CHAPTER nine
CHAPTER nine
The Last Barrel
Final Years, Final Sermon, and a Death
That Shook Two Continents
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I want to begin this chapter with a picture. It is the evening of the twenty-ninth of September, 1770, in Exeter, New Hampshire. A crowd has gathered in an open field as the autumn light fades — not a vast crowd, not the thirty thousand of the Boston Commons or the tens of thousands of Cambuslang, but a gathered crowd of people who have come to hear a man preach. The man is fifty-five years old, which is not old by any modern reckoning, but by the measure of thirty-five years of oceanic crossings and field preaching and sleepless nights and a body that has been given to a pace no physician could endorse, he is old. His face carries the lines of all those years. His voice is not what it was in the Bristol fields when the coal miners wept. His lungs, ravaged by the asthma that has been his constant companion for years, make the sustained effort of outdoor preaching a genuine act of physical will.
There is no pulpit. There is a large barrel, and the old preacher climbs up onto it, and he stands there in the autumn evening, and he opens his mouth, and he preaches. For nearly two hours, by some accounts, he preaches — the same message he has preached in one form or another for thirty-five years, in fields and tabernacles and drawing rooms and ships' decks and market squares across two continents. You must be born again. Jesus Christ is sufficient for every lost soul. Come, poor, undone sinner, come just as you are. Come.
When he climbs down from the barrel, he is done. Not just with the sermon — with everything. The final sermon has been preached. The final invitation has been extended. The voice that cried in the wilderness of two continents falls silent before the next morning's sun rises.
This chapter is the story of how we got to that barrel in Exeter — and what happened in the hours after George Whitefield climbed down from it for the last time. It is the most difficult chapter I have written, because it requires me to speak about my own death. But it is also, in some ways, the most important — because the manner of a man's dying is the final and most honest testimony to what he actually believed while he was living. And the manner of my dying, if the accounts are accurate, was entirely consistent with everything I had preached for thirty-five years: still going, still urgent, still pressing toward the work, still trusting that the Master who had sent me would receive me when He called me home.
I had been saying for years that I would rather wear out than rust out. I had said it to friends, said it in letters, said it in response to the concerned inquiries of physicians and companions who watched my physical condition with increasing alarm. It was not a boast. It was a conviction — rooted in the specific calling God had given me and in the specific character of that calling, which was not the calling of a settled pastor but of an itinerant evangelist, not the calling of a man who serves from a fixed position but of a man who goes where the fields are white and the laborers are few. (2 Timothy 4:7 KJV): "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith." Those words of Paul were the words I wanted to be able to say — not as a formula, not as a conventional religious closing, but as a literal, specific, verifiable account of what my life had been. I had fought. I had run. I had kept the faith. And if the keeping required everything I had, I was not sorry to give it.
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The Fading Light: 1765 to 1770
The last five years of my life were different from what had come before — different in pace, different in tone, different in the quality of my engagement with the world and the people around me. The great revival seasons were behind me. The Cambuslang of 1742, the massive American tour of 1739 and 1740, the early Bristol and Kingswood fire — all of that was history now, nearly three decades past. The world had changed. I had changed. The movement I had helped ignite had developed its own institutions and its own character and its own momentum, and it no longer needed the dramatic intervention of a young man on fire in an open field to keep it going. It was going. The question was what my role in its continuation was meant to be.
I continued to preach. Of course I continued to preach — it would be more accurate to say that I would not have known how to stop, even if stopping had seemed right, which it did not. But the preaching of those final years had a different character from the revival preaching of the 1740s. The crowds were smaller, often — not because the revival's fruit had entirely faded, but because the novelty had worn off, the established churches had largely absorbed what they could absorb of the awakening's energy, and the colonial religious world had settled into a new normal that incorporated the revival's legacy without continually requiring its founder's presence to sustain it.
I spent more time in those years in what I had always called pious conversation — the individual pastoral encounter, the small group, the private correspondence that had been a steady thread through my entire ministry but that now took a larger proportion of my time and energy. I visited the sick. I sat with the dying. I counseled the troubled and the doubting with the patience that only a man who has been through his own darknesses can offer to another person in theirs. These were not the dramatic scenes of mass outdoor preaching. They were the quiet, essential, unglamorous work of genuine pastoral care, and I found in them a richness and a depth that the public ministry, for all its breadth, had not always provided.
