The Great Awakening

“Truly, truly, I say to you, Unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God… You must be born anew.” — John 3:3, 7

Background

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Christianity in colonial America and Britain looked strong on the outside and was growing cold within. The Enlightenment had pushed deism into the educated classes; Puritan piety had cooled into the compromise of the Half-Way Covenant; Church of England parish life had largely become moralism; the Welsh and Scottish nonconformists were strong on doctrine but quiet on the call to conversion. (First Great Awakening — Wikipedia)

The revival did not begin with any one man. It broke out in several places almost at the same time.

Theodorus Frelinghuysen, a Dutch Reformed minister, had been preaching personal conversion among Dutch settlers in New Jersey’s Raritan Valley from the 1720s onward — historians sometimes call him “the father of the Great Awakening.”

William Tennent Sr. founded the “Log College” at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania (c. 1727), which trained about twenty Presbyterian revivalist ministers — including his son Gilbert Tennent, whose 1740 sermon The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry shook the Presbyterian church.

In Wales, Howell Harris was converted in 1735 and began open-air preaching the same year; Daniel Rowland experienced his evangelical awakening in 1735 as well. Their parallel work prepared in Wales a soil that would one day burn again — the same ground on which the 1904 Welsh Revival would later stand.

What happened

1734–1735: The Northampton Revival

In Northampton, Massachusetts, under the pulpit of the Congregational minister Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the fire was lit. From the winter of 1734 to the spring of 1735, more than three hundred members of his congregation made public professions of faith, and the revival spread through about twenty-five towns along the Connecticut River Valley. (First Great Awakening — Wikipedia) (A Faithful Narrative — Jonathan-Edwards.org)

Edwards documented the revival in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (London, 1737; Boston, 1738), describing the three stages he had observed: conviction, conversion, and consolation. The book crossed the Atlantic — Whitefield, Wesley, and ministers across Europe read it and recognized that what was happening under their feet was not only their own. (A Faithful Narrative — Wikipedia)

Edwards wrote:

“There was scarcely a single person in the town, either old or young, that was left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world… The town seemed to be full of the presence of God.” — Edwards, A Faithful Narrative (Jonathan-Edwards.org)

May 24, 1738: Wesley’s Aldersgate Experience

John Wesley (1703–1791) returned to London discouraged after the failure of his Georgia mission. He went reluctantly to a Moravian Brethren society meeting that evening. Someone was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. Wesley wrote in his journal:

“About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me, that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” — John Wesley’s journal, May 24, 1738 (Wesley’s Journal — CCEL)

This moment became the engine of the Methodist movement. In his lifetime Wesley rode about 250,000 miles on horseback and preached over 40,000 sermons.

1739–1741: Whitefield’s American Tours

George Whitefield (1714–1770) — Anglican deacon (ordained priest in 1739) and companion of John and Charles Wesley in the Oxford “Holy Club” — crossed to America. His message had one unbroken note: “You must be born again.” When a woman once asked him why he preached so often on John 3:7, he answered, “Because, dear woman, you must be born again.” (Banner of Truth — George Whitefield)

In a single year Whitefield rode 5,000 miles on horseback and preached more than three hundred and fifty sermons across the colonies. Open-air gatherings in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York sometimes reached fifteen thousand — assemblies without precedent in colonial America at the time. It is estimated that more than half the population of the colonies heard him preach in person during his lifetime. (Mapping the Great Awakening — SMU)

The Anglican pulpits mostly closed to Whitefield, but the Presbyterians and Congregationalists opened theirs. Driven outside the parish walls, “open-air evangelism” entered the practice of evangelicalism.

July 8, 1741: Enfield

In Enfield, Connecticut, Edwards preached his most famous sermon — “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. His text was Deuteronomy 32:35: “Their foot shall slide in due time.” The eyewitness Stephen Williams recorded that the wailing and crying for mercy of the congregation grew so loud that Edwards had to ask several times for quiet before he could go on. (Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God — Blue Letter Bible)

From the sermon:

“There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God… The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire… The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart.” — Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (Blue Letter Bible)

He closed:

“Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come.”

