CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A CAUSE FOR OPTIMISM: INSIDE AMERICA’S FIRST GREAT AWAKENING
The outlook may be bleak, but I don’t believe it is hopeless. The U.S. is in dire straits, but we have not yet imploded.
Yes, the American business community is plagued by failure and bankruptcy, but there are glimmers of hope; we do see some true innovators and creative geniuses out there creating new industries and trying to revive old ones, and more are struggling to rise. Yes, the American political community is awash with corruption and ineptitude, but we also see notable exceptions; there actually are some political leaders out there—and more are emerging—who are holding fast to the Constitution and are willing to stand on the principles upon which this great country was founded, rather than selling out and giving up. Yes, the American church has been far too weak and ineffectual for far too long and thus seemingly irrelevant to helping Americans cope with—much less fix—the multiple crises we face. But not all is lost; some Americans are beginning to wake up to their need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and some pastors and congregations are actually becoming more faithful to the Word of God and shining even more brightly, as lighthouses in a dark and troubled land. May their tribes increase.
It is critical that we as a nation seriously consider, understand, accept, and then discuss with our fellow Americans just how precarious our situation really is. We must not put our heads in the sand. Rather, we need to honestly confront the grave challenges before us. We must not allow ourselves to become paralyzed by fear or consumed by the thought that our fate is sealed and there are no steps we can take to turn this ship of state around and get it back on the right course.
The central question we now face is this: Will God in his mercy unleash a dramatic period of sweeping spiritual revival and moral renewal and reform that will fundamentally transform our nation and help us get back on the right track before it’s too late?
While it is by no means guaranteed, I believe such a dramatic revival is possible. The prophet Habakkuk once prayed, “O LORD, revive Your work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make it known; in wrath remember mercy” (Habakkuk 3:2). If the Hebrew prophet chose to pray for revival, we should too.
The good news is that twice before in American history we have experienced periods of broad, deep national revival. In fact, these movements were so game-changing that both secular and Christian historians were compelled to call them the “Great Awakening” and the “Second Great Awakening.” Unfortunately, few Americans know the history of the two spiritual revivals that swept this land in the early- to mid-1700s (pre–Revolutionary War) and in the early- to mid-1800s (pre–Civil War). I certainly don’t recall learning much of this history growing up. My parents didn’t talk about it, as they hadn’t been taught about it, and I don’t recall learning any of this at church or in the public schools I attended.
I first began developing an interest in America’s Great Awakenings while I was working as an advisor to Steve Forbes. As I set out to write this book, however, I decided to undertake a closer look at how God moved so powerfully to save our country in the past. I was absolutely fascinated and deeply encouraged by what I read. And as a result, I contend that it would be very valuable for all of us to review a bit of that history and then ask whether another such awakening could happen again.
The First Great Awakening (1700–1760s)
Let’s begin with some context. Many of the pilgrims who came to this continent in the 1600s and 1700s were strong followers of Jesus Christ, eager to experience religious freedom from the state-run churches of Great Britain and the European continent and to build vibrant faith communities in the New World. But by no means were all those who came faithful believers. Some were businessmen, soldiers, government officials, bureaucrats, and tradesmen who came with little or no religious heritage or faith. These came to work, not to advance the Kingdom of God. Some who arrived here were convicts sent essentially to provide slave labor until others from Africa and the Caribbean were cruelly captured and enslaved and brought to the New World. In time, therefore, the British colonies became a hodgepodge of different religious beliefs.
Unfortunately, while there were some boldly evangelistic ministers and laypeople in the colonies, most believers who were here did little to preach the gospel or make disciples capable of spiritual reproduction—that is, making other disciples who could and would make still more disciples. In other words, the Christians who came to the colonies tended to remain in their churches and in their pews and made little spiritual impact on those around them.
To be sure, they faced enormous challenges. They were battling the exhaustion of building a new society from scratch. They faced disease and the death of many of their family members, friends, and loved ones. They often struggled against harsh weather conditions. They also faced political oppression from the British and skirmishes with the Native Americans (whom they called Indians). However, rather than see these as opportunities to boldly share the life-changing message of the gospel with the rest of the colonists, most believers instead retreated into the safety of their families and tight-knit communities.
Yet this inward and almost-isolationist approach by the believers had unintended consequences. By the late 1600s, various ministers throughout the colonies had begun to despair of the moral and spiritual condition of the people and the rising apathy toward the things of God. So they began preaching of the need for a purification of the church and a revival of interest in hearing and obeying the Word of God. They also began praying more diligently for God to do something that the pastors couldn’t do on their own: turn increasingly sluggish and secular hearts and minds toward Christ.
To these ministers’ horror, however, events in the colonies took a terrible turn for the worse, not the better. There came a sudden, furious, and devastating war with the Indians, which became known as King Philip’s War—referring to Metacomet, the leader of the Native American forces, who was known to the British colonists as King Philip. Not many Americans today know much about it. Indeed, few have ever even heard of it. Yet it was this brutal conflict that helped shake the foundations of colonial American life to its core and set into motion a chain of events that would lead to an astounding outpouring of God’s amazing grace.
