man’s Christian Association (YMCA) appointed Dwight Moody as a missionary. In 1867, while Moody was speaking at YMCAs in England, Rev. Henry Varley challenged Moody with these words: "The world has yet to see what God can do with one man wholly dedicated to Him." These words so inspired Moody that he vowed to become that man.

In 1870, at a YMCA International Convention, he heard a hymn singer with an impressive voice. He invited Ira Sankey to join him as music director; for the next two decades "Moody and Sankey" became linked as a world famous evangelistic team.

On October 8, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed Moody’s home, the YMCA, and the Illinois Street Church. But Moody saw the destruction of his work in Chicago as an opportunity to plunge more fully into evangelistic work, and the era of the great evangelistic campaigns was launched.

Even though Moody had little education himself, he established Northfield Seminary for Girls and Mount Herman School for Boys in Massachusetts, and helped establish a Bible school for lay men and women in Chicago. Only after Moody’s death was it renamed the Moody Bible Institute.

Just before the turn of the century, his weak heart forced him to cut an evangelistic trip short. Only sixty-two, he died December 22, 1899, at his home in Northfield, where he is buried.