The son of innkeepers in Gloucester, England, George Whitefield had neither the pedigree nor the fortune that might have foretold what he would become: the most listened to preacher of the eighteenth century, able to gather crowds in the open air long before any microphone existed.
Born in 1714, he studied at the Crypt School and later entered Oxford, where he joined the small devotional group led by John and Charles Wesley, known as the Holy Club. There he began to pursue, with discipline, a faith he still felt was distant and merely formal.
The turning point came around 1735, when he read Henry Scougal’s work on the life of God in the human soul, a recommendation from Charles Wesley. Whitefield described the experience as a new birth, a theme that would mark all his preaching from then on.
Ordained a deacon in 1736, he preached his first sermon in the Gloucester church where he had been baptized. A few years later, in 1739, he began preaching outdoors to miners in Bristol, breaking with the custom of confining preaching to the walls of a church.
That decision thrust him into the center of the Great Awakening, the evangelical renewal movement that swept through England and the American colonies. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and preached, by historians’ estimates, to millions of listeners over his lifetime.
In Georgia, he founded the Bethesda Orphanage in 1740, a work to which he devoted much of his energy and resources. It was also in this context that he committed one of his gravest failures: he came to publicly advocate for the legalization of slavery in the colony, convinced it would financially sustain the orphanage, and he himself came to own enslaved people, in contradiction to the gospel he preached.
He maintained a lasting friendship with Benjamin Franklin, who admired his oratory without sharing his faith, and had deep theological disagreements with John Wesley over predestination, though this never entirely broke the affection between the two former Oxford companions.
He died in 1770 in Newburyport, in what is now the state of Massachusetts, one day after preaching outdoors for the last time. His life marked the birth of the transatlantic evangelical revival which, with its lights and shadows, still inspires public preaching and mass evangelism today.
