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Each day this Lent we’re looking at major “turning points” in Christian history – moments or seasons in which the story of God’s people took an important and often unexpected turn.
Every schoolchild learns about the Spirit of 1776 – the monumental social and political upheaval that led to the birth of the United States.
The American Revolution featured a galaxy of superstars, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton (who would no doubt have been surprised to learn he would one day be a huge hit on Broadway).
Fewer Americans are aware that 40 years earlier there had been another revolution that profoundly shaped our nation.
It was known as the Great Awakening – a spiritual revival that began in New England and spread throughout the colonies.
The Awakening featured its own cadre of luminaries, including two prominent clergymen: Jonathan Edwards (arguably the greatest theologian ever born on American soil) and a young open-air preacher named George Whitefield (whose name is pronounced “whit” instead of “white”).
A number of historians now include both figures in that special group known as America’s Founders, even though each was gone years before the Declaration of Independence. Edwards died in 1758 and Whitefield left the scene in 1771.
Whitefield, you might recall, was a member of the Oxford Holy Club with John and Charles Wesley. Even though he never surrendered his English citizenship, he spent much of his adult life overseas.
His messages prepared the American colonists to embrace an idea that was found nowhere else on Earth – the radical notion that every human being matters equally to God, regardless of wealth or social standing.
By all accounts, he was a rock star long before Elvis.
He preached to huge crowds. In 1740, when he arrived in Boston at the age of 25, the city boasted about 17,000 residents. Whitefield’s outdoor “congregation” sometimes numbered more than 20,000.
Without the benefit of a sound system, Power Point, or walk-up music, he held his listeners spellbound. In a day in which most preaching was dull to the point of sleep-inducing, Whitefield’s messages literally brought people to their knees. Many of them cried out, groaned, and fainted as they pondered the condition of their souls.
When a Connecticut farmer learned that Whitefield was preaching nearby, he dropped his plow and grabbed his wife. They breathlessly raced to join the crowd, afraid they might not arrive in time to hear the sermon.
Whitefield journeyed from England to the colonies seven times – a voyage across the treacherous North Atlantic which no one took for granted. Even as an outsider, he quickly became the best-known person in America, rivaling even Ben Franklin – the only founder who personally experienced both the Great Awakening and the Revolution.
Since he was a lifelong spiritual skeptic, Franklin provides an interesting test case. Could Whitefield somehow get through to such a hard-boiled agnostic?
Franklin, wondering what all the ruckus was about it, decided to hear the preacher for himself. He stood at the fringes of the crowd. He marveled at Whitefield’s ability to connect with common people.
At the end, when it was time to take a collection for the poor, Franklin – despite his prior resolutions not to get drawn in – found himself reaching for his purse. He even ended up borrowing money from a friend so he could contribute more generously. Whitefield and Franklin, by the way, became friends.
Edwards, for his part, was something of a different creature.
Whereas Whitefield preached outdoors, Jonathan was always under roof. While the Anglican’s sermons were dynamic, Edwards the Puritan read directly from a carefully crafted manuscript in a dull monotone. But the content of his two-hour messages nevertheless stirred the hearts of his listeners.
Christians today sometimes speak of colonial times as if they were a Golden Age of Faith. They weren’t. Church attendance hovered around a paltry 10%.
Then, from the late 1720s through the early 1740s, fresh winds seemed to blow through Edwards’ parish in Massachusetts. “The Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in,” he wrote. In one community after another, people began to crowd into church.
Worshippers who had long prided themselves on sitting stock still during sermons began to cry out for God’s mercy. There were screams and tears and thrashing bodies – the kinds of things that tend to alarm denominational officials. But there was also genuine joy. Outsiders noted, with approval, that gossip and conflict seemed to disappear.
The Great Awakening ended almost as mysteriously as it began. Hundreds of other pastors before that time had preached their hearts out. But few people had responded. Those revivals seemed to fizzle before they even started.
Why were things different with Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield?
Looking back almost 300 years, we can say that it was apparently the right time. It was God’s time. It was the beginning of an age when the simplest farmer began to believe that his opinion mattered, and a milkmaid could dream of making a meaningful contribution to God’s kingdom. Whitefield and Edwards made it clear that spiritual maturity did not come down to breeding or education or religious tradition.
Knowing and serving God were within reach of everyone. That was a genuine turning point in the history of Christianity, and it helped prepare Americans to imagine a whole new kind of country.
Carefully crafted sermons and theological treatises weren’t the only gifts bestowed by Jonathan Edwards. He and his wife Sarah had eleven children.
This was the pre-Pampers, pre-microwave oven, pre-Disney-movies-on-the-tablet-to-keep-them-occupied era. There were surely plenty of days in the midst of all those runny noses and sibling quarrels in which Jonathan and Sarah were tempted to ask themselves, “Is all of this really worth it? Does it really matter whether or not we try to corral these kids today to keep them on the right path?”
History allows us to see what they couldn’t see. By the year 1900 the Edwards family had grown to include 1,400 descendants, among them:
- 13 college presidents
- 65 professors
- 100 lawyers (OK, so their parenting wasn’t perfect)
- 30 judges
- 66 physicians
- 80 prominent public officials
- 3 governors
- 3 U.S. senators
- 1 Vice-President
A great deal of life is just pressing on – getting from this day to the next day.
We do the best we can for God’s sake. And we leave the results to him.
That sort of faithfulness is one sure way to experience our own great awakenings.