This month marks the tricentennial of the birth of the most famous man in America before the Revolution. George Whitefield, born on Dec. 16, 1714, was a Church of England minister who led the Great Awakening, a series of Christian revivals that swept through Britain and America in the mid-1700s. Whitefield drew enormous audiences wherever he went on both sides of the Atlantic, and his publications alone doubled the output of the American colonial presses between 1739 and 1742. If there is a modern figure comparable to Whitefield, it is Billy Graham. Buteven Mr. Graham has followed a path first cut by Whitefield.
What made Whitefield and his gospel message so famous? First, he mastered the period’s new media. Cultivating a vast network of newspaper publicity, printers and letter-writing correspondents, Whitefield used all means available to get the word out.
Most important, he joined with Benjamin Franklin, who became Whitefield’s main printer in America, even though Franklin was no evangelical. Their business relationship transformed into a close friendship, although Whitefield routinely pressed Franklin, unsuccessfully, about his need for Jesus.
I always found the Ben Franklin, George Whitefield connection to be quite odd. Franklin was C of E (later Episcopalian) but certainly a deist more than Evangelical. Yet at the University of Pennsylvania, Franklin’s institution, they have a great statue of Whitefield in the Quadrangle Dormitory commons. Penn has never been a religious school (like Yale or Harvard was) with an affiliation to one denomination or another (despite its Mascot, the Quakers, it was not a quaker school either). http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd;=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRw&url=http://involve.christian-union.org/site/PageServer?pagename=HomePenn&ei=Aw6DVNn9K8yfyATyzoGwDQ&bvm=bv.80642063,d.aWw&psig=AFQjCNG_7deyRlvi_E22Y5i7xXGaFxMhCw&ust=1417961322739350