1742: The Cambuslang Work in Scotland

In Cambuslang, near Glasgow, a parallel revival broke out in the parish shepherded by William McCulloch. When Whitefield preached at the August communion in 1742, the crowd was estimated at thirty thousand. The revival spread from Cambuslang to Kilsyth and the surrounding region, and historians treat it as the Scottish front of the same trans-Atlantic awakening. (First Great Awakening — Wikipedia)

Key figures

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) — Congregational minister at Northampton; philosopher-theologian; author of A Faithful Narrative, Religious Affections, and The Life of David Brainerd. The intellectual center of the Awakening.
George Whitefield (1714–1770) — Anglican-ordained itinerant; the Awakening’s chief evangelist; preached about 18,000 sermons in his lifetime. Went to be with the Lord on September 30, 1770, in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
John Wesley (1703–1791) — co-founder of the Methodist movement; Aldersgate (1738) was the beginning of his service.
Charles Wesley (1707–1788) — the poet of Methodism; wrote over six thousand hymns, including “And Can It Be,” “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.”
Theodorus Frelinghuysen — Dutch Reformed forerunner in New Jersey.
Gilbert Tennent and William Tennent — Presbyterian, the Log College ministerial training tradition.
Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland — leaders of the parallel Welsh Methodist revival.
James Davenport — the later excesses of his ministry became a cautionary mirror.
Samuel Davies — Presbyterian minister who preached the gospel to enslaved African Americans in Virginia.
Charles Chauncy — minister of Boston’s First Church; leader of the “Old Lights” opposition to the revival; published Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion (1743), criticizing the revival’s emotional excess.

Outcome and impact

In numbers

Edwards estimated about twenty-five to fifty thousand new members were added to the Congregational churches of New England alone. By Wesley’s death in 1791, English Methodism had 71,668 members; American Methodism, 43,265. (First Great Awakening — Wikipedia)

Denominational fracture

In 1741 the Presbyterian Synod split into the “Old Side” (anti-revival) and the “New Side” (pro-revival), and was not reunited until 1758. The Congregational churches of New England fractured into “Old Lights” and “New Lights,” producing about ninety-eight schisms.

The rise of new colleges

Shut out of Harvard and Yale (which they regarded as compromised), the New Lights founded their own colleges:

Princeton (1746, originally the College of New Jersey) — Presbyterian
Brown (1764) — Baptist
Rutgers (1766, originally Queen’s College) — Dutch Reformed
Dartmouth (1769) — Congregational

(Great Awakening — History.com)

The Awakening shattered an assumption — that faith was something inherited from one’s parents. It made conversion a personal, immediate experience open to all — including women, the young, enslaved African Americans, and Native Americans. In Virginia the first sustained gospel work among enslaved people appeared. Before the Revolution there were already Black Baptist churches in Petersburg, Virginia.

Theologically

The Awakening crystallized Anglo-American evangelicalism — a movement defined not by denomination but by four convictions: the necessity of conversion (the new birth), the authority of Scripture, the substitutionary death of Christ, and active gospel witness. This framework remained the dominant shape of Protestantism for the next two centuries.

The missionary opening

Edwards’ edited Life of David Brainerd (1749) became one of the most influential missionary biographies in history — William Carey and the rise of the modern missionary movement were ignited from that book.

Connection to the Lord’s recovery

The First Great Awakening holds a clear place on the line of the Lord’s recovery as taught by Brother Watchman Nee and Brother Witness Lee. They saw the Lord, after the degradation of the church, restoring lost truths through a sequence of movements: through Martin Luther, the recovery of “justification by faith”; through the Anabaptists, the recovery of “baptism after salvation”; through the Moravian Brethren and Zinzendorf, the recovery of “world mission” — and then through John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield in the Great Awakening, the recovery of “salvation, eradication of sin, sanctification, and open-air preaching.” (The Lord’s Recovery — Wikipedia)

