Born in Gloucester, England; the best-known evangelist of the 18th century and one of the greatest itinerant preachers in the history of the churches of Jesus Christ. Whitefield worked together with John and Charles Wesley in establishing the “Holy Club” during his studies at Oxford University. By God’s grace, Whitefield experienced a genuine conversion and came to see that his “holiness” was only filthy rags. He realized that he needed to rest by faith in the finished work of Christ and began to fervently preach the necessity of regeneration.
Whitefield was an ordained minister of the Church of England. When opposition to his preaching closed church doors to him, he led the way in preaching outdoors and in traveling wherever he could to air the message of salvation. He shared this work with the Wesleys. He was mightily used of God in England and the American Colonies during the “Great Awakening,” and ceaselessly preached the sovereign grace of God, the necessity of the new birth through faith alone in the Person and work of Jesus Christ. In New England in 1740, he preached to crowds as large as eight thousand nearly every day for over a month. This tour was one of the most remarkable episodes in the whole history of American Christianity and a key event in New England’s revival. Whitefield died in 1770 in the American Colonies in the midst of a preaching tour, which is as he had wished.
