The Great Awakenings
- When
- 1730–1840 AD
- Where
- Britain and North America
- Kind
- Revival
Waves of revival preaching produced the Methodist movement and, later, the Baptist and Restorationist expansion in America.
The revivals turned on preaching for an experience of conversion that a person could date, delivered in the open air to crowds no building could hold. Whitefield drew tens of thousands and Jonathan Edwards gave the movement its theological account; Wesley's organisation of converts into classes and circuits is what let it outlast its preachers. The second wave, from about 1800, spread Baptist and Methodist churches across the American frontier and produced the Restorationist movement. Its social consequences ran in both directions: the revivals fed abolitionism and the temperance and missionary societies, and the same camp meetings produced the segregated denominations of the following century.
Bodies it bears on
Began here
Party to it
Who stands here
- Jonathan Edwards
1703–1758
Gave the revival its theological account, and its criteria
- John Wesley
1703–1791
Organised the converts into classes, which is why it outlasted its preachers
- Charles Wesley
1707–1788
Taught it its theology in something over six thousand hymns
- George Whitefield
1714–1770
Preached to the crowds that made it intercolonial
- Richard Allen
1760–1831
Came out of it, and founded the first Black denomination in the United States
Either side of it
The whole timeline, from the apostolic communities to the present.