My health was failing, and I knew it. The asthma was worse than it had ever been. There were mornings when I could barely speak, let alone preach, when the simple act of drawing breath was a labor that exhausted the body before the day had properly begun. My companions worried about me openly, and the letters I received from friends on both sides of the Atlantic were full of anxious inquiries about my condition and gentle urgings to rest, to slow down, to spare what remained of a physical constitution that had been spent with a prodigality that now seemed, to everyone around me, close to its natural limit.
I did not rest. Or rather, I rested when I could not do otherwise and resumed as soon as I was able. Not from stubbornness — or not only from stubbornness, though I will not pretend that stubbornness played no role. From the settled conviction that the work was not finished, that there were souls to be reached that had not yet been reached, that the voice God had given me was His instrument and not mine to retire before He retired it. I had said for thirty years that I wanted to die in the work. I meant it every time I said it, and I did not change my mind in those final years simply because the body's protests were growing louder.
I wrote, in those last years, with a quality of reflection about death and heaven that earlier seasons of ministry had not always produced. Not morbidity — I was never given to morbidity, and the approaching end did not darken my fundamental disposition, which remained characteristically energetic and forward-pressing even as the body failed. But a clarity. A settled, peaceful, specific clarity about what was coming and what it meant. (Philippians 1:21-23 KJV): "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labour: yet what I shall choose I wot not. For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better." To live is Christ and to die is gain. I had preached those words across thirty-five years with genuine conviction. In those final years, the conviction deepened into something that felt very close to personal knowledge — a knowledge not yet arrived at but approaching, the way the knowledge of a destination approaches the traveler who has been on the road a long time and can begin to see the lights of the city ahead.
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Elizabeth: The Loss That Preceded the End
Before we reach the final sermon and the final morning, I need to speak about something that happened two years before my own death, something that left a mark on those final years that no amount of preaching or letter-writing or pastoral visiting could entirely fill. In 1768, my wife Elizabeth died.
She had been a widow before she met me, and she became, in the years of our marriage, something that I had not known how to value as fully as I should have until she was gone: the steady, practical, unflappable foundation of the domestic life that the ministry required. She had managed Bethesda across thousands of miles of ocean. She had held the household together during the long months and years when I was always elsewhere. She had raised the children of others — our own son having been taken from us in his infancy, four months after his birth in 1743 — with a warmth and a competence that the orphan children of Georgia still felt, long after she was gone.
She died quietly, in the way she had lived — not dramatically, not with the theatrical intensity that had characterized so much of my own experience, but with the patient, steady faith of a person who had walked with God through decades of ordinary days and was ready, when the time came, to walk the final distance in the same way. I was not with her when she died. The itinerant life had kept me away, as it had kept me away through much of our marriage, and that particular absence is a grief I carry differently from all the other griefs — with a weight of specific regret that is not answered simply by the knowledge that it was unavoidable.
I have said elsewhere in these pages that Elizabeth was a stronger person than I was in the private places of life. That was not a polite formality. It was the truth. She bore the isolation and the uncertainty and the constant management of a difficult situation with a grace that I, however much I preached about grace, did not always demonstrate in the ordinary daily circumstances of my own life. She was a helpmeet in the fullest biblical sense — not a complement in the superficial way the word is sometimes used, but a genuine supplement of character and competence to my own, filling gaps that I did not always see and carrying weights that I was too busy to notice she was carrying.
Her death stripped away a layer of ordinary human companionship that I had not, until it was gone, fully understood how much I depended on. The last two years of my ministry were conducted in a solitude that was, even for a man as comfortable as I was with the solitude of the early morning and the ship's cabin, more complete and more demanding than anything I had experienced before. I was old, by the standards of my body if not of my calendar. I was alone. And I was still preaching.
I am glad, in retrospect, that the two years between Elizabeth's death and my own gave me the experience of that solitude. Not because it was pleasant — it was not. But because it drove me, more completely than any previous season of my life, to the only companionship that cannot be taken away. (Psalm 73:25-26 KJV): "Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever." My flesh faileth. Yes. My heart faileth. Yes. But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. That promise, in those last two years, was not decoration. It was the whole of the structure. Everything else had been stripped back to that, and that was sufficient — more than sufficient, fully and eternally sufficient — for a man who had staked his entire life on its truth and was now, in the final stripping, being shown that the stake had been well placed.
