John Newton

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. 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."
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 1746*Religious Affections*Edwards 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 1779*Olney Hymns*Newton 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."
11. 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.
12. 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 Great Awakenings: the whole era→