The Great Awakenings were waves of revival in Britain and America from the 1730s through the 1800s that made Christian faith deeply personal for millions of people. The First Great Awakening, led by John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards, stressed the new birth. The Second Great Awakening carried revival to the American frontier. Their influence flowed into the Holiness movement and Pentecostalism, and it still shapes how many evangelical churches preach, worship, and do missions today.
From State Religion to Personal Faith
If the Reformation answered the question “What is the gospel?”, the Great Awakenings answered another one: “What happens when faith becomes personal, not just political?” As we saw in Lesson 5, Europe after the Reformation was still a world of state churches. Most people were baptized as infants into the official church of their country and attended out of duty or law. Many pastors were faithful, but in many places religion had become formal, cold, and routine.
Into that spiritual sleep, God sounded an alarm. Paul’s words to the Ephesians capture what many people experienced in these revivals.
Ephesians 5:14 This is why it is said: “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”
From the 1700s into the early 1900s, the Holy Spirit stirred fresh movements that reshaped preaching, sparked modern missions, and redrew the map of denominations.
The Moravians: A Bridge to Revival
The story begins with a small refugee community in Saxony, Germany. Descendants of the followers of Jan Hus, the Bohemian reformer we met in Lesson 3, fled persecution and began settling in 1722 on the estate of Count Zinzendorf, at a village they named Herrnhut (“the Lord’s watch”). The community was soon torn by quarrels. But on August 13, 1727, during a communion service, the believers experienced confession, reconciliation, and a powerful sense of God’s presence. Later that month they began a round-the-clock prayer watch, with men and women taking hourly shifts, that continued for about a hundred years.
Out of that prayer came the first large-scale Protestant missionary movement. In 1732 Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann sailed to the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to reach enslaved Africans, reportedly ready to become slaves themselves if that was the only way to share the gospel. Other Moravians went to Greenland, Suriname, South Africa, and North America. In 1736, on a stormy voyage to Georgia, a young Anglican priest named John Wesley watched Moravian families calmly singing hymns while the sea broke over the deck. He was terrified of dying. They were not. He never forgot it.
Wesley, Whitefield, and Edwards
On May 24, 1738, Wesley reluctantly attended a small meeting on Aldersgate Street in London, where someone was reading Martin Luther’s preface to Romans. “I felt my heart strangely warmed,” he wrote in his journal. “I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins.” That assurance became a hallmark of his preaching.
Romans 8:15-16 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.
Wesley spent the next fifty years riding roughly a quarter of a million miles on horseback and preaching tens of thousands of sermons. His real genius was organization. He gathered converts into societies, weekly class meetings, and smaller bands for prayer, confession, and accountability, giving revival a lasting pathway of discipleship instead of a passing emotional high. His teaching on holiness, explored in What Did John Wesley Teach About Christian Perfection?, would echo for two centuries.
George Whitefield, Wesley’s friend from the “Holy Club” at Oxford, became the great preacher of the age. When church pulpits closed to him, he began preaching outdoors in 1739 to coal miners near Bristol, whose tears made white streaks down their blackened faces. He made seven trips to America. In Philadelphia, a skeptical Benjamin Franklin measured how far Whitefield’s voice carried and calculated that more than 30,000 people could hear him at once. Whitefield helped link the scattered American colonies through a shared spiritual experience.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, pastor Jonathan Edwards gave the Awakening its mind. A revival broke out in his church in 1734–1735, and in 1741 he preached his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” at Enfield, Connecticut. Edwards was also a careful critic of excess. In Religious Affections (1746), he argued that true conversion transforms both mind and heart, and that the best evidence of the Spirit’s work is a changed life, not dramatic emotion. Together, these three men show that genuine revival is passionate, organized, and theologically rooted.
The First Great Awakening and a New Nation
From the late 1730s through the 1740s, these currents merged into what historians call the First Great Awakening. Thousands joined churches, and new colleges were founded to train pastors, including the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), Brown, Dartmouth, and Rutgers. The revival also divided congregations between supporters (“New Lights”) and critics (“Old Lights”), and it helped forge a shared “evangelical” identity that crossed denominational lines.
The Awakening affected more than personal faith. When people hear that every soul stands before God personally and that Christ has authority over every earthly power, they begin to think differently about kings, conscience, and rights. Many revival-shaped pastors later supported American independence, and some British observers reportedly dismissed the war as a “Presbyterian rebellion.” Historians debate how direct the connection was, but the Awakening helped prepare the cultural soil for the American Revolution.
The Second Great Awakening and Cane Ridge
After independence, church life declined, especially on the frontier. Then revival came again. At Yale, a powerful awakening in 1802 under President Timothy Dwight turned many students to Christ. In August 1801, a communion gathering at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, hosted by Presbyterian pastor Barton W. Stone, drew somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 people. Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist preachers spoke side by side for nearly a week, and many people wept, cried out, and fell to the ground under conviction.
Camp meetings spread across the frontier, and Methodist circuit riders and Baptist farmer-preachers planted churches everywhere settlers went, making those two groups the largest in America. In the 1820s and 1830s, evangelist Charles Finney brought revival to cities in the North, calling people to respond publicly. Cane Ridge also helped launch the Restoration Movement, led by Stone and Alexander Campbell, which sought a simple, Bible-only model of church. Its heirs include Churches of Christ, Christian Churches, and many non-denominational congregations. Revival also fueled missions; William Carey, the father of modern missions, set out for India in 1793. In both Britain and America, it inspired efforts to abolish slavery and reform society.
From Holiness to Pentecost
Wesley’s hunger for holiness didn’t end with Methodism. In the 1800s, the Holiness movement, shaped by leaders like Phoebe Palmer, taught that God not only forgives sin but empowers believers for wholehearted love and obedience. Groups like the Salvation Army, founded by William and Catherine Booth in London in 1865, and the Church of the Nazarene, organized in 1908, grew from this stream.
In the early 1900s, that same hunger led to Pentecostal revival. In 1906 a Black preacher named William J. Seymour began leading meetings at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, where Black, white, Latino, and Asian worshipers prayed together, sought the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and experienced speaking in tongues and healing. They saw themselves living out Peter’s message at Pentecost.
Acts 2:17-18 ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.
From Azusa Street, Pentecostal denominations like the Assemblies of God spread worldwide, followed later by Charismatic renewal in older churches. Today Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians number in the hundreds of millions, roughly a quarter of the world’s Christians by many estimates, especially in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Even worship music has been shaped by this stream, as the story of modern church music shows.
Why the Great Awakenings Still Matter
So why are there so many churches? Part of the answer is human weakness, including pride, conflict, and division. But another part is revival. When the Spirit wakes people up, new movements, methods, and sometimes new denominations emerge. The Great Awakenings remind us that the church is more than a building or a brand. It’s a living body that Jesus keeps shaping across time and cultures, just as he promised.
Matthew 16:18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
Our goal isn’t to idolize any one movement or to manufacture revival. It’s to stay awake, keep praying, and return to a biblical, Spirit-led, mission-focused faith that points people to Jesus.
The Takeaway
The Great Awakenings were revivals in the 1700s and 1800s that made faith personal for millions. Moravian prayer, Wesley’s small groups, Whitefield’s preaching, and Edwards’s theology fueled the First Great Awakening; frontier camp meetings marked the Second. Their influence flowed into the Holiness and Pentecostal movements and modern missions. Through it all, Jesus kept his promise to build his church, and he invites us to wake up and join him.