Historian Jill Lepore, in her award-winning book The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origin of American Identity, described the conflict:
In 1675, Algonquian Indians all over southern New England rose up against the Puritan colonists with whom they had lived peacefully for several decades. The result was the bloodiest war in American history, a terrifying conflict in which the Puritans found themselves fighting with a cruelty they had thought only the natives were capable of. . . . In proportion to population, their short, vicious war inflicted greater casualties than any other war in American history. . . . By August 1676, when the severed head of the Wampanoag leader, King Philip, was displayed in Plymouth, thousands of Indian and English men, women, and children were dead. More than half of the new towns in New England had been wiped out, and the settlers’ sense of themselves as civilized people of God had been deeply shaken.[336]
“The mood in New England following King Philip’s War (1675-76) was bleak and raw,” noted historian Thomas S. Kidd in his intriguing book The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. Kidd wrote of two pastors from the Northeast who thought it increasingly obvious that “we are a people in extream [sic] danger of perishing, in our own sins and under Gods Judgements [sic].” Moreover, the pastors feared that “‘all ordinary means’ of promoting moral reformation had failed,” causing them to ask themselves whether “our degeneracy and apostasy may not prove . . . perpetual.”[337]
Desperate for the Lord’s grace and mercy, a growing number of Protestant ministers began devoting themselves to prayer and fasting for a revival in the colonies. A growing number of laypeople began to pray for widespread revival as well. They asked God to have mercy on them and their neighbors and countrymen, and they patiently waited for the Lord to show his powerful hand. Yet what then began to unfold starting around 1700, building through the 1740s and lasting well into the 1760s, was more than even the most faithful prayer warriors had hoped for, dreamed of, or imagined. For suddenly there emerged two new dynamics.
• First, there entered into the drama preachers who proclaimed the gospel and taught the Scriptures with great care, passion, and conviction—and with a supernatural power few had seen or heard from their ministers before.
• The leaders of the Great Awakening—preachers like the American-born Jonathan Edwards and British-born missionaries such as George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Charles Wesley—tended to be well-educated men who had attended universities such as Yale and Oxford and were trained theologians. Yet they didn’t allow their higher learning to create an intellectualism or an elitism about the Bible that would make it difficult for laypeople to understand them. They carefully studied the Scriptures. They were empowered by the Holy Spirit. They had demonstrable spiritual gifts of teaching, preaching, and evangelism. And they believed that the Word of God—not they personally—had the power to save souls, change lives, and alter nations.
• Second, there emerged in this drama millions of people who wanted to hear the gospel preached with great passion and conviction. These people realized that their hearts were full of sin and that they needed to repent and get right with God. A revival cannot take place if there is no one to preach the Word with God’s power. But nor can it take place if no one will listen to God’s Word and be transformed by it.
By the grace of God, there emerged in America at that time a historic convergence of preachers and hearers, and no one in the New World had ever seen such dramatic results.
The Rise of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)
Few men were more instrumental in the First Great Awakening than Jonathan Edwards. Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703, into a family of well-educated and well-respected pastors and theologians. Edwards’s father was a pastor, and his mother’s father was the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, a famous pastor who shepherded the nation’s largest and most influential church, in Northampton, Massachusetts, about eighty miles from Boston, and who saw God bring a series of small revivals to his congregation that foreshadowed the revivals to come.[338] Eventually, Edwards married Sarah Pierpont, the daughter of James Pierpont, a pastor and theologian who was the founder of Yale University.
Edwards himself was a brilliant young man. He graduated from high school at the age of thirteen and was immediately accepted to Yale. Four years later, in 1720, he graduated as the valedictorian of his class. After continuing his theological studies at Yale, he became an assistant pastor and understudy to his grandfather Stoddard. But it is unlikely that Edwards understood exactly what the Lord was going to teach him next.
“On Sunday evening, October 29 [1727], a terrible earthquake shook the homes of New Englanders, awakening many both physically and spiritually,” one historian noted. “This was followed by a long series of aftershocks, which kept the threat fresh in the minds of penitents. Immediately churches filled with seekers anxious to secure their salvation, lest they be caught unprepared for their own death.”[339] Remarked one layperson who survived the earthquake, “God has by the late amazing Earth-quake layd open my neglect before me that I see no way to escape. But by fleeing to Christ for refuge. God in that hour Set all my Sins before me. When I was Shaking over the pit looking every moment when the earth would open her mouth and Swallow me up and then must I have been miserable for ever & for ever.”[340] In towns throughout Massachusetts, churches continued to fill as people repented and gave their hearts to Christ.
The Lord used Reverend Stoddard to minister to people powerfully during this time, and his grandson was at his side to assist him. And three years before Stoddard went home to be with the Lord in 1729, the twenty-six-year-old Jonathan Edwards became senior pastor of Stoddard’s church.
Though relatively young and inexperienced, Edwards could see God was shaking his town and his community, both literally and spiritually. He could see the hunger people had to find forgiveness and redemption and to grow closer to Christ. Most importantly, he firmly believed the Scriptures spoke clearly of God’s ability and desire to save many souls and reverse a nation’s drifting from the Lord. He believed God’s words from 2 Chronicles 7:14, when the Lord declared, “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land” (NIV). Edwards understood the similarities between what was going on around him and the spiritual revivals that occurred in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, when the entire nation of Israel listened to the Word of God and repented of their sins. So Edwards began to pray that God would use him to effect great change, and he began to preach with the faith that the Lord would hear and answer his prayer.
The Impact of Jonathan Edwards
Beginning in 1734, Edwards saw God move even more powerfully in his congregation and community. During a short period of time, several people died in a way that rattled observers to the core. One young man whom Edwards described as being “in the bloom of his youth” was unexpectedly stricken with pleurisy (an inflammation in the chest cavity), experienced intense pain, was delirious for two days, and then was gone.[341] Then a young married woman unexpectedly developed a terrible illness and passed away. “This was followed with the death of an elderly person, which was attended with many unusual circumstances,” Edwards recalled. The tragic deaths reminded people of their own mortality and focused them on the prospect of spending eternity either in heaven or in hell. Five or six people suddenly came to the church and converted, Edwards observed. Then a well-known immoral woman came to the church and was saved, and something dramatic began to happen.
