The Secret Place of George Whitefield

George Whitefield was born in Gloucester in 1714, the son of an innkeeper whose livelihood placed the boy in the bustle of a coaching house and the hearing of many stories. The world paraded past the door of the Bell Inn, yet from his earliest days he felt the press of another world. He served at the inn, learned hard work, and tasted the restlessness of youth, but Scripture and conscience pursued him. At Oxford he entered Pembroke College as a servitor, a poor student who worked for his keep. There he met a small society of serious young men that included John and Charles Wesley. They gathered for prayer, Scripture reading, fasting, and visitation of prisoners and the sick. Some mocked them as the Holy Club. Whitefield found in that company a pattern for life, yet his heart still longed for the inward reality of the new birth that he read in the pages of Henry Scougal about the life of God in the soul of man. After prolonged seeking, fasting, and the illness that accompanied his spiritual crisis, he found the mercy he sought. The love of Christ broke upon him, and he would later speak of the change in plain words that echoed across his preaching for the rest of his life. You must be born again.

In 1736 he was ordained deacon in the Church of England by Bishop Benson of Gloucester. His first sermon at St Mary de Crypt was fiery and searching, and the effect was immediate. Some scoffed, many wept, and he sensed that God had set him to plead with consciences rather than court applause. He sailed soon after to the colony of Georgia, where he preached, learned the needs of orphans, and conceived a plan to build a home for them. When he returned to England in 1739 he found many pulpits closed to him. He did not answer refusal with resentment. He answered by carrying the gospel out of doors to those who rarely entered a church. On the commons and in the lanes of Kingswood near Bristol he preached to colliers coming off their shift. He wrote of seeing white gutters made by tears down their black cheeks as the Word pierced hearts. The scene became a sign of what followed. From fields and hillsides to Moorfields and Kennington, from market towns to ports, he lifted his voice and found that God had given him a trumpet that could be heard by thousands.

Whitefield's calling was transatlantic. Between 1739 and 1770 he crossed the ocean again and again, preaching up and down the American seaboard and through Britain and Ireland. In New England during 1740 he preached with a force that helped kindle what became known as the Great Awakening. He stood in Boston Common before multitudes. He preached in Jonathan Edwards's pulpit at Northampton, and Edwards wept as the young Englishman exalted Christ. In Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin tested how far his voice carried and judged that tens of thousands could hear him. Yet Whitefield never counted crowds as evidence that God was at work. He looked for repentance, for faith in the crucified and risen Lord, for reconciled families, for taverns emptied and prayer meetings filled. He looked for the marks of the new birth.

The revival brought controversy. Whitefield held to the doctrines of grace and spoke plainly of the sovereignty of God in salvation. John Wesley preached the love of God with an Arminian accent. The two friends differed and for a time their followers quarrelled. Whitefield refused to let bitterness take root. He declared that he was content that the Lord should choose whom He would to be the instruments of His glory. When pressed to defend his name he answered that the name of Whitefield might die so that the name of Christ might be exalted. He remained an Anglican priest to the end, yet his real parish was wherever sinners gathered and saints prayed. He gave himself to societies that nourished the life of prayer and to field preaching that reached those untouched by ordinary church life.

He was a man of immense exertion and an equally constant inner life. He kept journals and letters that reveal early mornings of Scripture and supplication, long rides turned into seasons of intercession, fasts that quieted his soul before the Lord, and friendships that kept him honest. He prayed before he mounted a platform and after the meeting he prayed with the broken in inquiry times that were not theatrics but mercy. He raised funds again and again for the orphan house in Georgia, which he named Bethesda. The house became both a shelter for children and a burden that drove him to prayer. Here history must be told in full. In pleading for the survival of the orphanage he advocated the legalization of slave labor in Georgia and later owned enslaved people at Bethesda. It stains his record, and later generations rightly grieve it. Whitefield preached to enslaved people and spoke of their souls with the same urgency he brought to any congregation, yet his support of slavery in Georgia cannot be excused. The truth belongs in any faithful telling of his life so that the church learns humility, repentance, and the fear of God.

He poured himself out to the end. On his final day he preached in Exeter in New Hampshire with failing strength yet with eyes bright. That night he reached Newburyport, climbed a staircase with a candle to retire, and paused to speak to those gathered below about the need to keep to Christ. In the early morning hours of September 30, 1770, he entered the presence of the Lord. He was buried beneath the pulpit of the Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, a fitting place for a herald who spent himself that Christ might be heard.