In the Awakening Library resource titled What Is Awakening? we describe awakening as “when a movement of God’s power and love extends far and long enough to spill over into the streets of life and the structures of the social order. . . . Not just an uptick in numbers or a flash of greater zeal, but a far-reaching encounter with God resetting the trajectory of generations.”

Awakening is that beautiful, that vast and glorious and captivating. The First Great Awakening unfolded in three theaters of Scotland, England, with the Wesleys, and in colonial America, between about 1730 and 1745, led by Jonathan Edwards. It was John Wesley, in fact, who introduced the other two: having been contacted by the Scots regarding concerted prayer for awakening, he encouraged them also to correspond with Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts.1 Wesley went on to publish more abridgements of Edwards than any other single author.2

Northampton appeared “full of the presence of God . . . in almost every house”3 according to Edwards, spreading to more than twenty communities in western Massachusetts and Connecticut. And with the arrival of George Whitefield, the roving lightning rod of the First Great Awakening, revival spread through the southern, then the middle, and throughout the New England colonies. All the churches grew. Missionary work advanced. Six of the nine colonial colleges in America were born of awakenings. A distinctive American theology began to form under the magisterial reflections of Jonathan Edwards, colonial America’s greatest theologian. The soul of our culture was really formed in that Awakening.

Revival embers smoldering during the Revolutionary War were fanned back into flame in the Second Great Awakening, again developing in three phases with camp meetings bursting onto the scene at Cane Ridge near Lexington, Kentucky, and spreading all throughout Tennessee in the early 1800s. There was the more learned but still very warm-hearted revival work of Lyman Beecher and others in New England. And then came Charles Finney, who blended a certain educated credibility with bold, frontier zeal across upstate New York to extend the Awakening into thirty-five or forty years of continuous advancement.


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