Brother Watchman Nee

Around 1925, Brother Watchman Nee carefully studied Methodist holiness teaching. His conclusion was that what Wesley called “Christian perfection” was not really sanctification but a form of “sinless perfectionism”; that the Brethren’s teaching on sanctification was more accurate than Wesley’s — but still too objective, only reaching the level of positional change. Out of this assessment Brother Nee developed his own vision: sanctification must be dispositional, not only positional — the work of the indwelling Christ in the believer, carried out through the human spirit. (Watchman Nee — faithsaves.net)

This means Brother Nee genuinely received from Wesley the burden for sanctification and the experiential dimension of the Christian life — but rebuilt it on the foundation of “Christ as life” rather than “moral improvement.” The Awakening’s recovery of “personal conversion” and “religion felt in the heart” is one of the spiritual rivers behind Brother Nee’s writing of The Spiritual Man (1928) and The Normal Christian Life (1957).

Brother Witness Lee

Brother Witness Lee listed Whitefield’s recovery of open-air preaching as one of the concrete steps in the Lord’s recovery. Whitefield’s pattern — an Anglican-ordained deacon driven outside the parish walls when those pulpits closed to him — foreshadowed the recovery’s later practice of preaching the gospel outside the institutional church structures.

As for the new birth — the central message of the Awakening, “You must be born again” — this is the very truth Brother Nee took up in his first major work The Spiritual Man, and which Brother Lee developed throughout his ministry: the human spirit must be regenerated. The Awakening did not invent this truth, but it put it back at the center of the pulpit for the modern age.

Cautions

But Brother Nee and Brother Lee did not receive everything in the Awakening uncritically.

They held reservations about certain of Wesley’s sanctification formulations, about emotional excess, and about the revivalist tendency to treat conversion alone as the full goal of God’s salvation. In their view, regeneration is the door — the transformation by the life of Christ and the building up of the Body of Christ are the goal. The Awakening recovered the door; the Lord’s recovery presses on — to the consummation of the New Jerusalem.

Cautions left behind

Honestly looked at, the Awakening left two cautions worth holding:

Edwards’ Calvinism and Wesley’s Arminianism diverged systematically. They never met in person. In 1740 Whitefield — a Calvinist — broke publicly with Wesley over predestination; but they kept their personal friendship, and at Whitefield’s funeral in 1770 Wesley preached the sermon. The unity of the Awakening was not in systematic theology but in the gospel as experienced. (Edwards vs. Whitefield — Jonathan Edwards Studies)
The revival had its extremes. James Davenport’s later ministry slid into book-burning and accusations against fellow workers — he later publicly repented. Chauncy’s wholesale criticism of “religious enthusiasm” was too broad, but not entirely without ground. Edwards himself wrote Religious Affections (1746) precisely to discern true revival from false — a book the Lord’s recovery has reason to value.

Significance

What the Awakening did was not invent something new. It put some old, forgotten things back at the center of the pulpit —

A thirty-one-year-old pastor speaking to his Northampton congregation that “the town seemed to be full of the presence of God”; An Anglican deacon in Boston crying out under the open sky to fifteen thousand, “You must be born again”; A thirty-four-year-old failed missionary on Aldersgate Street hearing Luther’s preface and feeling his heart strangely warmed; A sermon in Enfield where the listeners wept so hard the preacher had to ask them to be silent.

On the line of the Lord’s recovery, the Awakening is this step: the recovery of salvation, the eradication of sin, sanctification, and open-air preaching — it passed the torch to the next runner. Going further: through the Brethren, the Lord recovered the truth of the church; through the Welsh Revival and the “Overcomer” movement, He recovered the discernment of spirit and soul and spiritual warfare; finally, through Brother Watchman Nee and Brother Witness Lee, He recovered Christ as life, the church as the Body of Christ, and the center of God’s economy.

Every step is necessary; no step is the end.

“Therefore let us also, having so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, put away every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and run with endurance the race which is set before us, looking away unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith.” — Hebrews 12:1–2