Implosion (24 page)

Yet it was at precisely this time that God gave Whitefield a radical idea: What if he preached the gospel to the lost in the open air—in fields, factory yards, and town squares? Whitefield had heard of a layman named Howell Harris who was preaching in homes and at outdoor events in Wales. He'd even corresponded with Harris and had been encouraged by Harris's passion for Christ and by the results he was seeing. So on a cold February day, Whitefield simply couldn't wait any longer. He headed to a coal-mining district near the city of Bristol, called several hundred miners and their families together, and began preaching the gospel to them. Today, this might not seem so remarkable. Today, we know the stories of evangelists such as D. L. Moody and Billy Graham preaching outside of church walls. In the 1700s, however, this was considered by the Anglican hierarchy as outright religious fanaticism. But Whitefield didn't care. He kept preaching, and he saw people praying to receive Christ and developing a hunger for God's Word.

“Blessed be God!” he later wrote. “I have broken the ice. I believe I was never more acceptable to my Master than when I was standing to teach those hearers in the open fields. Some may censure me, but if I thus pleased men I should not be the servant of Christ.”
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Interest in Whitefield and his message began to grow. Soon he was preaching thirty outdoor meetings a week around Bristol, then in towns and cities throughout England. Three months after that first experiment, he was preaching daily to crowds in London ranging from ten thousand to fifteen thousand. Not long after that, he preached to a gathering of some eighty thousand people.

Word about Whitefield was already spreading across the Atlantic. Pastors throughout New England, then the Mid-Atlantic colonies, and then the South wanted Whitefield to come and preach in their pulpits. They had read Jonathan Edwards's pamphlet on revival. Now they were hearing about an evangelist who seemed to have the hand of God upon him. What if God could use Whitefield to bring revival to their communities?

Sensing God's call to revisit the colonies, Whitefield set sail and reached America on October 30, 1739. He immediately went to Philadelphia and preached in churches that were packed to overflowing. He also spoke in New York, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. He was frequently forced to add extra meetings and then outdoor gatherings to accommodate all the people interested in hearing the Word of God taught with more passion and strength than they had ever heard it before.

In November, Whitefield wrote to Jonathan Edwards, asking the well-known reverend if Whitefield could visit the site of the famous revival in Northampton.
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Edwards seized the opportunity to meet this kindred spirit. He immediately wrote back to welcome Whitefield, offering him the opportunity not just to visit but to preach in his town and also in Boston and the surrounding areas. Edwards also learned that the governor of Massachusetts wanted to hear Whitefield as well.

The impact was stunning. Whitefield spoke to students and faculty at Harvard and saw many pray to receive Christ. He spent four days in Northampton, preaching, teaching, and comparing notes with Edwards about what they were seeing God do to bring revival to the colonies. And the crowds just kept growing.

“When he preached in New England during the fall of 1740, Whitefield addressed crowds of up to 8,000 people nearly every day for over a month,” noted one historian, describing that evangelistic tour as “one of the most remarkable episodes in the whole history of American Christianity.”
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In his final message before departing the colonies, Whitefield preached the gospel to a crowd of at least twenty thousand on Boston Common.

The Impact of George Whitefield

We need to be careful about how we evaluate numbers, of course. A man's ministry should be measured primarily by his faithfulness to God's calling on his life, not by how many people show up to listen or by how many respond to an invitation to receive Christ. Indeed, a pastor, missionary, or layperson can be a wonderful and truly faithful minister of the Word of God and the gospel and never see big crowds or much fruit. As Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, liked to say, we should share Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leave the results to God.
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Jesus drove this point home best of all. In the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, he told us that God wants us to wisely and effectively invest the spiritual gifts, natural talents, and financial resources he has given us, and he wants us to get a good “return,” as it were, on our investments. But in the end, God will not grade us on our external results; he will grade us on our internal faithfulness. To those who are successful in their spiritual investments, he will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!” (Matthew 25:21, NIV).

That said, if God chooses to bear much fruit through a man and his team, we need not deny it. We should rejoice in it, as long as we are giving praise to Christ and not to the man or his ministry. We are all just servants, after all. The glory belongs to Jesus.

In that context, then, the more I learn about the things God did through George Whitefield, the more I rejoice. The man wasn't perfect, of course. But he was used mightily.

“For decades [in the early 1700s] preachers had lamented the absence of grace and the apparent indifference of their congregations,” wrote one historian of the Great Awakening. “In sermon after sermon ministers unsuccessfully urged sleepy sinners to awake to their danger. An individual now and again detected signs of the Spirit operating in him, and in the 1720s and 1730s a number of congregations reported seasons of spiritual refreshment. But not until the 1740s did men in large numbers lay claim to the divine power which their theology offered them. Then they suddenly awoke to God's glory and experienced a moral transformation as promised. In the Awakening the clergy's pleas of half a century came to fulfillment.”
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The powerful preaching of George Whitefield was one of the catalysts of this movement sweeping across the colonies. College presidents invited Whitefield to address their student bodies. Local government leaders wanted to meet and discuss faith with him. The governor of Massachusetts came to see Whitefield preach in Boston. Even the esteemed Benjamin Franklin, not known to be a man interested in the Bible or the things of Christ, could not resist striking up a friendship with Whitefield and engaging him in many conversations, starting with Whitefield's first visit to Philadelphia.

