James McGready was born in western Pennsylvania of Scotch-Irish parents. In his early childhood they moved South and he spent the greater part of his boyhood in Guilford County, North Carolina. There was a quality about him as a youth which convinced a visiting uncle that he ought to be educated for the Christian ministry. Accordingly he accompanied his uncle to Pennsylvania to prepare for the work of a preacher.
McGready began his study in the autumn of 1785 in a Latin school conducted by Rev. Joseph Smith at Upper Buffalo, Pennsylvania, and completed his literary and theological education at Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, under Rev. John McMillan, and on August 13, 1788, was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Redstone, Pennsylvania. Soon he decided to move to North Carolina, and on the way spent some deeply significant days at Hampden-Sidney College in Virginia, with Dr. John Blair Smith, who at the time was the leading spirit in a great revival of religion.
McGready was first deeply impressed with the value of evangelistic preaching and felt the kindling of revival zeal in himself. Settling in North Carolina, he preached with such effect that he soon brought about a religious awakening "in which ten or twelve young men were brought into the fold, all of whom became ministers of the gospel". One of these was Barton W. Stone. About 1790, McGready became pastor of a church in Orange County. Possessed of great physical stamina and a voice which won for him the title Boanerges, he was so vehement in his denunciation of sin and hypocrisy that the community was divided into two factions: his ardent supporters and his blood-thirsty enemies. "A letter was written to him in blood, requiring him to leave the country at the peril of his life". Partly because of this hostility and partly for the sake of following the migration of his North Carolina converts, he went to Kentucky in 1796, and there took charge of the three small congregations of Gaspar, Red, and Muddy rivers in Logan County. Here he soon induced his people to sign the following covenant: "We bind ourselves to observe the third Saturday of each month, for one year, as a day of fasting and prayer for the conversion of sinners in Logan County and throughout the world. We also engage to spend one half hour every Saturday evening, beginning at the setting of the sun and one half hour every Sabbath morning from the rising of the sun, pleading with God to revive his work". With this covenant as a background, at each of McGready's three churches, in connection with sacramental services, remarkable revivals broke out in 1797, 1798, and 1799.
These were the forerunners of the Great Revival of 1800. Although many were converted during these three preceding years, yet all that work, McGready wrote later, was "but like a few scattering drops before a mighty rain, when compared with the overflowing floods of salvation poured out like a mighty river" in the year 1800. Beginning in Logan County, Kentucky, the revival swept over the western and southern states, affecting all the denominations on the frontier. It was marked by the highest degree of religious excitement, accompanied by violent physical demonstrations, trances, and visions. In connection with it the camp meeting originated, families coming to meeting places in wagons from miles around and camping out together for several days as they took part in the revival exercises. McGready wrote "A Short Narrative of the Revival of Religion in Logan County in the State of Kentucky, and the Adjacent Settlements in the State of Tennessee, from May 1797 until September 1800, " which was published serially, February June 1803, in the New-York Missionary Magazine. One of the consequences of the Great Revival was the organization of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which separated from the older Presbyterian body on two issues: the denial that a classical education is prerequisite to ministerial ordination, and renunciation of the fatalism in the Westminster standards. McGready allied himself with the Cumberland Presbytery in its policy regarding licensing preachers who do not have classical training, but finally (1809) refused to go with them in their renunciation of the strict Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. After a period of discipline and silence he was restored to the orthodox Transylvania Presbytery. In 1811, he was sent as a pioneer preacher to found churches in southern Indiana. In the fall of 1816, at a camp meeting near Evansville, Indiana, he preached with such effectiveness that he exclaimed, "I this day feel the same holy fire that filled my soul sixteen years ago, during the glorious revival of 1800". Just a few months later, February 1817, he died at his home in Henderson County, Kentucky.
A number of years after his death there appeared The Posthumous Works of the Reverend and Pious M'Gready, edited by James Smith.
According to his biographer, Beard (post), he was married about 1790, but the name of his wife is not recorded.