Concerning this conversion, Edwards would later write:
The news of it seemed to be almost like a flash of lightning, upon the hearts of young people, all over the town, and upon many others. Those persons amongst us, who used to be farthest from seriousness, and that I most feared would make an ill improvement of it, seemed to be awakened with it. Many went to talk with her, concerning what she had met with; and what appeared in her seemed to be to the satisfaction of all that did so.
Presently upon this, a great and earnest concern about the great things of religion and the eternal world, became universal in all parts of the town, and among persons of all degrees, and all ages. . . . Other discourse than of the things of religion would scarcely be tolerated in any company. The minds of people were wonderfully taken off from the world, it was treated amongst us as a thing of very little consequence.[342]
A revival in Northampton was under way.
Edwards described the events taking place in his community as nothing short of miraculous. He wrote:
The work of conversion was carried on in a most astonishing manner, and increased more and more; souls did as it were come by flocks to Jesus Christ. . . . The number of true saints multiplied, soon made a glorious alteration in the town: so that in the spring and summer following, anno 1735, the town seemed to be full of the presence of God: it never was so full of love, nor of joy, and yet so full of distress, as it was then. . . . It was a time of joy in families on account of salvation being brought to them; parents rejoicing over their children as new born, and husbands over their wives, and wives over their husbands. The doings of God were then seen in His sanctuary, God’s day was a delight, and His tabernacles were amiable. Our public assemblies were then beautiful: the congregation was alive in God’s service, every one earnestly intent on the public worship, every hearer eager to drink in the words of the minister as they came from his mouth; the assembly in general were, from time to time, in tears while the word was preached; some weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors.[343]
Edwards called what he was witnessing “a shower of divine blessing.”[344] Indeed, to me these accounts of the early days of the revival read like the exciting and supernatural events of Acts 2, when God poured out his Holy Spirit and created the church in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost.
In 1738, Edwards published a powerful tract titled A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. He described what God had just done, why he believed God had done it, and how Edwards and his congregation had responded to this outpouring of the Holy Spirit. He wrote about how people had begun fasting and praying for the lost and how young people had begun to share the gospel with their friends and neighbors and with complete strangers.
In a world without radio, television, or the Internet, the well-written tract caught people’s imagination and spread like wildfire. Copies were quickly snapped up, devoured, and shared with others, even as more were being printed. As other ministers and laypeople throughout Massachusetts and the other colonies heard of the revival and read Edwards’s pamphlet, many began to beseech the Lord to do in their churches and communities what he had done in Northampton.
And the Lord answered their prayers. The revival soon spread through thirty-two communities near Boston, then throughout New England and the rest of the colonies. Edwards’s tract was published in London and spread widely through Great Britain, Scotland, and Wales, where pastors and laypeople were enthralled and began praying and preaching for revivals in their nations as well.
In the years that followed, Edwards went on to plant other church congregations, serve as a missionary to Native Americans, and preach the gospel in congregations throughout New England (including his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1741).[345]
But arguably his most lasting impact was through his published works. He produced a series of highly influential publications to help others develop sound biblical theology and further the revival. These included The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (published in 1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (published in 1742), and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (published in 1746). Each of these was used by God to shape Christian thinking in Edwards’s day. In 1758, Edwards accepted the position of president at the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University). The school was founded in 1746 by four pastors specifically for the purpose of “educating Ministers of the Gospel” as well as to be “useful in other learned professions—ornaments of the State as well as the Church.”[346] Edwards was increasingly determined to train future pastors, theologians, and Christ-centered laypeople. He felt that by strengthening and revitalizing the college, he could advance the Kingdom of Christ even further. Sadly, he died of complications from a smallpox vaccination only a few months after accepting the post.
Despite his strong faith in Christ and love of the Scriptures, Edwards was by no means a perfect man. Among his flaws was the fact that he could occasionally have an explosive temper. He also, unfortunately, like many men of his day, was a slave owner. In time, however, “he came to oppose the slave trade as an impediment to spreading the gospel in Africa, thereby providing a basis for the abolitionism espoused by his son Jonathan Jr. and disciples such as Samuel Hopkins.”[347]
God used Edwards despite his flaws, and fortunately the remarkable positive legacy of Jonathan Edwards did not end with his death. In many ways his impact had only begun to be felt throughout the young and growing country. Edwards and his beloved wife, Sarah, had eleven children together, eight daughters and three sons. Ten of their children lived to adulthood, and the Edwardses invested heavily in them all, making certain they were well educated (including the girls), teaching them the Scriptures, praying with them, playing with them, and preparing them to make a difference for Christ in the world. They succeeded beyond their parents’ wildest dreams.
In 1900, a reporter by the name of A. E. Winship conducted a study of what had become of the 1,400 descendants of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards. “He found they included thirteen college presidents, sixty-five professors, one hundred lawyers and a dean of a law school, thirty judges, sixty-six physicians and a dean of a medical school, and eighty holders of public office, including three U.S. senators, mayors of three large cities, governors of three states, a vice president of the United States, and a controller of the United States treasury. They had written over 135 books and edited 18 journals and periodicals. Many had entered the ministry. Over one hundred were missionaries and others were on missions boards.”[348]
The Rise of George Whitefield (1714–1770)
Another incredibly influential figure in the First Great Awakening was George Whitefield[349], a passionate preacher of the gospel and missionary to the American colonies.
