George Whitefield

Life

Whitefield was born in 1714 at the Bell Inn in Gloucester, England, the youngest of seven children. His father died when he was two. Around the age of fifteen he interrupted his schooling to help his mother run the inn. At eighteen he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, as a servitor, a student who worked for the college in lieu of paying fees. There he became close to the brothers John Wesley and Charles Wesley. During this period he experienced a conversion that he called the "new birth." In 1736 he was ordained a deacon (the order of clergy below priest) in the Church of England. In 1738, at the invitation of the Wesley brothers, he joined the mission to the North American colony of Georgia. For the rest of his life he traveled back and forth between Britain and the American colonies as an itinerant preacher. He died in 1770 in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Ministry and Achievements

• Open-air preaching: In 1739 he began preaching outdoors to the coal miners of Kingswood. Thereafter he held large gatherings in fields and public squares, moving beyond church buildings and parish boundaries.
• The American awakening: Preaching from Georgia to Massachusetts, he became a central figure of the First Great Awakening. He associated with Jonathan Edwards of Northampton. Benjamin Franklin, whom he met in 1739, helped publicize his meetings widely through newspapers and printed works.
• Extent of his ministry: He is said to have preached some 18,000 times over his lifetime, and he reportedly made seven journeys to America and fourteen to Scotland.
• Bethesda Orphanage: In March 1740 he founded an orphanage near Savannah, Georgia. It became the principal charitable undertaking of his life.
• Calvinistic Methodism: He parted ways with Wesley over predestination and went on to lead Calvinistic Methodism, whose center was the Moorfields Tabernacle in London. Although the two men divided theologically, he is said to have sought to avoid attacking the other camp for the sake of evangelism.

Influence on the Korean Church

Whitefield had no direct connection with Korea. Nevertheless, in Korean Protestant churches he is frequently cited as a model preacher of the new birth and revival. Korean Presbyterian and Reformed circles present him as a Calvinist revival preacher, while Korean Methodists regard him as an early co-worker who launched the Methodist movement together with the Wesley brothers. His name also appears frequently in columns in Korean church newspapers that discuss spiritual revival in the Korean church or the renewal of Methodism.

Assessment

Whitefield is regarded as a pioneer of the modern mass evangelistic meeting and as one of the founders of the evangelical movement. The nineteenth-century Church of England bishop J. C. Ryle, in his account of the spiritual leaders of eighteenth-century England, treated him first.

He has also drawn criticism. In America his sermons against unconverted ministers stirred controversy, and Jonathan Edwards counseled him, cautioning that young people might rashly judge whether their ministers were converted. Slavery is the most prominent criticism raised today. Georgia initially prohibited slavery, and Whitefield argued for its legalization, contending that slave labor was necessary to fund the orphanage. After slavery was legalized in the early 1750s, he purchased slaves and put them to work at the orphanage and on a plantation. At his death he bequeathed these slaves to the Countess of Huntingdon. He did rebuke the mistreatment of slaves and labored to evangelize Black people. Yet because he accepted the institution of slavery itself, he is often contrasted with Wesley, who encouraged the abolition movement. Citing this record, the University of Pennsylvania decided to remove his statue from its campus.