Franklin actually soon became an admirer of both the crowds Whitefield was drawing and the cultural impact he was having. For Franklin could see that people were not just hearing Whitefield preach; they were responding to his message with weeping, with genuine repentance, and with changed lives and conduct. “In 1739 there arrived among us the Rev. Mr. Whitefield [and] the multitude of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons was enormous,” Franklin would later write, noting that he had attended one particular open-air sermon that he personally calculated was heard “by more than thirty thousand.”
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Franklin observed, “It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious” after hearing Whitefield's sermons, “so that one could not walk thro' the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families in every street.”
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Franklin would go on to publish Whitefield's sermons and even financially invest in Whitefield's ministry, though there is no evidence that this founding father ever personally prayed to receive Christ as Savior.

Others, too, were struck by the impact of Whitefield's preaching.

Said one observer of the Great Awakening in Boston in November of 1741, “The apostolical times seem to have returned upon us; such a display has there been of the power and grace of the divine Spirit in the assemblies of his people, and such testimonies has he given to the word of the Gospel.”
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Declared a pastor in Connecticut who was amazed by what God was doing through men like Whitefield, Edwards, and the Wesleys, “I believe the people [in my congregation] advanced more in their acquaintance with the Scriptures, and a true doctrinal understanding of the operations of the Holy Spirit in conviction, regeneration, and sanctification, in six months' time than they had done in the whole of my ministry before, which was nine years.”
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Over the course of his thirty-three-year ministry, Whitefield preached an estimated fifteen thousand sermons.
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The pace and intensity of his ministry eventually exhausted him, and he actually died during a preaching tour. When Whitefield passed from this life and went to heaven on September 30, 1770, his dear friend John Wesley preached his eulogy. He said, “Have we read or heard of any person, who called so many thousands, so many myriads of sinners to repentance?”
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George Whitefield was without question one of the preeminent leaders of the Great Awakening in America in the eighteenth century, and he was used powerfully by God throughout England as well. As one religious historian has usefully noted, Whitefield “initiated almost all of [the eighteenth century's] enterprises—the open-air preaching, the use of lay preachers, the publishing of a magazine, the organizing of an association, and the holding of a conference. And by his thirteen crossings of the ocean, he provided the international scope of the movement. Among his accomplishments there must be recognized the host of men and women he led to Jesus Christ and the large part he played in this great work of revival on both sides of the Atlantic.”
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Confirmed another historian of the eighteenth century, “The very magnitude of the revivals, which won for the Awakening the appellation ‘Great,' is one indication of their importance. From Whitefield's 1740 tour until 1743, the period when the revival was at its peak, thousands were converted. People from all ranks of society, of all ages, and from every section underwent the new birth. In New England virtually every congregation was touched. It was not uncommon for 10 or 20 percent of a town . . . to join the church in a single year.”
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The Rise of John Wesley (1703–1791) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788)

John Wesley was born on June 17, 1703, in Epworth, England, the fifteenth of nineteen children. His brother Charles was born four years later on December 17, 1707, the eighteenth child of Samuel Wesley, an Anglican minister, and Susanna Wesley, the daughter of a minister. Together, these two remarkable brothers—in concert with George Whitefield—would be used by God to launch a movement of gospel preaching, church planting, pastor recruitment and training, disciple making, and Christian praise and worship that would impact much of the Western world. Yet one of the most fascinating aspects of their early lives is how they set out to convert the lost before they themselves were actually converted.

As I noted earlier, while attending Oxford University, the Wesley brothers led a men's Bible study and prayer group known as the Holy Club. It was Charles who founded the group and later recruited John to help him lead it. But neither of them actually knew Christ personally, and unfortunately when their friend George Whitefield was powerfully converted in early 1735, the Wesley brothers were so busy, or so distracted, that they didn't take the time or effort to grasp precisely what had happened to him. They were excited about his enhanced zeal, but they didn't see how it directly affected them.

The two brilliant and disciplined young men were certainly deeply devoted to serving God, and when they graduated, both were ordained as Anglican ministers like their father. Then they decided to accept an invitation from Georgia governor James Oglethorpe to come to the colony, pastor a church there, and serve as missionaries to the Native Americans. They departed on a ship to the New World on October 14, 1735.

Along the way, the vessel encountered a terrible storm that threatened to sink it. Everyone aboard was terrified—all but a group of Moravian Christians. These Moravian believers didn't seem bothered by the wind or the waves. Rather, they sang songs and remained calm throughout the entire ordeal. The Wesley brothers were intrigued by such depth of faith. They began to get to know the Moravians and spent long hours discussing with them what they believed and how they practiced their faith. It was a relationship that would deeply mark the two men.

The Wesleys reached Savannah, Georgia, on February 8, 1736, and tried to settle into new routines. Charles became a secretary to Governor Oglethorpe. John began pastoring a congregation and trying to convert a tribe of Native Americans to Christ.

From the beginning, everything seemed to go wrong. Few of the roughneck Georgians seemed interested in the Wesleys' highly intellectualized teaching or style of worship. The Indians didn't seem much interested either. As one religious historian noted of Charles, “this well-bred, well-educated, earnest High Churchman was completely out of his element. His experiences, including one Sunday (March 21, 1736) when his sermon was disrupted by gunshots and an irate matron threatened to blow him up as a religious hypocrite, were mostly discouraging. In late July 1736 he resigned his position and by early August was headed back to England.”
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John endured for about another year but fared little better. He couldn't find a way to connect with the people. He couldn't seem to convince them by his preaching, and he found himself embroiled in theological arguments at every turn. “More trouble followed when he fell in love with Sophia Hopkey, the niece of Georgia's chief magistrate. When she married another man, Wesley banned her from Holy Communion, damaging her reputation in the community. His successful romantic rival sued him; but Wesley refused to recognize the authority of the court, and the man who would eventually found a major Protestant denomination in America left Georgia in disgrace on December 2, 1737.”
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