Born in 1714 in Gloucester, England, Whitefield was one of seven children. When he was only two years old, his father died, leaving his mother a grieving, struggling widow who would not remarry for another eight years. But George grew into a brilliant young man, and he was determined to make something of himself. He studied hard and eventually attended and graduated from Oxford University. It was there that he met two young men whom God would use to change his life, John Wesley (1703–1791) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788), who eventually became world-famous gospel preachers, teachers, and songwriters, went on to found the Methodist church, and were key figures in revivals going on in England and in the American colonies.
At Oxford, however, the young Whitefield was only beginning his spiritual journeys. Though he had been raised in the church, he was only now taking his quest for God more seriously. It was Charles Wesley who invited Whitefield to get involved in a men’s Bible study and prayer group that Wesley led with his older brother John. The group was derided by fellow students as the “Holy Club,” but the Wesleys liked the name and embraced it; Whitefield embraced it as well. Early on, the group consisted of just eight or nine men. At its peak, about two dozen men participated. But few realized then the spiritual revolution that was going to emerge from their midst.
The group resolved to resist what they saw as their fellow students’ lives of luxury and waste of time and money. The members of the Holy Club fasted two days a week. They took Communion together. They devoted themselves to caring for the poor. They ministered to prisoners. And all the while they kept rigorous schedules and sought to keep each other accountable to maintaining strict, disciplined, and austere lives. The young men were well meaning, to be sure, but there was a problem: they were trying to earn God’s favor through their good works rather than accepting the free gift of God’s forgiveness and peace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.
Whitefield would become the first to discover his mistake—that while newly religious, he didn’t actually have a personal relationship with Christ—and radically change course.
One day, Whitefield asked Charles Wesley for a list of books to read and began to devour them one by one. His favorite was written in 1677 by a Scottish theologian named Henry Scougal, titled The Life of God in the Soul of Man. The work had a profound, life-changing impact on Whitefield. “God showed me that I must be born again, or be damned!” he would later write. “I learned that a man may go to church, say prayers, receive the sacrament, and yet not be a Christian.” Whitefield was startled, even offended. “Shall I burn this book? Shall I throw it down? Or shall I search it?” he wondered. “I did search it, and holding the book in my hand I thus addressed the God of heaven and earth: ‘Lord, if I am not a Christian, or if not a real one, for Jesus Christ’s sake show me what Christianity is, that I may not be damned at last!’ God soon showed me, for in reading a few lines further, that ‘true Christianity is a union of the soul with God, and Christ formed within us,’ a ray of divine light was instantaneously darted into my soul, and from that moment, and not till then, did I know I must become a new creature.”[350]
Such radical new thoughts troubled Whitefield at first. He embarked on a course of deep soul-searching as he completely rethought his understanding of Christianity, his involvement in the Holy Club (which he would leave for a time), and his place in the world. Whitefield bought a Greek copy of the New Testament and began studying it, reading it whenever and wherever he could. As he did, God began to open the young scholar’s eyes, ears, and heart to the truths in his Word of what it means to be born again. He learned how a man can—and must—be saved and be adopted into God’s family not through being religious but through receiving the free gift of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. And then one day in 1735, it was as though the clouds over the young man parted. The gospel suddenly made sense, and Whitefield—at the age of twenty—got down on his knees and said “Yes!” to Christ. “God was pleased to remove the heavy load, to enable me to lay hold of his dear Son by a living faith, and by giving me the Spirit of adoption, to seal me, even to the day of everlasting redemption,” Whitefield later wrote. “O . . . what joy—joy unspeakable—even joy that was full of and big with glory!”[351]
Whitefield began to wake at five each morning for prayer and Bible study in both Greek and English, praying over every word and line. “I began to read the Holy Scriptures upon my knees,” he recalled. “This proved meat indeed and drink indeed to my soul. I daily received fresh life, light, and power from above. . . . Oh, what sweet communion had I daily.”[352]
Whitefield immediately started sharing his faith in Christ with others and was excited when “God made [him] instrumental to awaken several young people.”[353] By the following year, he had completed his schooling, become an ordained Anglican minister, and preached his first sermon. He found it exhilarating. He had found his life’s calling, and he continued preaching as opportunities presented themselves. He also served for a while as a missionary in what eventually became the American state of Georgia, where in addition to preaching, he helped start an orphanage.
But it was after Whitefield’s return to England that the Lord’s favor truly came upon him. The young Christian was soon preaching the life-changing gospel message with more conviction and power than anyone in the U.K. had ever seen before. Churches were packed wherever he spoke, and people were getting saved. The problem was that many of the Anglican clergymen Whitefield encountered were not born again themselves and were cold to his series of messages, which he called “The New Birth,” based on John 3. Before long, Whitefield found himself banned from one pulpit after another and under severe criticism from the religious establishment.
Yet it was at precisely this time that God gave Whitefield a radical idea: What if he preached the gospel to the lost in the open air—in fields, factory yards, and town squares? Whitefield had heard of a layman named Howell Harris who was preaching in homes and at outdoor events in Wales. He’d even corresponded with Harris and had been encouraged by Harris’s passion for Christ and by the results he was seeing. So on a cold February day, Whitefield simply couldn’t wait any longer. He headed to a coal-mining district near the city of Bristol, called several hundred miners and their families together, and began preaching the gospel to them. Today, this might not seem so remarkable. Today, we know the stories of evangelists such as D. L. Moody and Billy Graham preaching outside of church walls. In the 1700s, however, this was considered by the Anglican hierarchy as outright religious fanaticism. But Whitefield didn’t care. He kept preaching, and he saw people praying to receive Christ and developing a hunger for God’s Word.
