The Great Awakening and the Methodists

In Aldersgate Street

John Wesley (1703–1791) was a priest of the Church of England. In 1735 he went as a missionary to the colony of Georgia in North America, and early in 1738 he came home disappointed. On the evening of 24 May that year, as his Journal tells it:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. 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.

Wesley, Journal

The gospel Luther had grasped at Wittenberg reached the heart of an English priest two centuries later (see Wittenberg, 1517). What that night meant and what Wesley taught are the Theology course's Wesley and the Methodist movement.

The next February his friend from Oxford, George Whitefield (1714–1770), finding church pulpits closed to him, began preaching in the open air to the coal miners of Kingswood near Bristol. Wesley, who shrank from preaching outside a church building, preached in the open for the first time near Bristol on 2 April 1739. Paul says that "faith comes by hearing" (Romans 10:17), and miners and labourers who never came to church heard the word in the fields.

Classes, preachers on horseback, and hymns

Wesley did not leave the converts alone but gathered them into societies. In Bristol in 1742, members were put in groups of about twelve to collect a penny a week toward the debt on their meeting house, and this became the class meeting, in which a leader watched over each member's soul week by week. He appointed lay preachers and from 1744 met them every year in conference. For half a century Wesley himself rode on horseback through England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, preaching in fields and market places, sometimes beaten and driven off by mobs, and his preachers rode their appointed rounds too.

His brother Charles Wesley (1707–1788) sang the revival in thousands of hymns. One he wrote in 1739 to mark the first anniversary of his conversion is sung today as "O for a thousand tongues to sing", in Korean churches as well. Paul writes, "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17), and John Wesley's note is, "Only the power that makes a world can make a Christian" Wesley.

Wesley remained a priest of the Church of England all his life. But after American independence the Methodists there organized a Methodist church at Baltimore in 1784, and circuit riders such as Francis Asbury carried it across the frontier on horseback. In Britain too the Methodists gradually became a church of their own after Wesley's death in 1791.

The Great Awakening in America

Across the Atlantic, in 1734 and 1735 revival came to the church of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Congregational pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts. His A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God of 1737 was read on both sides of the ocean as a forerunner of the Great Awakening. Whitefield came to America again in 1739 and until the next year travelled from Georgia to New England, preaching in fields and squares to crowds of thousands. This revival, spreading through the colonies around 1740, is called the Great Awakening. Churches divided between those who welcomed the travelling preachers and those who opposed them, and the Presbyterians split in 1741, to reunite in 1758.

The revival's preaching reached Africans brought as slaves as well. Whitefield preached to them, and in 1740 published an open letter to the planters of the southern colonies rebuking them for their cruelty to their slaves. Yet he did not oppose slavery itself; later he urged that slavery be allowed in Georgia, and used enslaved people to support his orphanage there.

Even so, Black Christians founded churches of their own. In the 1770s a Black Baptist church gathered at Silver Bluff in South Carolina, and George Liele, a preacher freed by his master, preached in Georgia and later carried the gospel to Jamaica. In Philadelphia Richard Allen, born enslaved, who had bought his freedom and become a Methodist preacher, left a church whose white members had pulled Black worshippers from their knees in prayer; in 1794 he founded Bethel church, and in 1816 became the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen.

Fruits and critics, and today

The revival bore much fruit. Great numbers joined the churches, colleges were founded, such as the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1746, and missionaries went out to the native peoples.

But criticism came too. Charles Chauncy, a Boston minister, in Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743) judged that much of the revival was heated feeling rather than true religion, and was troubled by disorder in worship and by itinerants who branded ministers unconverted when they could not tell of a conversion experience; a mind enlightened by the truth, he held, not stirred passions, must lead in religion. Some did go too far: James Davenport, who burned books at New London in 1743, publicly confessed his wrong the next year.

Edwards neither rejected the revival nor approved all of it. In A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections of 1746 he discerned that true religion lies much in holy affections and that their truth shows in the fruit of life. His twelfth sign reads: "Gracious and holy affections have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice" Religious Affections III.12.1. His teaching is the Theology course's Pietism and the Great Awakening.

The revival had the shape of Pentecost:

When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and asked Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Acts 2:37-38

In a valley full of dry bones Ezekiel was asked, "Son of man, can these bones come to life?" (Ezekiel 37:3). He prophesied as he was told:

So I prophesied as He had commanded me, and the breath entered them, and they came to life and stood on their feet — a vast army.

Ezekiel 37:10

Wesley reads the vision as a threefold resurrection: of souls, of the body at the great day, and "The resurrection of the church from an afflicted state, to liberty and peace" Wesley. The eighteenth-century revivals show that as the word is preached and heard, the Spirit brings a dry church to life. They show too that the fruit must be judged by changed lives, not by the strength of feeling; that converts must be nurtured in small groups; and that beside preachers who used slaves stood churches founded by the enslaved, which we must remember. The next lesson, The century of modern missions, follows the age of missions that grew out of these revivals.

Practice