George Whitefield
- Lived
- 1714–1770
- Era
- Modern
- Where
- England and North America
- Tradition
- Methodist / Wesleyan
Preaching to crowds no building could hold
An innkeeper's son from Gloucester with a voice Benjamin Franklin measured by walking away from it until he could no longer hear, and estimated could reach thirty thousand people. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and preached perhaps eighteen thousand times.
Why it matters
He was the engine of the Great Awakening in America, and the first genuinely intercolonial celebrity, drawing crowds in every colony and creating something like a shared American public before there was a nation. He and Wesley split over predestination and remained friends. He also lobbied successfully to legalise slavery in Georgia to staff his orphanage, and owned slaves — the clearest case in this period of a revival preacher whose gospel did not reach his own practice.
In the record
-
1730–1840 AD Revival
The Great Awakenings
Preached to the crowds that made it intercolonial
All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.