“Blessed be God!” he later wrote. “I have broken the ice. I believe I was never more acceptable to my Master than when I was standing to teach those hearers in the open fields. Some may censure me, but if I thus pleased men I should not be the servant of Christ.”[354]
Interest in Whitefield and his message began to grow. Soon he was preaching thirty outdoor meetings a week around Bristol, then in towns and cities throughout England. Three months after that first experiment, he was preaching daily to crowds in London ranging from ten thousand to fifteen thousand. Not long after that, he preached to a gathering of some eighty thousand people.
Word about Whitefield was already spreading across the Atlantic. Pastors throughout New England, then the Mid-Atlantic colonies, and then the South wanted Whitefield to come and preach in their pulpits. They had read Jonathan Edwards’s pamphlet on revival. Now they were hearing about an evangelist who seemed to have the hand of God upon him. What if God could use Whitefield to bring revival to their communities?
Sensing God’s call to revisit the colonies, Whitefield set sail and reached America on October 30, 1739. He immediately went to Philadelphia and preached in churches that were packed to overflowing. He also spoke in New York, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. He was frequently forced to add extra meetings and then outdoor gatherings to accommodate all the people interested in hearing the Word of God taught with more passion and strength than they had ever heard it before.
In November, Whitefield wrote to Jonathan Edwards, asking the well-known reverend if Whitefield could visit the site of the famous revival in Northampton.[355] Edwards seized the opportunity to meet this kindred spirit. He immediately wrote back to welcome Whitefield, offering him the opportunity not just to visit but to preach in his town and also in Boston and the surrounding areas. Edwards also learned that the governor of Massachusetts wanted to hear Whitefield as well.
The impact was stunning. Whitefield spoke to students and faculty at Harvard and saw many pray to receive Christ. He spent four days in Northampton, preaching, teaching, and comparing notes with Edwards about what they were seeing God do to bring revival to the colonies. And the crowds just kept growing.
“When he preached in New England during the fall of 1740, Whitefield addressed crowds of up to 8,000 people nearly every day for over a month,” noted one historian, describing that evangelistic tour as “one of the most remarkable episodes in the whole history of American Christianity.”[356] In his final message before departing the colonies, Whitefield preached the gospel to a crowd of at least twenty thousand on Boston Common.
The Impact of George Whitefield
We need to be careful about how we evaluate numbers, of course. A man’s ministry should be measured primarily by his faithfulness to God’s calling on his life, not by how many people show up to listen or by how many respond to an invitation to receive Christ. Indeed, a pastor, missionary, or layperson can be a wonderful and truly faithful minister of the Word of God and the gospel and never see big crowds or much fruit. As Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, liked to say, we should share Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leave the results to God.[357]
Jesus drove this point home best of all. In the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, he told us that God wants us to wisely and effectively invest the spiritual gifts, natural talents, and financial resources he has given us, and he wants us to get a good “return,” as it were, on our investments. But in the end, God will not grade us on our external results; he will grade us on our internal faithfulness. To those who are successful in their spiritual investments, he will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” (Matthew 25:21, NIV).
That said, if God chooses to bear much fruit through a man and his team, we need not deny it. We should rejoice in it, as long as we are giving praise to Christ and not to the man or his ministry. We are all just servants, after all. The glory belongs to Jesus.
In that context, then, the more I learn about the things God did through George Whitefield, the more I rejoice. The man wasn’t perfect, of course. But he was used mightily.
“For decades [in the early 1700s] preachers had lamented the absence of grace and the apparent indifference of their congregations,” wrote one historian of the Great Awakening. “In sermon after sermon ministers unsuccessfully urged sleepy sinners to awake to their danger. An individual now and again detected signs of the Spirit operating in him, and in the 1720s and 1730s a number of congregations reported seasons of spiritual refreshment. But not until the 1740s did men in large numbers lay claim to the divine power which their theology offered them. Then they suddenly awoke to God’s glory and experienced a moral transformation as promised. In the Awakening the clergy’s pleas of half a century came to fulfillment.”[358]
The powerful preaching of George Whitefield was one of the catalysts of this movement sweeping across the colonies. College presidents invited Whitefield to address their student bodies. Local government leaders wanted to meet and discuss faith with him. The governor of Massachusetts came to see Whitefield preach in Boston. Even the esteemed Benjamin Franklin, not known to be a man interested in the Bible or the things of Christ, could not resist striking up a friendship with Whitefield and engaging him in many conversations, starting with Whitefield’s first visit to Philadelphia.
Franklin actually soon became an admirer of both the crowds Whitefield was drawing and the cultural impact he was having. For Franklin could see that people were not just hearing Whitefield preach; they were responding to his message with weeping, with genuine repentance, and with changed lives and conduct. “In 1739 there arrived among us the Rev. Mr. Whitefield [and] the multitude of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons was enormous,” Franklin would later write, noting that he had attended one particular open-air sermon that he personally calculated was heard “by more than thirty thousand.”[359]
Franklin observed, “It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious” after hearing Whitefield’s sermons, “so that one could not walk thro’ the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families in every street.”[360]
Franklin would go on to publish Whitefield’s sermons and even financially invest in Whitefield’s ministry, though there is no evidence that this founding father ever personally prayed to receive Christ as Savior.
