George Whitefield

George Whitefield (1714–1770) was the greatest evangelist of the eighteenth century and one of the most extraordinary preachers in the history of Christianity. Born in Gloucester, the son of an innkeeper, he worked his way through Pembroke College, Oxford, as a servitor — a student who paid his fees by waiting on wealthier students. At Oxford he encountered the Holy Club of John and Charles Wesley, was converted through a long spiritual struggle, and emerged from it with a settled assurance of salvation and a zeal for preaching that he would sustain for the rest of his life.

He was ordained in 1736 and immediately discovered what would become clear over forty years of ministry: that he possessed a natural gift for preaching that was, in the judgment of contemporaries from Benjamin Franklin to David Garrick, utterly unparalleled. His voice carried to tens of thousands in the open air; his dramatic delivery, his mastery of Scripture, and his passionate appeals moved audiences to weeping and conviction wherever he preached. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and preached an estimated 18,000 sermons — often multiple times a day.

Whitefield and John Wesley parted in the early 1740s over Whitefield's Calvinism: he could not follow Wesley into Arminianism, and the two conducted a pamphlet controversy that, to their mutual credit, never broke their personal friendship. Whitefield's Calvinism was warm, earnest, and entirely compatible with the most urgent evangelistic appeal — he believed in election precisely because he trusted that God would honor his preaching with conversions. He died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and was buried beneath the pulpit of Old South Presbyterian Church.