The Thunderbolt of God: How George Whitefield Set a Continent Ablaze

There is a peculiar madness that seizes upon certain men in certain ages, a holy madness that makes them utterly unsuitable for polite society and absolutely essential for the salvation of civilization. It is the madness of the prophet who sees what others cannot see, who speaks what others dare not speak, and who burns with a fire that either illuminates or incinerates everything it touches. In the eighteenth century, this madness fell upon a cross-eyed young man from Gloucester named George Whitefield, and the result was nothing less than the transformation of two continents.

The modern mind, with its touching faith in gradual progress and reasonable discourse, finds figures like Whitefield deeply embarrassing. Here was a man who drew crowds of thirty thousand in an age before amplification, who could reduce hardened criminals to tears with a single sermon, who crossed the Atlantic thirteen times when such voyages were still genuinely perilous adventures. He was, by any measure, a celebrity of the first order—yet his fame rested not on any talent the world recognizes, but on his peculiar ability to convince people that they were going to hell and that this was, remarkably, the most hopeful news they could possibly receive.

This is the first great mystery of Whitefield's ministry, and indeed of the Great Awakening itself: that it began not with good news but with terrible news. In an age that had grown comfortable with a reasonable, respectable religion that demanded little and promised less, Whitefield arrived like an unwelcome physician, diagnosing a disease that polite society preferred to ignore. He told comfortable churchgoers that they were spiritually dead, told moral citizens that their morality was filthy rags, told the enlightened that their enlightenment was darkness visible. And somehow, miraculously, they thanked him for it.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, for the story of George Whitefield begins, as all the best stories do, with failure. Born in 1714 to the keeper of the Bell Inn in Gloucester, young George seemed destined for a life of respectable mediocrity. His father died when he was two, leaving his mother to manage both the inn and her precocious son, who showed an early talent for dramatics that his mother undoubtedly wished he would direct toward more profitable pursuits. The boy had a gift for voices and gestures, for commanding attention and moving hearts—gifts that might have made him a successful actor, if only he hadn't suffered from the inconvenient conviction that most plays were works of the devil.

It was at Oxford that the young Whitefield encountered that most dangerous of all things: a religion that took itself seriously. The Holy Club, led by the Wesley brothers, was practicing what would later be called Methodism—a systematic approach to holiness that involved prayer, study, good works, and a general determination to be more Christian than most Christians thought necessary. Whitefield threw himself into this discipline with characteristic enthusiasm, fasting until he nearly killed himself, rising at four in the morning for prayer, and generally making himself so unpleasant with his piety that his fellow students began to avoid him.

Here we encounter another divine riddle that marks all genuine conversion: that Whitefield's most strenuous efforts to save himself only convinced him more thoroughly that he could not be saved. The harder he worked at holiness, the more unholy he felt. The more he strove for perfection, the more perfectly he understood his imperfection. It was a spiritual mathematics that made no sense to the calculating mind but perfect sense to the surrendering heart: he had to lose his life to find it.

The crisis came during Lent of 1735, when Whitefield's self-imposed austerities brought him to the edge of physical and mental collapse. It was then, in the depths of his weakness, that he experienced what he would later describe as the new birth—that moment when the great transaction was completed, when his sins were exchanged for Christ's righteousness, when the burden he had been carrying was suddenly lifted. He would spend the rest of his life trying to give others what he had received in that moment: the gift of knowing themselves saved.

But what made Whitefield extraordinary was not merely that he had been converted—thousands of others could make that claim—but that he had been converted with a particular genius for making conversion contagious. He possessed that rarest of all combinations: the heart of a mystic and the voice of an actor. He could weep real tears over imaginary sinners and move real sinners to real tears with his imaginary scenarios. His preaching was theater, but theater in service of the highest truth; drama, but drama that could change the drama of men's lives forever.

When he began preaching in 1736, barely twenty-two years old, Whitefield discovered that he possessed what every evangelist dreams of and most never find: the indefinable something that makes people listen. Churches that had dozed through decades of dutiful sermons found themselves hanging on every word of this young man who spoke as if heaven and hell were as real as the pews they sat in. His voice, trained in the inn yard and polished at Oxford, could reach the back of any building and the depths of any heart.

But it was when he was locked out of those buildings that Whitefield made his greatest discovery. Refused the pulpits of the Anglican establishment, who found his enthusiasm unseemly and his theology suspect, he did what seemed obvious to him and revolutionary to everyone else: he went outside. On a February day in 1739, he preached to a gathering of coal miners in the fields of Kingswood, near Bristol. These were men blackened by their labor, hardened by their circumstances, unused to hearing that God might take notice of them. Yet as Whitefield spoke, he could see the white tracks of tears cutting through the coal dust on their faces.

This was the birth of modern mass evangelism, though Whitefield would have been puzzled by such terminology. To him, it was simply the obvious solution to an obvious problem: if the churches wouldn't let him preach to the people, he would preach to the people without the churches. If the gospel was for everyone, then everyone should be able to hear it, whether they could afford a pew or not. The idea was so simple it was radical, so obvious it was revolutionary.

The outdoor preaching also revealed another aspect of Whitefield's genius: his understanding that the gospel needed not just to be heard but to be seen. His dramatic gestures, his vivid descriptions, his ability to make biblical scenes come alive before his audiences—all of this served not merely as entertainment but as incarnation. He was making the invisible visible, giving flesh to spiritual realities, helping people see what they had only heard about. When he described the sinner hanging over the pit of hell, supported only by the spider's web of his own righteousness, people could see themselves dangling. When he portrayed Christ on the cross, arms outstretched in invitation, people could see their Savior reaching for them.