Others, too, were struck by the impact of Whitefield’s preaching.
Said one observer of the Great Awakening in Boston in November of 1741, “The apostolical times seem to have returned upon us; such a display has there been of the power and grace of the divine Spirit in the assemblies of his people, and such testimonies has he given to the word of the Gospel.”[361]
Declared a pastor in Connecticut who was amazed by what God was doing through men like Whitefield, Edwards, and the Wesleys, “I believe the people [in my congregation] advanced more in their acquaintance with the Scriptures, and a true doctrinal understanding of the operations of the Holy Spirit in conviction, regeneration, and sanctification, in six months’ time than they had done in the whole of my ministry before, which was nine years.”[362]
Over the course of his thirty-three-year ministry, Whitefield preached an estimated fifteen thousand sermons.[363] The pace and intensity of his ministry eventually exhausted him, and he actually died during a preaching tour. When Whitefield passed from this life and went to heaven on September 30, 1770, his dear friend John Wesley preached his eulogy. He said, “Have we read or heard of any person, who called so many thousands, so many myriads of sinners to repentance?”[364]
George Whitefield was without question one of the preeminent leaders of the Great Awakening in America in the eighteenth century, and he was used powerfully by God throughout England as well. As one religious historian has usefully noted, Whitefield “initiated almost all of [the eighteenth century’s] enterprises—the open-air preaching, the use of lay preachers, the publishing of a magazine, the organizing of an association, and the holding of a conference. And by his thirteen crossings of the ocean, he provided the international scope of the movement. Among his accomplishments there must be recognized the host of men and women he led to Jesus Christ and the large part he played in this great work of revival on both sides of the Atlantic.”[365]
Confirmed another historian of the eighteenth century, “The very magnitude of the revivals, which won for the Awakening the appellation ‘Great,’ is one indication of their importance. From Whitefield’s 1740 tour until 1743, the period when the revival was at its peak, thousands were converted. People from all ranks of society, of all ages, and from every section underwent the new birth. In New England virtually every congregation was touched. It was not uncommon for 10 or 20 percent of a town . . . to join the church in a single year.”[366]
The Rise of John Wesley (1703–1791) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788)
John Wesley was born on June 17, 1703, in Epworth, England, the fifteenth of nineteen children. His brother Charles was born four years later on December 17, 1707, the eighteenth child of Samuel Wesley, an Anglican minister, and Susanna Wesley, the daughter of a minister. Together, these two remarkable brothers—in concert with George Whitefield—would be used by God to launch a movement of gospel preaching, church planting, pastor recruitment and training, disciple making, and Christian praise and worship that would impact much of the Western world. Yet one of the most fascinating aspects of their early lives is how they set out to convert the lost before they themselves were actually converted.
As I noted earlier, while attending Oxford University, the Wesley brothers led a men’s Bible study and prayer group known as the Holy Club. It was Charles who founded the group and later recruited John to help him lead it. But neither of them actually knew Christ personally, and unfortunately when their friend George Whitefield was powerfully converted in early 1735, the Wesley brothers were so busy, or so distracted, that they didn’t take the time or effort to grasp precisely what had happened to him. They were excited about his enhanced zeal, but they didn’t see how it directly affected them.
The two brilliant and disciplined young men were certainly deeply devoted to serving God, and when they graduated, both were ordained as Anglican ministers like their father. Then they decided to accept an invitation from Georgia governor James Oglethorpe to come to the colony, pastor a church there, and serve as missionaries to the Native Americans. They departed on a ship to the New World on October 14, 1735.
Along the way, the vessel encountered a terrible storm that threatened to sink it. Everyone aboard was terrified—all but a group of Moravian Christians. These Moravian believers didn’t seem bothered by the wind or the waves. Rather, they sang songs and remained calm throughout the entire ordeal. The Wesley brothers were intrigued by such depth of faith. They began to get to know the Moravians and spent long hours discussing with them what they believed and how they practiced their faith. It was a relationship that would deeply mark the two men.
The Wesleys reached Savannah, Georgia, on February 8, 1736, and tried to settle into new routines. Charles became a secretary to Governor Oglethorpe. John began pastoring a congregation and trying to convert a tribe of Native Americans to Christ.
From the beginning, everything seemed to go wrong. Few of the roughneck Georgians seemed interested in the Wesleys’ highly intellectualized teaching or style of worship. The Indians didn’t seem much interested either. As one religious historian noted of Charles, “this well-bred, well-educated, earnest High Churchman was completely out of his element. His experiences, including one Sunday (March 21, 1736) when his sermon was disrupted by gunshots and an irate matron threatened to blow him up as a religious hypocrite, were mostly discouraging. In late July 1736 he resigned his position and by early August was headed back to England.”[367]
John endured for about another year but fared little better. He couldn’t find a way to connect with the people. He couldn’t seem to convince them by his preaching, and he found himself embroiled in theological arguments at every turn. “More trouble followed when he fell in love with Sophia Hopkey, the niece of Georgia’s chief magistrate. When she married another man, Wesley banned her from Holy Communion, damaging her reputation in the community. His successful romantic rival sued him; but Wesley refused to recognize the authority of the court, and the man who would eventually found a major Protestant denomination in America left Georgia in disgrace on December 2, 1737.”[368]
Both young Wesley men were discouraged and confused. What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t they made the impact for which they had prayed and worked so hard? And why had they failed so spectacularly, when God was so radically blessing the work of their friend George Whitefield?
John began to reflect on a conversation he’d had with one of the Moravian believers. “My brother, I must first ask you one or two questions,” the Moravian had said to him. “Have you the witness within yourself? Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?”
