Whitefield preaches to thousands
The birth of the open-air revival
George Whitefield is twenty-four years old when he steps onto a hill in Kingswood, outside Bristol, and preaches to the coal miners.
He is there because the churches will not have him. His preaching is too intense, too emotional, too likely to produce disorder. The coal miners of Kingswood are considered unreachable — rough men who live outside the parish system, who do not attend church, who are beyond the reach of conventional ministry.
Whitefield preaches in the open air. About two hundred people gather. Then a thousand. Then ten thousand. Then twenty thousand.
He describes watching the white channels of tears on the black coal-dust faces of men who have never wept in church because they have never been in church. He preaches to them about the new birth — the direct, immediate, personal experience of God's grace — and they receive it standing in a field.
John Wesley watches from a distance. He is skeptical of open-air preaching — it seems undignified, disorderly, not quite proper. And then he sees the faces.
On April 2, 1739, Wesley preaches outside for the first time. He is thirty-five years old. He will ride two hundred and fifty thousand miles on horseback and preach forty thousand sermons in the open air before he dies at eighty-seven.
The Great Awakening that follows — in England, in Wales, in Scotland, in the American colonies — begins with a young man standing on a hill in the rain talking to coal miners about being born again.
“The world is my parish.”
— John Wesley, Journal, June 11, 1739 AD
“The lord said to the servant, 'Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.”
Whitefield went to the people the church would not go to, in the place where the people actually were.
The gospel has always moved this way — outside the walls, to the margins, into the fields and the prisons and the coalfields and the places decent religious people do not frequent.
The church that waits for people to come to it is not the church of Acts or Wesley or Whitefield. The church of Acts went out on the day of Pentecost and never fully came back in.
Where are the Kingswood coalfields in your world — the people the institution has decided are unreachable? And who is willing to go stand on a hill in the rain?