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The Seventh and Final American Tour
In 1769 I made what would prove to be my seventh and final visit to the American colonies. I was fifty-four years old, and by any objective physical assessment I was not well enough to make the crossing. My companions knew it. I knew it. And I made the crossing anyway, because the letters and the reports from America told me that there was still work to be done there, still communities that had been shaped by the earlier tours and that were now, a generation after the Great Awakening, in need of the kind of ministry that only a living voice could provide.
The America I arrived in was a different America from the one I had first encountered in 1739. The colonies were on the edge of revolution — the political temperature was rising with an urgency and a heat that would, within six years of my death, produce the Declaration of Independence and the most consequential political experiment the modern world had yet attempted. The churches that had been transformed by the Awakening were grappling with the relationship between the spiritual liberty they had always preached and the political liberty that their congregations were increasingly demanding. The vocabulary of the revival — liberty of conscience, the equality of souls before God, the right of every person to be addressed by the Gospel without the mediation of an institutional authority — was being translated, rapidly and somewhat loosely, into the vocabulary of political revolution.
I watched this translation with a mixture of admiration and anxiety. The admiration was for the genuine dignity and genuine courage of the colonial leaders who were pressing for rights that the Gospel itself had always proclaimed. The anxiety was that the political urgency would swallow the spiritual one — that people would be satisfied with the freedom of political self-determination and lose sight of the deeper freedom that only the Gospel provides, the freedom from sin and death and judgment that no political constitution can deliver.
I preached on this final tour with everything I had left. Not the same physical energy of the early years — that was gone, irretrievably, and my body reminded me of its loss with every sermon. But something else, something that I had not quite had in the same way in the younger years: the authority of a man who had been doing this for thirty-five years and had seen what the Gospel does when it is faithfully proclaimed, the authority of deep experience and deep conviction layered over each other until they had become indistinguishable. I was not performing energy I no longer had. I was preaching from a place of absolute certainty that was worth, perhaps, more to the people before me than any amount of physical vitality could have been.
The tour took me through the middle colonies and up through New England, the region that had been the most deeply affected by the first Great Awakening and that still carried, in its churches and its communities, the living memory of what God had done there in 1740. I preached in cities I had preached in thirty years before, to congregations that included men and women who had been children when I first visited and who came now to hear the old preacher one more time — to see, perhaps, in the lined face and the labored breathing and the voice that was less than it had been, the evidence that thirty-five years of faithful service had cost what it had cost.
I was moved, on that final tour, by the testimonies of people who told me what had happened to their families as a result of the earlier visits — the conversions that had taken root and grown, the marriages that had been entered into with genuine shared faith rather than mere social convention, the children who had been raised in households where the Gospel was lived and not merely professed. The harvest that I had not been able to see fully from the field was beginning, in those conversations, to be visible. It was larger than I had known. It was more deeply rooted than I had hoped. God had been working in the ground of those colonial communities across thirty years of gradual, quiet, invisible growth, and what had begun in the dramatic scenes of the first Great Awakening had produced a people whose faith was, in many cases, less dramatic and more durable than anything the early revival could have produced alone. (John 4:37 KJV): "And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth." I had sowed. Others had watered. Others had reaped. And the reaping was real and it was good and the God who had sent the growth was worthy of all the praise.
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September 29, 1770: The Last Sermon
Let me take you to Exeter, New Hampshire, on the evening of September 29, 1770, and try to describe what happened there — as nearly as a man can describe his own last public act from the other side of it.
The day had already been full. I had been unwell — more than usually unwell, even by the generous standard of the previous several years. My companions had urged me to rest, to cancel the evening meeting, to conserve what little strength remained for the days ahead. I had, as was my custom in such circumstances, listened to them respectfully and done what I believed I was called to do. There was a crowd waiting in Exeter. There were souls in that crowd who might be hearing the Gospel for the first time, or the last time they would give it serious attention. Neither possibility permitted me to stay behind on account of my health.
There was no pulpit in the field where the meeting was held. Someone found a large barrel, and the old preacher climbed up onto it, and the evening sermon began. The accounts that have come down to us suggest that the sermon lasted close to two hours — though I myself cannot vouch for the duration, the specifics having been absorbed into the general blur of a mind and a body that were, by that point, operating on something very close to their last reserves. What I can say is that the message was what it had always been. The words were not the words of a man delivering his farewell address. They were the words of a man who still believed, with everything that remained of him, that the people in that field needed to hear what he was saying and that Jesus Christ was sufficient for every need they carried.
