The Great Cloud of Witnesses · Gallery
The Awakeners
The preachers of the Great Awakenings, fields for pulpits, nations for parishes. 31 witnesses hang on this wall, era by era down the line.
What Was Happening
The 1730s and 1740s at the center, spreading through the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s, with later revivalist preachers standing in the same line.
By the early 1700s, church attendance in Britain and the American colonies had grown formal in many places and, by the preachers' own account, spiritually asleep. Starting in 1734 in Northampton, Massachusetts, and then across England and the colonies through the 1740s, sudden and sustained revival broke out under preachers like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley. Whitefield, refused most pulpits, preached in open fields to coal miners and crowds in the thousands. Wesley organized converts into small weekly groups so the change would outlast the excitement of a single meeting.
Awakening was the movement's own word for what it believed was happening: that people and whole towns who already considered themselves Christian were being roused out of a real spiritual sleep, not converted from unbelief for the first time. That is what separates an awakener from an evangelist working among people who had never heard the gospel at all.
The cost
George Whitefield crossed the Atlantic by sail seven times, weeks of real danger each way, and preached to crowds that included open hostility from clergy who considered field preaching disorderly and indecent. John Wesley rode an estimated quarter of a million miles on horseback over fifty years, in all weather, with no settled home or guaranteed income.
Itinerant preaching of this kind meant no fixed congregation, no fixed salary, and no fixed home.
31 witnesses on this wall
The Great Awakenings1730–180011 on this stretch
Rode a quarter of a million miles on horseback to preach in open fields, because the churches had locked him out.
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Watched revival sweep his town, then taught the church how to tell the Spirit's true work from its counterfeits.
_-_H27_-_Harvard_Art_Museums.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Preached in the open fields to crowds no building could hold, on both sides of the Atlantic, for thirty years.
Coughed blood through four years among Native villages and left a diary that has sent thousands to the mission field since.
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Wrote about six thousand hymns so that people who could not read a page of doctrine could still sing it.
Sold her jewels to build sixty chapels and made her drawing room the one place England's aristocracy would hear a Methodist preach.
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
People walked two and three days to hear him in a village of a few hundred, and kept coming for fifty years.
Refused ordination four times, preached anyway, and organized Welsh converts into small societies that outlasted the excitement.
_-_John_Newton_(1725%25E2%2580%25931807)_(copy)_-_OLNCN-143_-_Cowper_and_Newton_Museum.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Captained a slave ship, spent the rest of his life undoing it, and wrote 'Amazing Grace' for a village prayer meeting.
Rode some 270,000 miles on horseback for forty-five years and never owned a house.
Brought the same bill to Parliament for eighteen years and heard slavery abolished three days before he died.
The Missionary Century1790–191010 on this stretch
Preached to six thousand people a week in London and left behind more printed words than almost any other writer in the English language.
A shoe salesman with no ordination and no education who shook two continents with plain speech about Christ.
Spent forty years writing a commentary on the whole Bible while riding the Methodist circuits.
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Wrote Bible notes for his own Sunday school class that ended up selling more than a million copies.
Wrote short, blunt tracts for working people by the million, and became Liverpool's first bishop at sixty-four.
Ran Scotland Yard by day and worked out the arithmetic of Daniel's seventy weeks by night.
Retold Pilgrim's Progress in words small children could follow, and generations met Christian there first.
Catalogued every figure of speech in the Bible so readers would stop missing what the writers were doing.
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Proved from the manuscripts themselves that the earliest Christian letters were genuine, against the skeptics of his day.
A Lutheran pastor who taught Americans to read Revelation, the pyramids, and the stars as one story.
The Revival Streams1900–19501 on this stretch
The Church Under Fire & Into All the World1930–today9 on this stretch
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Preached in person to more people than anyone in history and never once handled the offering himself.
An engineer and intelligence officer who taught the Bible as one integrated message from outside of time.
Kept teaching the Old Testament in Germany when the regime was demanding the church throw it out.
Wrote Knowing God, and kept the Puritans in print for a century that had forgotten them.
A philosophy professor who taught the church that following Jesus is something you actually practice, not just believe.
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Taught ordinary people the holiness of God until they felt the floor move under them.
Planted a church in the middle of skeptical Manhattan and preached to doubters without ever flinching.
Argued his friend Lewis back toward Christ on a midnight walk, then spent his life telling the true story sideways.
Portraits: Wikimedia Commons and resident public-domain plates: full attribution and license on every witness page.