John had been stunned by the questions and unsure how to answer.
The Moravian had seen this and pressed further. “Do you know Jesus Christ?”
John had replied, “I know he is the Saviour of the world.”
“True,” the man had said, “but do you know that he has saved you?”
Again John hadn’t known what to say. “I hope he has died to save me,” was all he could muster, but he feared his words were in vain.[369]
For the next few months, John wrestled with his questions and his fears. Simultaneously, Charles was going through a similar process. Together they sought out some Moravian Christians who were living and ministering in London. They asked a lot of questions but couldn’t for the life of them understand what they were doing wrong. By May, the struggle in both men was intensifying. Charles became quite ill but kept praying, pleading with God to show him the way. “I waked [one night] hungry and thirsty after God,” he wrote in his journal on May 12, 1738. The next night he wrote, “I waked without Christ; yet still desirous of finding him.” On May 14 he wrote, “I longed to find Christ, that I might show him to all mankind; that I might praise, that I might love him.”[370]
Another week went by. Charles again sought out the Moravians and studied Paul’s epistle to the Galatians with them. And finally, on Sunday, May 21, Charles’s eyes were opened. Until then, his religion had been an intellectual affair. It had not yet penetrated his heart. Now he understood what Christ meant when he said a man must be “born again,” and he prayed to receive Christ as his personal Savior and Lord. “I found myself at peace with God and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ.” And he quickly wrote a hymn, likely “Christ the Friend of Sinners,” expressing the joy of his newfound, life-transforming faith.[371]
John, too, was reading his Bible, discussing it with the Moravians, and spending much time wrestling with God in prayer. And that very month, he began to realize that his religion had been a purely intellectual pursuit and that he himself didn’t actually have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. On May 24, 1738—just three days after his younger brother—he, too, was born again. “In the evening, I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the epistle to the Romans,” John wrote in his journal. “About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”[372]
In the days that followed, both John and Charles read the Bible with new eyes and new insight. They felt a deep sense of joy and inner peace that they had never previously experienced. They were no longer trying to earn God’s love; rather, they found themselves enjoying his favor and thanking him profusely.
At one point, John wrote something quite telling in his journal: “I left my native country in order to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity. But what have I learned myself in the meantime? Why . . . that I who went to America to convert others was never myself converted to God.”[373]
Now he and his younger brother were genuinely converted and eager to serve the Lord with renewed fervor. Almost immediately, they were contacted by Whitefield, who asked them to come help him preach the gospel in the open air, for he was overwhelmed with the enormous response and desperately needed assistance. At first the Wesleys were appalled by the radical concept of preaching the Word of God outside the walls of a church building. But they couldn’t deny that the Spirit of God was moving powerfully, and they truly wanted to let Christ lead them rather than trying to follow their own strategies. Their lives were about to change forever.
Charles dove into open-air preaching almost immediately. From June 24 through July 8, 1738—barely a month after his conversion—he preached to crowds of ten thousand people. Later he preached the gospel to a crowd of twenty thousand at Kennington Common. He preached whenever and wherever the Lord told him, regardless of the size of the audience. In fact, from 1739 to 1743, Charles tabulated the number of people to whom he had preached, and the figure came to more than 149,000.[374]
And Charles was not even considered the gifted preacher between the brothers—John was. Charles’s real passion—indeed, his genius—was writing hymns and urging people to praise and worship the risen Christ.
John certainly had a passion for preaching and teaching the Word of God as well, but he soon discovered that his real spiritual gifting lay in leadership and administration, and his genius was organization. He didn’t simply want to see the gospel preached and the Word taught. He wanted to organize people into small groups to study the Scriptures and pray for one another. He wanted to recruit and train pastors. He wanted to help these young new pastors plant churches. He wanted to organize conferences to better equip pastors and lay leaders. He wanted to make sure churches had excellent hymnals filled with theologically sound psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs—many written by Charles. And he didn’t simply want to reach England. He wanted to make disciples of all nations, just as the Lord commanded in Matthew 28:18-20.
John wanted to recruit, train, and send missionaries all over the world—and especially to the American colonies—to preach the gospel and plant more churches. These, John believed, were the methods by which the gospel would be spread and the church strengthened and expanded. And thus was set into motion the beginnings of what would become known in England and America as the Methodist church.
The Impact of the Wesley Brothers
It is difficult to overstate how powerfully God used the Wesley brothers to fan into flame the great spiritual awakenings under way on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in America. For while the brothers invested most of their time in England, their most lasting impact was in America, as they sent well-trained pastors and missionaries to establish Christ-centered Methodist churches from north to south.
Having perceived themselves as failures with their Holy Club on one side of the pond, and then failures as missionaries in the New World, the Wesleys were clearly determined to make up for lost time. They beseeched the Lord to give them faith, courage, and clarity of purpose and to allow them to truly make a significant difference for Christ at home and abroad. And the Lord certainly heard and answered their prayers.
Charles established a remarkable legacy. In addition to much preaching and teaching of his own, he published some six thousand hymns in his lifetime and wrote nearly four thousand more that weren’t published while he was alive. Among his compositions are great classics of the faith such as “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “And Can It Be?,” “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” “Rejoice, the Lord Is King,” and “Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies.” Truly, Charles helped believers throughout America (as well as England and Europe) learn solid, biblical theology while also learning to praise and worship the Lord in song.