I preached about faith and grace. I preached about the new birth that transforms the soul from its root. I preached about the cross that is the only meeting point between the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man. I pressed the invitation, as I had pressed it eighteen thousand times before: come. Come to Jesus. Come just as you are. Do not wait. Do not defer. The door is open now, in this evening, in this field, in this specific moment of your specific life. Come.
By the accounts of those who were present, the sermon had its characteristic effect. People were moved. Some wept. The Spirit, who is not limited by the failing health of the instrument He chooses to use, was present and working even as the instrument was visibly approaching its end. The old preacher on the barrel was not diminished in the only way that ultimately mattered: the Word he carried was undiminished, the Spirit he served was undiminished, and the mercy he was proclaiming was as vast and as available on that September evening in New Hampshire as it had been on a February morning in Kingswood thirty-one years before.
When the sermon ended and I climbed down from the barrel, a friend who was present noted that I looked exhausted beyond the ordinary exhaustion of even a very long day. He said something to me about resting, and I replied — or so the account has it — that I would have preached my last sermon sooner if that was what was required to preach it at all. The words capture something true about the posture of my whole ministry: not a death wish, not a morbid disregard for the body God had given me, but a settled conviction that the work was the point and the instrument was expendable in its service. (Acts 20:24 KJV): "But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God." None of these things move me. Neither count I my life dear unto myself. Those were not the words of a man performing heroic sacrifice. They were the words of a man who had, through thirty-five years of tested conviction, genuinely reorganized his hierarchy of values so that the ministry was at the top and the life that served it was, comparatively, expendable. I finished my course that evening in Exeter. I do not regret that it was in a field, on a barrel, with the autumn air in my failing lungs and a crowd of souls before me who needed what I had been given to proclaim.
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September 30, 1770: The Morning That Did Not Come
I did not wake up on the morning of September 30, 1770, to preach another sermon. The morning came. I did not.
The night before, I had been brought from Exeter to the parsonage of Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where I was to stay with the minister, the Reverend Jonathan Parsons. Those who carried me there noted that I was in a state of profound exhaustion, more depleted than they had ever seen me, though they had seen me depleted many times before. I was given a room and a bed and the attentions of concerned friends who were doing everything that concern and competence could do, which was not enough, because what was happening in that tired body was not the temporary depletion of overwork but the final accounting of a constitution that had given everything it had.
I died in the early hours of the morning of September 30, 1770, at the parsonage of Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I was fifty-five years old.
Let me speak plainly about what I believe about that morning, from the other side of it. I believe that dying, for the person who knows Jesus Christ and has kept the faith, is not the catastrophe it appears to be from the outside. I had preached this for thirty-five years with absolute conviction, and I found the conviction confirmed in exactly the way that only experience can confirm theoretical belief: by having it tested against reality and finding it true. The God who had been present through thirty-five years of ministry was present in that parsonage bedroom. The mercy that had reached a twenty-year-old in an Oxford room in May 1735 had not diminished or expired. The Saviour who had said he would not leave me comfortless had kept that promise through every trial of those years, and He kept it now, in the last and greatest trial of all.
I had said, in a letter written many years before, that I wanted to leap my seventy years — to skip over the remaining distance to the end and arrive at the presence of God without the intervening years of labor and suffering. I did not get my seventy years. I got fifty-five. But I do not think the cutting short was a loss, except from the perspective of the work still undone, which is always considerable and which God always provides other instruments to continue. The arrival was what mattered. The arrival that has no departure. The presence that does not withdraw. The face that I had spent thirty-five years proclaiming the possibility of seeing, finally seen. (Revelation 22:4 KJV): "And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads." They shall see his face. That is the end of the story. Not the barrel in Exeter. Not the parsonage in Newburyport. Not even the thirty-five years of preaching that preceded those final scenes. The end of the story is the face of Jesus Christ, seen at last without the veil of faith, without the dimness of this present life, in the clarity and the fullness and the eternal immediacy of the direct vision of God. That is where the voice of the Great Awakening went when it fell silent on September 30, 1770. And that is where it remains.
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The Grief That Followed: Two Continents in Mourning
News of my death traveled slowly by the standards of later centuries, but it traveled with an emotional velocity that surprised even those who had known how significant my ministry had been. On both sides of the Atlantic, the response was grief — genuine, personal, widely shared grief that went beyond the conventional mourning due to a public figure and expressed something closer to the loss of a friend.
