The Great Awakenings

The dated line

1. 1734–1735A farm town in Massachusetts starts to shakeJonathan Edwards, pastor at Northampton, preached on being made right with God by faith and watched the young people of the town get serious. He reckoned that in about six months some three hundred people in a town of roughly eleven hundred were savingly changed — his own careful count, which he published rather than let rumor do the counting.
2. 1735Whitefield is born again; the Wesleys sail for GeorgiaAt Oxford, after weeks of illness and severe fasting, George Whitefield came to rest in Christ rather than in his own effort — most accounts put it in the spring of 1735. That autumn John and Charles Wesley sailed for Georgia as missionaries. On the voyage a storm terrified John, while a group of Moravian passengers went on singing; he wrote that he had gone to America to convert the Indians, but who would convert him?
3. May 24, 1738Aldersgate StreetHome from Georgia counting himself a failure, John Wesley was being pressed by the Moravian Peter Böhler to seek a faith he did not yet have. At a small meeting on Aldersgate Street, someone read aloud from Luther's preface to Romans, and Wesley's heart was, in his words, strangely warmed. That August he traveled to Herrnhut to see Count Zinzendorf's Moravian community for himself — the Pietist stream of the previous era feeding straight into this one.
4. 1739The preaching goes outdoorsOn February 17, 1739, shut out of the pulpits, Whitefield preached to about two hundred coal miners on Hanham Mount at Kingswood, outside Bristol. He wrote that he first knew they were moved when he saw the white gutters their tears made down their coal-black faces. On April 2 Wesley, who had thought open-air preaching nearly sinful, gave in: "I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation."
5. 1740–1742The Awakening binds the American coloniesWhitefield's tour ran from Georgia to Boston, and for the first time colonists from different colonies and different churches were talking about the same preaching. Benjamin Franklin, who never believed a word of the message, measured Whitefield's voice on a Philadelphia street and reckoned tens of thousands could hear him. Historians still argue over how much this shared experience prepared the colonies to think of themselves as one people.
6. July 8, 1741Enfield — and the test of the fireEdwards preached "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" at Enfield, and the crying out in the meeting house stopped him before he finished. That same year he published The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, arguing that tears, trembling, and outcry neither prove nor disprove anything — the question is whether Jesus is exalted, sin hated, Scripture honored, and love produced.
7. February 1742The class meeting is invented in BristolTrying to pay off a building debt, Wesley's people divided the Bristol society into groups of about a dozen, each with a leader who visited weekly to collect a penny. The visiting turned into asking how each person's walk with God was actually going, and Wesley kept it. The following year he wrote The Rules of the United Societies: do no harm, do good, attend upon the ordinances of God.
8. 1746Religious AffectionsEdwards published the book that is still the best-known Christian test of genuine experience. His case: true religion consists largely in holy affections — the heart really moved — but the proof of them is a changed life, not the intensity of the feeling.
9. 1748The Countess opens her house and her purseSelina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, widowed two years earlier, made Whitefield one of her chaplains and began spending her fortune on the revival. Over the following decades she built or funded some sixty chapels, and in 1768 founded a college at Trevecca in Wales to train preachers.
10. 1748–1764John Newton: the slave ship, then the pulpitCaught in a storm off Ireland in March 1748, the slave-ship officer John Newton cried out to God — but by his own account the change came slowly, and he stayed in the trade for several more years before illness ended his sailing in 1754. He read and studied for a decade, and was ordained in 1764 as curate of Olney. Sources differ on which year to call his conversion; Newton himself refused to make it tidy.
11. 1770–1771Whitefield dies in America; Asbury sails for itWhitefield died at Newburyport, Massachusetts, on September 30, 1770, after crossing the Atlantic seven times. He had asked in his will that John Wesley preach his funeral sermon in London, and Wesley did, in November. Ten months later Francis Asbury volunteered at the Bristol conference and sailed for America, where he would ride an estimated quarter of a million miles over forty-five years.
12. 1779Olney HymnsNewton and his neighbor, the poet William Cowper, published the hymns they had written for the weekly meetings at Olney. Number forty-one in the first book was Newton's own testimony, set down for a New Year's service: "Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."
13. December 1784The Christmas Conference, BaltimoreAt Lovely Lane Chapel, sixty-odd preachers formed the Methodist Episcopal Church — the movement's first independent church, in a country that had just won its independence. Thomas Coke ordained Francis Asbury, who refused the office until the preachers themselves elected him to it. Riding the circuits with Asbury was Harry Hosier, a formerly enslaved man whom many who heard both called the better preacher.
14. 1785–1791The awakening reaches ParliamentWilliam Wilberforce, a young Member of Parliament, went through what he called his Great Change in 1785, and went to old John Newton for counsel; Newton told him to stay in politics. Six days before he died in 1791, Wesley wrote Wilberforce his last letter, urging him on against "that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature." The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807.

The story

The outpourings of this era

When God moved on these years in power, it looked like this.

