Banned from church pulpits, George Whitefield preached to 50,000 in fields
In February 1739 parish priests in Bath and Bristol barred George Whitefield from their churches as a dangerous enthusiast. He went outside instead, preaching to coal miners at Kingswood. Within a week crowds of 10,000 gathered; by May, London audiences reached 50,000. Open-air revival was reshaping Protestantism on both sides of the Atlantic.
The movement, called the Great Awakening in America and the Evangelical Revival in Britain, swept Britain and its thirteen colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. It drew on Puritanism, Pietism and Presbyterianism, but its leaders, Whitefield, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, stressed something that crossed denominational lines: conversion as a new birth felt in the heart, not merely agreement with correct doctrine, and an expectation that believers could be assured of salvation.
Continental Pietism prepared the ground. The Saxon nobleman Nicolaus Zinzendorf invited refugee Moravians onto his estate in 1722, creating the community of Herrnhut, which spread societies to England. Wesley met Moravians on a failed mission to Georgia and came home doubting his own faith, writing that he had gone to convert others without ever being converted himself. In May 1738, at a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London, he felt transformed while hearing Luther's preface to Romans read aloud.
Whitefield was the showman. Converted in 1735 after reading the Scottish theologian Henry Scougal, he preached with tears and impersonations of Bible characters and promoted his meetings with newspaper advertisements, becoming a celebrity before he sailed for Georgia in 1737. Wesley was the organiser. Initially uneasy with outdoor preaching, he preached to about 3,000 people near Bristol on April 2, 1739, and went on to build societies divided into small classes where members confessed to one another, led by lay preachers. When he died in 1791, Methodists numbered roughly 71,668 in England, plus 43,265 across the Atlantic.
The revival also divided. Critics accused it of fanaticism and of letting uneducated men preach, and mobs sometimes attacked converts. In the colonies it split Congregational and Presbyterian churches while strengthening Methodists and Baptists. Preachers aimed to reach everyone regardless of race or status, and many enslaved and free Black people in the South became Christians. Wales had already begun its own revival in 1735 under Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland.
Source: First Great Awakening