In America, the grief was perhaps more acute than in England, because the American relationship with my ministry had been more immediate and more transformative. These were people who had stood in those fields and those squares, who had heard the voice that was now silent, whose lives had been bent in a different direction by a specific sermon on a specific day that they still remembered decades later. The Awakening had not been a distant event that happened to other people — it had happened to them, in the specific communities where they lived, through the specific voice of the man who was now gone. The grief was correspondingly specific and correspondingly deep.
John Wesley, whom I had asked to preach my funeral sermon, preached it at both of my London tabernacles — Moorfields and Tottenham Court Road — before large and visibly moved congregations. He spoke of our long friendship and our genuine disagreements and the reconciliation that had partially healed what the theological controversy had broken. He spoke of the ministry that had been given to me and the extraordinary way in which it had been exercised. He spoke, with a warmth and a generosity that honored both the friendship and the truth, of a man he had known since Oxford, who had been, in a very real sense, the catalyst of the entire movement of which Wesley himself was now the primary institutional heir.
The fact that Whitefield had asked Wesley — his long-time theological opponent, the man with whom he had argued publicly in pamphlets and privately in letters across thirty years — to preach his funeral sermon is one of the most significant things I ever did. It was not sentiment. It was a theological statement. It said, as plainly as any statement I could have made: whatever divides us theologically, whatever separated our movements and our methods, we are brothers in Christ. The friendship that Jesus creates between His people is deeper than the disagreements that human sinfulness and human imperfection introduce into it. John Wesley is the man I want standing over my body because John Wesley, whatever I think of his Arminianism, loves the same Jesus that I love. And the love of the same Jesus is the only ground that finally matters.
The grief was so widespread and so genuine that it extended beyond the boundaries of the religious community that my ministry had most directly shaped. Even those who had never been converted — who had heard the preaching and been moved by it without being transformed by it — felt something at the news of my death that they could not entirely account for in purely rational terms. Something had gone out of the world that had made it, in some ways, more interesting and more alive and more awake than it had been before. The voice that had cried in the wilderness of two continents was silent. (Psalm 116:15 KJV): "Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints." Precious in the sight of the Lord. Not a tragedy, not a defeat, not a loss in the ultimate sense. Precious — valued, honored, received as the homecoming of a servant who has finished the course. The grief was real and the grief was right. But underneath the grief, for those who had heard and believed what I had spent thirty-five years proclaiming, there was something else: the settled certainty that the voice had not been finally silenced, that it had simply been transferred from the mortal instrument to the eternal presence, and that the message it had carried was as alive and as powerful and as urgently needed as it had been on the first morning it was ever spoken in a Gloucester church to fifteen people who went home troubled.
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The Soldiers and the Buried Voice
I want to tell you something that happened after my death that I find, from this side, both deeply moving and somewhat overwhelming. It has to do with the Revolutionary War, which broke out six years after my death and which produced scenes that no one who knew me in life could entirely have anticipated.
During the Revolutionary War, American soldiers marching to battle — soldiers who were, in many cases, the children or grandchildren of people who had heard me preach in the Great Awakening years, who had grown up in households where the revival's memory was living and the faith it had kindled was real — developed a practice of visiting my grave in Newburyport. My body had been interred, according to my own wishes, in a vault beneath the pulpit of Old South Presbyterian Church — a placement that I had requested because I wanted, in a very literal sense, to continue to stand under the preaching of the Gospel even in death. The pulpit above the grave was, and remains, a place of proclamation, and I wanted to be buried in its shadow.
But during the war, soldiers came to that vault and did something remarkable. They opened it. And they took pieces of my clothing — scraps of the garments in which I had been buried — and carried them away with them. They believed, or so the accounts tell us, that if they carried something of mine into battle, God would watch over them.
I want to be careful about how I interpret this practice, because I do not want to attribute to it a significance it does not quite have. The soldiers were not engaging in idolatry. They were not worshipping me or treating my remains as sacred objects in any theological sense. They were doing something much simpler and much more human: they were carrying with them a tangible connection to the faith that had shaped them and their families, a reminder of the God who had revealed Himself through the ministry that had shaped their world. The pieces of clothing were not relics in the Roman Catholic sense. They were reminders — physical, carried-in-the-pocket reminders — of the one to whom the wearer belonged and in whose service they were going into battle.
And the battle cry that those soldiers carried — 'No king but King Jesus' — was not a political slogan that happened to have religious language attached to it. It was the distilled essence of what the Great Awakening had planted in the colonial soul over thirty years of preaching: the conviction that the ultimate authority in the universe is not any earthly king or parliament or magistrate but the risen Lord of all creation, whose sovereignty over every soul and every nation is the deepest and most unassailable truth about the structure of reality.
