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| George Whitefield |
George Whitefield (1714-1770) was known as the “Apostle of
the British Empire”. Although very
popular in England, his main claim to fame was his revival work and preaching
tours he brought to colonial America. He
was considered the greatest preacher of the 18th century and is
believed to have preached to over 10 million people.
George grew up in Gloucester England where his parents ran a
lodging house or inn. As a young boy Whitefield
was an avid reader and would frequently give dramatic readings of plays to the
guests of his parents lodging after dinner.
When George’s father died, his mother struggled to stay afloat
financially and George convinced her that he should drop out of school to help with
the family business. She allowed this
but George continued to study on his own.
In this period he became interested in the Bible which he read quite
voraciously.
Soon a paying guest at their inn met George and told him
that going to Oxford would be possible as he had worked his way through school
without large financial resources.
George was convinced he should do this and went back and completed
school so he could qualify to attend college.
It was while he was attending Oxford that he fell in with
John and Charles Wesley the founders of the Methodists. During this period Whitefield experiences a
Christian conversion and following college sets forth to the new world to be a
missionary in the colony of Georgia with John Wesley.
As he was preparing
to go he spends three months preaching in London churches and finds that
whenever he preaches he attracts a crowd and they enthusiastically respond to
his preaching. His method of preaching was hardly conventional. He wouldn’t read from notes which was the
common way of preaching in the day, but rather acted out his sermons often
playing the part of biblical characters with great animation. His voice would rise and fall with expression
of great emotion and like a professional actor he would completely memorize all
of his remarks.
Although he went to Georgia
and did start a missionary orphanage there, Whitefield found the living
situation too difficult in this primitive colony and returned to London to
resume his preaching career.
Although well-received by the people, Whitefield was held
suspect by the clergy and soon found churches no longer open to him. From that point forward he began the open air
preaching which became his stock and trade.
1739 saw the first of his preaching tours of America. Whitefield went to Philadelphia and preached
in the open air as no church in that time could hold a crowd of 8000 people. Crowds of that size were noted for being so
boisterous, but when he began to preach people literally listened in
silence. His effect upon them was
mesmerizing and electric. Ben Franklin
said even the way he said “Mesopotamia” made him tear up.
He was slender, handsome in appearance, but also
cross-eyed. In the day, this was not
considered a handicap but actually a sign of genius. Part of what caused the ire of more established
ministers is that Whitefield did things like advertise his meetings. He was directly going above the heads of the
churches to get an audience with their people.
Such procedures and use of media are common today but were completely
unheard of in the day.
Doctrinally speaking he was a Calvinist and believed
conversion began with a sovereign act of God.
He urged conversion, but unlike evangelists like John Wesley and ones
who would follow, Whitefield did not deliver an altar call. “Repent and come to
Jesus” and “ I know the Lord is bringing some to salvation here today” were
about as close as you would hear him come to a call to conversion.
He ended this tour in Boston Massachusetts. By this time a national revival had ignited
known as the Great Awakening. A sign of
its impact is that 23,000 people showed up for his open air rally. This was to date the largest gathering ever
held in America of any kind.
He came back for 6 more tours of America throughout his
lifetime.
During his first preaching tour he founded an orphanage in
Bethesda Georgia. He used finances
raised finances through offerings to fund the orphanage his entire life. Though a lot of money came in, it was poorly
run and he had a hard time keeping it going. Although Whitefield in his day never questioned slavery, he
did include and reach out to slaves in his preaching and is considered an
important figure in founding the black church in America. Sadly in an effort to make his orphanage more
cost-effective, Whitefield actually purchased slaves to work on the orphanage
plantation. Though questioned on this by
evangelicals at the time, Whitefield eventually became a defender of slavery.
Whitefield is credited with essentially changing the way people experienced God
in this culture. Before, one’s
relationship with God was mediated by the church and your pastor. They were your superiors and like everything
else in British society, you had to know your place. Whitefield saw this was a dying idea in
America and latched on to this aspiration. You don’t need an intermediary was his
message, you just come directly to God. This
and the Puritan experiment, truly led to the democratization of the Church in America.
Aside from the king of England, no other person was so
widely known and celebrated than George Whitefield. He was truly America’s first celebrity. During the course of his career he preached
to equivalent of every man, woman, and child in America.
Whitefield was married, but like John Wesley, the ministers
of the day feared their wives were a distraction to their devotion to Jesus and
therefore he sought to avoid much contact with her and had about as cold of
relationship with her as you could imagine.
By some miracle, Mr. and Mrs. Whitefield conceived and had a son but he
died in childhood. Whitefield managed to
preach in the morning, come home for an hour and then preach at his son’s
funeral, then left his wife to continue his preaching tour. Obviously a man with many gifts but certainly
no example worth emulating when it comes to marriage.
Not widely remembered was that Ben Franklin was not only a
personal friend of Whitefield but was also his publisher. He put into print many of his sermons for
distribution to the public. Franklin was
a lapsed puritan and never did convert but was pleased to see the social
effects of Whitefield’s preaching which seemed to bring about better morality.
Virtually unknown is that George Whitefield fell into
ill-health and died on his last crusade in America. He was buried in the basement of the Baptist
church in Newburyport Massachusetts.
When the Revolutionary war broke out 6 years after his death, a group of
American soldiers, with the permission of the pastor, broke open Whitefield’s
tomb, and took the buttons and remains of his clothing they found there with
them into battle. There was a strong
sense in the day, that George Whitefield saw America as a nation long before
America did. When the war for
independence began, they had George Washington, but they wanted what they could
have of George Whitefield to go with them as well that God might grant favor to
mission.
Today about 1000 people a year, mostly conservative
evangelicals, visit his grave in Newburyport Mass.
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