From the Bell Inn to the Open Field

He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes. 1 SAMUEL 2:8

A boy at an inn. George Whitefield was born in December 1714 at the Bell Inn in Gloucester, where his parents kept the house. His father died when he was two. His mother struggled to keep the business going, and the boy’s schooling was broken off while he was still in his teens so that he could help in the inn. He later described himself in those years as a common drawer, carrying drink and cleaning rooms. He was quick, restless, fond of the stage, and by his own account no stranger to the sins of a lively boy. But there were already signs of something else: he read his Bible at odd hours, and he tried his hand at writing sermons.

A servitor at Oxford. In 1732, through the help of friends, he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, as a servitor — the lowest rank of undergraduate, who paid for his education by waiting on wealthier students. At Oxford he met Charles Wesley, and through him the small, mocked society of earnest young men that the university called the Holy Club, led by Charles’s brother John. They fasted, prayed by rule, received the sacrament weekly and visited the prisons. Whitefield threw himself into all of it and more.

The long road to peace. Charles Wesley lent him a book by the Scottish divine Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man, and it undid him. Scougal taught that true religion is not a round of outward duties but the life of God within, union with Him in the soul. Whitefield saw at once that he did not have it, and set out to get it the only way he knew — by effort. He fasted until he was weak, prayed for hours in the cold, gave away what little he had and denied himself every comfort. His health broke. And then, in 1735, at the end of his own strength, he cast himself on Christ, and peace came. He always spoke of it afterwards as the day his burden fell away, and every sermon he preached for the rest of his life was, in a sense, an attempt to hand that day to someone else.

Ordination and fame. In June 1736 Bishop Martin Benson ordained him deacon in Gloucester Cathedral. He was twenty-one. His first sermon, in the church where he had been baptised, was on the necessity of religious society, and it caused a stir. Within a year he was the most talked-about young preacher in England. Crowds filled the London churches to hear him, and his sermon on the new birth was printed and passed from hand to hand. He sailed for the new colony of Georgia in 1738, stayed some months, and returned to be ordained priest in January 1739.

Into the fields. By then many pulpits were closed to him. His insistence that baptised churchgoers must be born again, and his pointed words about clergy who did not preach it, had made him unwelcome. In February 1739, near Bristol, he went out to Kingswood, where the colliers lived — men whom the churches had largely left alone — and preached to them in the open air. Within weeks the crowds numbered thousands. He urged John Wesley to come and take up the work in Bristol, and Wesley, after some hesitation, did. The Evangelical Revival had found its method.

The Great Awakening. In 1739 and 1740 Whitefield travelled through the American colonies from Georgia to New England, preaching almost daily. In Philadelphia the printer Benjamin Franklin heard him and became his friend and publisher. Franklin, who never shared his faith, recorded in his Autobiography how he once went to hear him resolved to give nothing to the orphan house, and came away having emptied his pocket into the collection. In New England Whitefield preached in Boston and visited Jonathan Edwards at Northampton. Everywhere he went, the revivals that had begun here and there were joined together. He was, perhaps, the first person known by name to the whole of colonial America.

Bethesda. In March 1740 he began building an orphan house near Savannah, which he called Bethesda, the house of mercy. For thirty years he raised money for it on both sides of the ocean. Its story, which includes the gravest failure of his life, belongs to chapter sixteen.

Friends and division. His friendship with John Wesley suffered a serious breach in 1740 and 1741 over predestination; Wesley preached against it and Whitefield, a convinced Calvinist, answered him. For a time the Methodist movement divided. But the two men were reconciled in heart, preached for one another again, and remained friends to the end. Whitefield never founded a denomination of his own. In England he preached at his Tabernacle in Moorfields and later at a chapel in Tottenham Court Road, and he served for many years as chaplain to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, whose drawing room became another kind of pulpit.

Marriage and loss. In 1741 he married Elizabeth James, a widow, in Wales. Their only child, a son, died in infancy in 1744. It was not, by most accounts, an easy marriage, for Whitefield was almost never at home, and he did not pretend to be anything but a travelling evangelist. His wife died in 1768.

Scotland and the long years. He visited Scotland many times, preaching in Glasgow, Edinburgh and at the great communion gatherings at Cambuslang in 1742. He crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, seven journeys to America in all. His friend Henry Venn said that for many years he preached forty hours a week and more. He grew heavy and asthmatic, and friends begged him to rest. He would not.

The last crossing. In August 1769 he preached a farewell sermon in London before sailing to America for the last time; in it he remarked that it was his thirteenth crossing of the ocean. A year later, on 29 September 1770, weary and ill, he preached in the open air at Exeter, in New Hampshire, for nearly two hours. That evening he rode on to Newburyport, in Massachusetts, and early on the morning of 30 September he died there, in the parsonage of the Presbyterian church. He was fifty-five. At his own wish he was buried beneath its pulpit.

A funeral sermon from a friend. When the news reached London, John Wesley preached a memorial sermon for him in the Tottenham Court Road chapel, as Whitefield had long before asked that he should. The two men had differed on election for thirty years. They had never ceased to love one another.

A life to be read whole. Whitefield’s life is not a simple story of triumph. He was vain at times and rash in judgement. He was at home everywhere except at home. And he took part, with open eyes, in the great evil of his century. But the servitor from the Bell Inn was also a man whom God used to bring countless people to Christ, who never stopped wondering that grace had found him, and who spent himself to the last breath in telling others that it could find them too.

For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:26

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Whitefield tried for years to earn peace with God by effort before he received it as a gift. Ask whether you are still trying to earn what God freely gives.

2. Consider the people in your own town whom the churches have largely left alone, as the colliers of Kingswood were left. What would it mean to go to them?

3. Whitefield served God with tireless energy and neglected his own home. Ask honestly whether your zeal in one place is costing faithfulness in another.

4. Think of a Christian you have differed with sharply. Is there a word of reconciliation you could speak this week?

5. Read Whitefield’s farewell sermon, The Good Shepherd, in the Ochorus library, and notice what he chose to say when he thought he might not return.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You raise up the poor from the dust and set them among princes. You found a boy at an inn and made him a preacher of Your gospel.

Thank You that Your grace is not earned by fasting or effort, but given freely to those who come to the end of themselves.

Give me a heart like his for those whom no one else will reach, and keep me from the blindness that marred his life.

Let me spend my days, as he spent his, in making Christ known, until You call me home. Amen.