Francis Gladden Bishop Receives Vision During the Finney Revivals

In 1825, sixteen-year-old Francis Gladden Bishop of Greece, Monroe County, New York, was living amid one of the most intense periods of religious excitement in American history. Evangelist Charles Grandison Finney's revivals were sweeping across western New York in what would later be called the 'Burned-Over District'—a region so repeatedly scorched by the fires of revival that it seemed to smolder with spiritual longing. Young Francis, born into a devout Methodist home, attended one of Finney's electrifying meetings and was deeply stirred. His mother, Mary Hyde Bishop, had prophesied before his birth that she would bear a son who would 'gladden the hearts of the people,' and this spiritual heritage seemed woven into his very name. During this period of intense prayer and seeking, Francis received a powerful vision—a divine communication that convinced him that the Christianity of his day was incomplete and that God had something more in store for the world. This vision planted within him a deep hunger for spiritual truth, a hunger that seven years later would lead him to embrace the restored gospel when LDS missionaries arrived in New York in 1832. His willingness to follow the promptings of that early vision exemplified the spiritual seeking that characterized many of the earliest converts to the Church in the remarkable Burned-Over District of New York.

Recording note: No verbatim first-person text of this 1825 vision survives in a public archival source. Bishop's early religious experiences are documented in Richard LaVell Saunders's master's thesis, “Francis Gladden Bishop and Gladdenism” (Utah State University, 1989), and in the Church History Biographical Database. Bishop, a Monroe County, New York, youth of sixteen during the Finney revivals, later joined the Latter-day Saints, was ordained a bishop, and eventually led a small dissident movement.