Evangelist
🇬🇧George Whitefield
1714–1770 · British · Evangelist & Preacher of the First Great Awakening
“God forbid that I should travel with anybody a quarter of an hour without speaking of Christ to them.”
Biography
George Whitefield was born on December 27, 1714, in Gloucester, England, the son of an innkeeper. Working as a servitor at Pembroke College, Oxford, he joined John and Charles Wesley's Holy Club, where he experienced an evangelical conversion in 1735. Ordained as an Anglican deacon in 1736, his first sermon reportedly caused fifteen people to go mad—a charge he joked about as evidence of its power. He pioneered outdoor preaching in England and Wales before making his first trip to America in 1738. His return visit in 1739–40 ignited the First Great Awakening, the most significant religious revival in colonial American history. He preached to staggering crowds—in Philadelphia, Boston, and Savannah—sometimes numbering twenty to thirty thousand people at a single gathering, in an age without microphones. Benjamin Franklin, a skeptic, attended one meeting intending to give nothing and emptied his pockets by the end. Whitefield made seven trips to the American colonies in all. He was a Calvinist in theology, eventually diverging from the Wesleys over predestination. He founded the Bethesda Orphan House in Georgia (1740), one of the earliest charitable institutions in America. He died on September 30, 1770, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, while on his seventh American tour.
Key Works
Whitefield's published sermons, widely distributed in pamphlet form on both sides of the Atlantic, made him one of the first transatlantic media celebrities. His journal accounts of his revivals and travels were widely read and shaped the genre of evangelical memoir. The Bethesda Orphan House in Savannah, Georgia (1740) was one of the earliest charitable institutions in colonial America. His outdoor preaching campaigns in England in 1739, initially held at the Kingswood collieries near Bristol among miners, helped break down the barriers between formal church settings and popular evangelism. His partnership with the Countess of Huntingdon extended his ministry to the British aristocracy.
Legacy
George Whitefield is considered the first great trans-Atlantic religious celebrity and the spark that ignited the First Great Awakening in both Britain and America. His outdoor preaching model was adopted by Wesley, Finney, Moody, and virtually every major revivalist who followed. Scholars estimate he may have preached to more people than any individual before the age of radio. He helped establish the tradition of non-denominational popular evangelism. His influence on American religious identity in the colonial period was immense, and he is credited with contributing to the spiritual formation of the founding generation.