John’s impact was no less profound. “In an era when Britain enjoyed virtually no reliable roads,” one historian noted, “John Wesley traveled constantly to spread the good news of grace in Christ. After [his conversion] in 1738, his preaching tours took him about a quarter of a million miles (mostly on horseback), and he delivered forty thousand sermons (that is, an average of more than two a day). . . . Only in his seventies did Wesley abandon his horse for a carriage. Only in his mid-eighties did Wesley give up preaching before dawn.”[375]
John Wesley wasn’t only faithful to the Lord’s calling to preach and teach, however. He was also faithful in making disciples and establishing trained and gifted shepherds to continue the work long after he was gone. By the time he died in 1791, he had helped recruit and train 294 preachers in Britain and established the Methodist church in England with 71,668 members. He had also helped recruit and train 198 preachers across the Atlantic and established the American Methodist church with 43,265 members.[376]
Yet this was just the beginning. As we will see in the next chapter, the Methodist church was soon growing exponentially in the young United States as more and more pastors were recruited and trained to preach the gospel and plant theologically solid, Bible-believing congregations. The methods were working because they were rooted in biblical principles and because God was showing tremendous favor to the humble and faithful Methodist shepherds.
Without question, God used the Wesleys to make an enormous impact in the Great Awakening in the eighteenth century, and as we will also see, they helped plant seeds that would bear enormous fruit in the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century as well.
Bottom Line
In the early 1700s, the American people were living in darkness. Their political leaders were corrupt and oppressive. The culture was coarsening. The churches were weak. Yet God in his mercy heard the prayers of some faithful pastors and laypeople and sent a series of revivals that dramatically transformed individuals, families, and a continent.
During the Great Awakening, God raised up:
• a brilliant but humble theologian, pastor, and author by the name of Jonathan Edwards to advance the Kingdom of God through the pulpit and the printed word
• a powerful itinerant evangelist by the name of George Whitefield to advance the Kingdom of God through open-air preaching, an new and unconventional form of ministry
• a passionate and tireless shepherd with a genius for organization by the name of John Wesley to advance the Kingdom of God through discipleship, pastor training, and church planting
• a tremendously gifted hymn writer by the name of Charles Wesley to advance the Kingdom of God through praise and worship
What’s more, God raised up myriad other faithful pastors and laypeople to teach, pray, give, and serve sacrificially as God poured out his Holy Spirit on the American people far beyond what any of them could have ever imagined.
Was every lost soul in the thirteen colonies saved during the Great Awakening? No. Did every pastor and every person in every congregation on the American continent rededicate his or her life to Jesus Christ at the time? No. Did every believer then (or now) agree with every point of theology that Edwards, Whitefield, the Wesleys, and the others taught? No.[377] This spiritual revival was not a one-size-fits-all solution to every social problem. It didn’t create a perfect society. Indeed, the Bible makes it clear that society will never be perfect until the new heaven and the new earth described in the book of Revelation.
But the goal of the revivalists in the early 1700s wasn’t perfection; it was progress. Their Scriptural basis for this was sound. The apostle Paul didn’t require perfection in his disciple Timothy or expect him to save the whole city of Ephesus when he directed the young pastor to serve there. Rather, Paul urged Timothy to faithfully use his spiritual gifts, to boldly preach the gospel, to preach the Word of God consistently, to be faithful in prayer, to make disciples and encourage those under his care to do the same, and to govern himself and the congregation he pastored in such a way that “your progress will be evident to all” (1 Timothy 4:15). These were the goals of the leaders of the Great Awakening as well.
In this regard, the historical record is clear and compelling: the Great Awakening had a dramatic and positive impact on individual lives and families and on early American society as a whole. Millions of people became hungry for the Word of God. Millions of people renewed their commitments to live lives of greater holiness and to pray for their neighbors and their nation. As Americans rediscovered the timeless truths of the Scriptures, they became more unified as a people and more courageous in standing for what was right.
In time, this national hunger for spiritual freedom and wise, moral leadership led to the widespread desire to be a nation free from the religious, economic, and political tyranny imposed by King George III. While not every founding father was a devout Christian, many of them were, and they sought to establish a free society based firmly on Judeo-Christian principles. The Great Awakening thus created the moral climate for the Declaration of Independence and the founding of a new country, conceived in liberty, which would truly become a light to the nations. No country in the history of mankind has done more to liberate other peoples politically, economically, or spiritually than the United States of America. And all this began with the prayers and the preaching of a few faithful, prayerful men.
To be clear, neither George Whitefield nor most of the other powerful preachers of his day had political motives. Their goals were spiritual. They weren’t trying to build an independence movement against the king of England. They were trying to be faithful to the King of kings and the Lord of lords. They weren’t trying to build powerful political parties. They were trying to wake up a sleeping church and rediscover the power of the Holy Spirit. They were not trying to run for office. They were trying to run the race marked out for them by Christ himself. But their efforts had social and political consequences beyond their expectations. And by God’s grace—and in his power and for his glory—they were remarkably successful in turning many Americans back to the Lord and setting the fledgling nation on the right track for decades to come.
Let me encourage you to study the events and the leaders of the Great Awakening for yourself. I think they will amaze you as they have me. Understanding the dynamics of the Great Awakening has inspired and encouraged me. It has given me cause for optimism that what God has done in the past to revive and restore America he could certainly do again. Even more encouraging is the fact that amazingly, this wasn’t the only time America experienced a spiritual rebirth. Just a few decades later, a Second Great Awakening swept the young country in a historic way. Let us turn our attention now to this second remarkable revival as we ponder the question of whether God might be so gracious as to give us another one in our time.