The Great Awakening was a sweeping revival of Christianity that spread through Britain and its American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, transforming lifeless churches into communities ablaze with conviction, conversion, and joy. It was not organized by any council or denomination; it broke out in scattered places almost at once, carried by a handful of preachers and, beneath them, by countless praying believers. Within a few years it had reshaped the spiritual landscape of a continent. Understanding what happened — and why — is one of the clearest windows we have into how God revives his people.
The prophet Habakkuk had prayed for exactly such a season: “O Lord, revive your work in the midst of the years; in the midst of the years make it known; in wrath remember mercy” (Habakkuk 3:2). The Great Awakening was one of history’s great answers to that prayer — and its story still teaches us what revival is, where it comes from, and what it leaves behind.
A church asleep
By the early 1700s much of the Protestant world had grown cold. Churches were full but formal; religion had hardened into respectable habit; the New Birth of which Jesus spoke was little preached and less experienced. Many who sat in the pews had never been converted at all. Into this drowsy scene God began, quietly at first, to breathe.
The revival did not begin with a strategy but with a hunger. In Northampton, Massachusetts, a young pastor named Jonathan Edwards watched an ordinary congregation suddenly gripped, around 1734–35, by an overwhelming concern for their souls. “The town seemed to be full of the presence of God,” he wrote; conversions multiplied until the whole community was changed. Edwards recorded it soberly and carefully, and his account spread — showing others that God was on the move.
The preachers God used
The Awakening produced no single leader, but several remarkable men whose ministries God set on fire. Jonathan Edwards, one of the finest minds America has produced, preached the holiness of God and the peril and glory of the soul with piercing seriousness — his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” became the most famous of the era, delivered as strong men wept and clung to the pillars of the meeting house.
George Whitefield, an English evangelist with an astonishing voice and a heart for the lost, became the movement’s great itinerant. He crossed the Atlantic repeatedly and preached in the open air to crowds of thousands who could not fit in any building, from London commons to American fields. Where Edwards was the theologian of the revival, Whitefield was its herald, carrying the message of the New Birth across an ocean and binding the scattered awakenings into one great movement.
Across the same years in England, John and Charles Wesley led a parallel revival that became Methodism — field preaching, disciplined fellowship, and hymns that put the gospel on the lips of the poor. And in the American forests, a frail young missionary named David Brainerd poured out his brief life among the Native peoples, praying with such agony and preaching with such tenderness that a remarkable awakening broke out among the Delaware. His diary, published after his early death from tuberculosis, became one of the most influential accounts of a praying life ever written.
What actually happened
What united these varied ministries was a single message and a single result. The message was the New Birth — that religion is not mere morality or membership but a supernatural change wrought by God, and that a man must be born again to see the kingdom (John 3:8). The result was conviction, conversion, and transformation on a vast scale.
Contemporary accounts describe crowds pierced to the heart, deep weeping over sin, and then overflowing joy in forgiveness. Whole towns were altered: taverns emptied, quarrels were reconciled, family worship revived, and the Scriptures were devoured. It was as the Psalmist sang after a returning captivity: “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy... The Lord has done great things for us; we are glad” (Psalm 126:1–3). And it bore out God’s ancient promise: “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring” (Isaiah 44:3).
Not without controversy
Like every great work of God among fallen people, the Awakening had its excesses and its critics. Some itinerant preachers grew wild and censorious; some meetings saw disorder that owed more to human emotion than to the Spirit. Ministers divided over it: the “New Lights” welcomed the revival as a genuine work of God, while the “Old Lights” distrusted its fervor and disorder. Into this dispute Edwards brought his gift of careful discernment, writing to distinguish the true work of the Spirit from its counterfeits and excesses — insisting that the presence of some disorder no more disproved the revival than the absence of it would have proved it.
His conclusion has served the church ever since: judge a revival not by its heat but by its fruit — by whether it exalts Christ, humbles sinners, honors the Scriptures, and produces lasting holiness and love. Measured so, the Awakening was unmistakably the work of God, whatever human frailty ran alongside it. The lesson is worth keeping: we need not defend every excess to recognize a genuine outpouring, nor reject the whole because of the froth at its edges.
The Second Great Awakening — and the awakenings since
The fire did not die with that first generation. Around the turn of the nineteenth century a Second Great Awakening swept the American frontier through camp meetings and fervent preaching, and later through the labors of evangelists like Charles Finney, whose Lectures on Revivals of Religion shaped how a whole century thought about the subject. Finney insisted, sometimes too confidently, that revival follows when God’s people meet God’s conditions of humbling and prayer — and whatever the debates about his emphasis, the awakenings of his day were real and far-reaching.
Nor did revival stop there. A great prayer revival swept America and beyond in 1857–58, born in noonday prayer meetings. Wales was shaken again in 1904. And in the twentieth century the East African Revival ran for decades through Uganda, Rwanda, and beyond. Each was distinct, yet each bore the same marks: desperate prayer beforehand, deep conviction of sin, and a lasting harvest of holiness and mission afterward. The pattern is the one Zechariah named: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).
What the Great Awakening still teaches us
Several lessons stand out for anyone who longs to see God move again. First, revival is God’s sovereign gift — no one planned or produced it, and its suddenness left observers no doubt that God, not man, was the author. As Jesus said, “The wind blows where it wishes... So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). We cannot manufacture the wind.
Second, God chose to work through prayer and preaching, through ordinary means faithfully used by hungry people. The awakenings were cradled in the intercession of believers whose names history forgot, and carried by the plain preaching of Christ crucified. Third, the fruit was moral and lasting: not mere excitement, but converted lives, reformed communities, and a fresh surge of missions that would carry the gospel to the ends of the earth. The modern missionary movement was, in large part, a child of these revivals.
There is a fourth lesson, often overlooked: the Awakening overflowed into mission. The generation warmed by its fire looked out on a world without Christ and could not stay home. David Brainerd’s diary set countless later missionaries on fire; the modern missionary movement that carried the gospel across the globe drew much of its zeal from these revivals and their children. A truly awakened church does not curve inward on its own experiences; it lifts its eyes to the fields. Jesus said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:37–38) — and revival is God’s way of answering that prayer, thrusting out laborers made willing by a fresh sight of his glory.
Underneath it all lies a promise we can lean our whole weight upon: God’s word does not fail. “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose” (Isaiah 55:11). The preachers of the Awakening simply proclaimed Christ crucified and risen, and God honored his own word with power. That word has lost none of its force.
And so the Great Awakening leaves us not with mere history but with hope and a prayer. What God did once he can do again, for he does not change. The same Spirit who fell on Northampton and moved through Whitefield’s crowds is the Spirit promised to all who ask (Luke 11:13). The Psalmist’s cry is as fitting on our lips as it was on theirs: “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:6). And God’s answer still stands: “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh” (Joel 2:28).