The Great Cloud of Witnesses · Era 7 of 10
The Great Awakenings
1730–1800
God poured out His Spirit on two nations at once. Whole towns stopped talking about anything else, and the preaching moved out of the buildings and into the fields.
The story
It started quietly in a Massachusetts farm town. In late 1734 Jonathan Edwards, the pastor at Northampton, noticed young people getting serious about God. Within six months the whole town was affected. He wrote it up carefully in *A Faithful Narrative*, and the account was read across the Atlantic — which is part of why the next wave was expected.
In England, two Oxford men had tried religion as hard as it can be tried. John and Charles Wesley kept such strict rules that classmates mocked them as "Methodists." John sailed to Georgia as a missionary and came home a failure. On the voyage out, a storm terrified him — and the Moravian passengers sang calmly through it. He wrote that he had gone to America to convert the Indians, but who would convert him?
On May 24, 1738, at a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London, someone read aloud from Luther's preface to Romans. Wesley recorded it in his journal: "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation." It is one of the most famous sentences in English church history.
George Whitefield went first into the fields. In February 1739 he preached to coal miners at Kingswood near Bristol, outdoors, because no pulpit would have him — and watched tears cut white lines through the coal dust on their faces. He talked Wesley into doing the same. Wesley thought open-air preaching was almost sinful; then he did it and never stopped.
The Awakening crossed the ocean with Whitefield, who made seven trips to America and preached to crowds reported in the thousands, from Boston commons to Georgia. On July 8, 1741, Edwards preached "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" at Enfield, and the congregation's outcry made him stop before he finished. Benjamin Franklin, no believer, counted the crowd and admitted the whole town seemed changed.
What made it last was structure. Wesley organized converts into societies, and societies into small classes of about a dozen who met weekly to answer honest questions about their walk with God. Charles wrote thousands of hymns so the people would sing their theology. John rode an estimated quarter of a million miles on horseback over fifty years, preaching in market squares and mines. When he died in 1791 the movement was on both sides of the Atlantic — and the men it produced were starting to look past their own shores.