It was this combination of spiritual authority and dramatic genius that made Whitefield's American tours so explosively successful. When he first arrived in Philadelphia in 1739, he was already famous—newspapers had carried accounts of his English preaching, and anticipation had been building for months. But nothing could have prepared the colonies for the reality of hearing this young Englishman preach. Benjamin Franklin, that most practical and skeptical of men, attended one of Whitefield's sermons determined to give nothing to the collection. By the end of the sermon, he had emptied his pockets entirely, and later calculated that Whitefield's voice could clearly reach an audience of thirty thousand.

But Franklin's testimony is interesting for another reason: it shows how Whitefield's impact transcended religious boundaries. Here was an evangelist who could move both the converted and the unconverted, both the devout and the skeptical. His preaching created what we might call a religious common denominator—a shared experience that cut across denominational lines, social classes, and even continents. For the first time, people from different backgrounds found themselves having the same spiritual experience, speaking the same spiritual language, united not by geography or tradition but by grace.

This was the true genius of the Great Awakening, and Whitefield was its primary architect. He created not just individual conversions but a mass movement, not just personal piety but public transformation. The awakening was democratic in the best sense—it suggested that the most important truths were accessible to everyone, that salvation was not the exclusive privilege of the educated or the well-born. A slave and a master, a Harvard professor and an illiterate farmer, could stand side by side and hear the same gospel with the same effect.

The implications of this spiritual democracy were not lost on those who witnessed it. If all men were equal before God—if the ground was level at the foot of the cross—then perhaps other hierarchies were not as divinely ordained as had been supposed. The Great Awakening did not directly cause the American Revolution, but it certainly prepared the ground for it by teaching colonists to think of themselves as a people set apart, called to a special destiny, accountable directly to God rather than to earthly authorities alone.

Yet we must not make the mistake of reducing Whitefield to a mere social phenomenon or political catalyst. He would have been horrified by such interpretations. For him, the awakening was not about creating democracy but about creating Christians—not about reforming society but about regenerating souls. His passion was not for human rights but for divine grace, not for temporal liberation but for eternal salvation. The social effects of his preaching were real, but they were side effects; the main effect was conversion.

And what conversions they were! Whitefield's meetings were marked by what can only be called supernatural phenomena. People fell to the ground under conviction of sin. Hardened skeptics found themselves weeping uncontrollably. Criminals publicly confessed their crimes. The proud were humbled, the broken were healed, the dead in spirit were made alive. Critics called it hysteria, enthusiasm, emotional manipulation. Whitefield called it the power of God unto salvation.

The modern evangelical movement, with its careful attention to technique and methodology, might study Whitefield looking for transferable principles. But they would miss the point entirely. Whitefield's secret was not methodological but mystical. He preached as a man who had been to heaven and hell and lived to tell about it. He spoke with the authority of one who had met God personally and could not keep quiet about it. His power lay not in his techniques but in his transparency—he had become so clear a window that people could see through him to Christ.

This is why attempts to imitate Whitefield have generally failed. You cannot manufacture his kind of authority or engineer his kind of impact. What made him extraordinary was not something he learned but something he received, not something he developed but something he was given. He was that rarest of all creatures: a man who had been genuinely transformed by the gospel and who retained the ability to be astonished by it.

Perhaps this is why the Great Awakening could not be sustained indefinitely. Movements of the Spirit are like prairie fires—they burn hot and fast, transforming everything in their path, but they cannot burn forever. By the time of Whitefield's death in 1770, the awakening was largely spent, though its effects would continue to ripple through American culture for generations. Whitefield himself seemed to understand this; his later years were marked by a certain melancholy, a sense that the great days were behind him.

But what a legacy he left! The awakening had created a new kind of Christianity—experiential rather than merely intellectual, heartfelt rather than merely formal, personal rather than merely institutional. It had proven that the gospel could still move mountains, that ancient truths could speak to modern hearts, that God was not finished with His world. Most importantly, it had demonstrated that Christianity was not a museum piece but a living force, not a historical curiosity but a present reality.

The Great Awakening reminds us that God's timeline is not our timeline, that His methods are not our methods. Just when the church seemed most institutional, most formal, most dead, the Spirit moved. Just when religion seemed most reasonable, most respectable, most tame, God sent a cross-eyed enthusiast to set the world on fire. The lesson is clear: we serve a God of surprises, a God who delights in using the foolish things to confound the wise, the weak things to shame the strong.

In our own age of spiritual lethargy and religious compromise, perhaps we need to remember George Whitefield—not to imitate his methods, which belonged to his time, but to pray for his spirit, which belongs to all times. We need men and women who burn with holy fire, who speak with divine authority, who care more about souls than about respectability. We need another great awakening, and if history is any guide, it will come not through committees or conferences but through individuals who have been so transformed by grace that they cannot help but transform others.

For in the end, this is what Whitefield understood and what we must recover: that the gospel is not good advice but good news, not helpful suggestions but supernatural power, not religious enhancement but spiritual resurrection. When we truly believe this—when we believe it with our whole hearts, as Whitefield did—then perhaps we too might see what he saw: the dead raised, the bound set free, and the world turned upside down by the unstoppable power of grace.

The thunderbolt of God struck eighteenth-century America through a young preacher from Gloucester, and the reverberations are with us still. Perhaps it's time for another storm.

—The Seeker's Quill