1734–1735The Great Awakening at NorthamptonNorthampton, Massachusetts, and the towns along the Connecticut River valley.It began quietly, after the sudden death of two young people and a series of sermons on justification by faith. Edwards wrote that the town seemed to be full of the presence of God — taverns emptied, and people talked of little else. Deep conviction of sin came first, then a settled sweetness that Edwards took pains to test rather than trust on sight. He kept careful notes, including on a four-year-old girl, because he wanted the work examined, not just admired.

1740–1742The Great AwakeningThe American colonies from Georgia to New England, mostly in open fields and market squares.Whitefield preached outdoors to crowds the churches could not hold, and Benjamin Franklin — no believer — measured the carrying power of his voice and defended his honesty. Preaching aimed straight at the conscience: you must be born again. In some meetings people cried out, wept, or fell down, and Edwards wrote a whole book sorting the real work of the Spirit from the froth around it. In Britain the same fire ran through the Wesleys’ societies and the Welsh fields under Harris and Rowland.

August 1801The Cane Ridge Camp MeetingCane Ridge, Bourbon County, Kentucky — open ground on the American frontier.Families came by wagon and camped for days; estimates of the crowd run from about ten thousand to twenty-five thousand, in a state whose largest town held under two thousand. Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist preachers spoke at the same time from stumps and wagon beds. Witnesses described falling, weeping, shaking, and shouting on a scale that alarmed even sympathetic ministers. Stone, who was there, defended the work as genuine while admitting the excesses were real.

1821–1835Finney's RevivalsUpstate New York — Rome, Utica, Rochester — and then the eastern cities.Finney, a young lawyer, was converted in a wood outside Adams, New York, and described being met that evening by waves of the Holy Spirit. He preached like a lawyer addressing a jury — direct, plain, demanding a verdict now. He used what he called new measures: naming sins from the pulpit, meetings on consecutive nights, an anxious seat at the front, and women praying aloud in mixed meetings. Ahead of him went Daniel Nash, who would arrive in a town weeks early and do nothing but pray.

The Scriptures this era stood on

The witnesses of this era14 on this stretch of wall

John Wesley1703–1791

Rode a quarter of a million miles on horseback to preach in open fields, because the churches had locked him out.

Jonathan Edwards1703–1758

Watched revival sweep his town, then taught the church how to tell the Spirit's true work from its counterfeits.

George Whitefield1714–1770

Preached in the open fields to crowds no building could hold, on both sides of the Atlantic, for thirty years.

David Brainerd1718–1747

Coughed blood through four years among Native villages and left a diary that has sent thousands to the mission field since.

William Cowper1731–1800

Believed for the last twenty-seven years of his life that God had cast him off, and kept writing the hymns that have comforted everyone else.

Charles Wesley1707–1788

Wrote about six thousand hymns so that people who could not read a page of doctrine could still sing it.

Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon1707–1791

Sold her jewels to build sixty chapels and made her drawing room the one place England's aristocracy would hear a Methodist preach.

Daniel Rowland1713–1790

People walked two and three days to hear him in a village of a few hundred, and kept coming for fifty years.

Howell Harris1714–1773

Refused ordination four times, preached anyway, and organized Welsh converts into small societies that outlasted the excitement.

John Newton1725–1807

Captained a slave ship, spent the rest of his life undoing it, and wrote 'Amazing Grace' for a village prayer meeting.

Augustus Toplady1740–1778

Savaged John Wesley in print with a bitterness his friends still apologize for, and wrote one of the tenderest hymns in the language.

Francis Asbury1745–1816

Rode some 270,000 miles on horseback for forty-five years and never owned a house.

William Wilberforce1759–1833

Brought the same bill to Parliament for eighteen years and heard slavery abolished three days before he died.

John Gill

Preached in one London pulpit for fifty-one years and wrote a commentary on every single verse in the Bible.

What this era wrote

Recommended further study

Where to go next — the books and primary sources that tell this era best.

• *Christian Leaders of the Last Century*J. C. RyleThe best on-ramp: eleven short, warm, plain-spoken lives of the men of this awakening, by a bishop who loved them and did not flatter them. Free — public domain.Read it at the Internet Archive→
• *The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M.*John WesleyRead the era from the saddle, in Wesley's own words. Start with 1738 and 1739 — Aldersgate, the first field preaching, the mobs. Free — public domain.Read it at the Internet Archive→
• *A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections*Jonathan EdwardsThe deepest book on how to tell real spiritual experience from a counterfeit, written by a man who had watched both up close. Slow going, worth every page. Free — public domain.Read it at the Internet Archive→
• *An Authentic Narrative*John NewtonNewton's own account of the slave ships, the storm, and the long road back, written in 1764 as a series of letters. Short, and the story behind "Amazing Grace." Free — public domain.Read it at the Internet Archive→
• *George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist*, 2 vols.Arnold DallimoreThe standard modern life of Whitefield — thorough, sympathetic, and honest about his faults, including his defense of slavery in Georgia. Still in print.Read it at the Internet Archive→
• *Jonathan Edwards: A Life*George M. MarsdenThe standard modern biography of Edwards, which puts him back in his own century — the farm town, the family, the dismissal, the mission at Stockbridge — instead of leaving him a name on one sermon. Still in print.Read it at the Internet Archive→