No king but King Jesus. I would have been glad to hear it. Not because I was in any conventional sense a revolutionary — I was not, and I would not pretend otherwise. But because that cry expressed something that every sermon I had ever preached was trying to express: that there is an authority higher than any human authority, a King whose claim on every soul is prior to and exceeding any other claim, a Lord whose lordship does not yield to any competing sovereignty. Whatever the political implications of that conviction — and they were, clearly, more than I fully appreciated during my lifetime — the theological conviction itself was sound. (Revelation 19:16 KJV): "And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS." King of kings and Lord of lords. That is the title that belongs to Jesus Christ, by right of creation and by right of redemption. Every earthly king rules by His sufferance and under His authority. Every earthly government derives its legitimate power from His order. And the person who has truly understood that — who has genuinely encountered the living King in the transforming experience of the new birth — carries that knowledge with them into every arena of life, including the battlefield. No king but King Jesus. The voice that had cried it from the barrels and the hillsides was silent. But the conviction lived on, in the hearts of the children and grandchildren of the Awakening, marching to build a nation on ground that the revival had prepared.
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Wesley at the Funeral: What John Said Over His Friend's Body
I have spoken of the request that John Wesley preach my funeral sermon. I want to dwell on that for a moment, because what Wesley said — and the fact that he was the one saying it — is among the most eloquent testimonies in the entire story of the eighteenth-century revival to the strange, costly, enduring power of genuine Christian brotherhood.
Wesley was sixty-seven years old when I died. He had known me for more than thirty years, since the Oxford days when both of us were young men seeking God with desperate earnestness in the Holy Club and in the cold mornings of prayer and study that had shaped both of us before either of us had any idea what shape our lives would ultimately take. He had watched my conversion. I had watched his. We had labored together in the early Bristol revival, the months that had set both our ministries in motion. And then we had parted, over theology that neither of us could pretend away — the deepest theological disagreement in the history of Protestant evangelicalism, between two men who had been as close as brothers.
And yet when I asked who should preach my funeral sermon, I kept giving the same answer: He is the man. Not because the theology was resolved — it was not. Not because the wounds were entirely healed — they were not. But because John Wesley was my oldest friend in the work, the man who had been there from the beginning, the man whose love for Jesus Christ I had never doubted for a single day across thirty years of disagreement, and whose faithfulness to the Gospel — his version of it, which differed from mine in significant ways that we had both argued about at length — was as real and as costly and as evidenced by a life poured out as my own.
Wesley stood over my open vault and preached with the combination of grief and faith that only a person who has genuinely believed what they are saying can manage to hold in their voice simultaneously. He spoke of the gifts God had given me — the voice, the passion, the extraordinary breadth of reach that no other minister of the century could approach. He spoke of the faithfulness with which those gifts had been exercised, the thousands of sermons, the Atlantic crossings, the refusal to stop until the last breath prevented it. He spoke of the theological differences between us honestly — Wesley was never a man to pretend, and the funeral eulogy of a public man was not a place to create a false impression of agreement that had not existed in life. But he framed those differences within a context of shared faith and shared calling and shared devotion to the same Lord that made them, however real, secondary to the primary reality that bound them.
When asked afterward what he thought of me as a preacher, Wesley gave an answer that has been remembered and repeated for over two centuries: that I had a manner no man living could fully equal. This from a man who was himself one of the most powerful preachers of the era, who had spent a lifetime studying and practicing the art of Gospel proclamation, who had preached to millions of his own. He could have said many things about me — things less generous, things more accurate about the areas of my work that had fallen short, things more theologically precise about the differences he believed I had not adequately resolved. He said that I had a manner no man living could fully equal. And he said it standing over my body, in front of a congregation that loved me, with the integrity of a man who had spent a lifetime refusing to say what he did not mean.
The friendship between Wesley and me is, I think, one of the most important stories in the history of evangelical Christianity — not because it was always comfortable or always harmonious, but because it survived. Because two men who disagreed profoundly about the most important theological questions that divided their tradition found a way to maintain their personal regard, their mutual recognition of each other's genuine faith, and the expression of that regard even at the most public and most final moment of one man's life. (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 KJV): "Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow." Two are better than one. Across the theological divide, across the painful years of separation, across the decades of parallel but distinct ministries — two were still, in the end, better than one. And the man who lifted up his fallen fellow on the occasion of the final falling was exactly the man the fallen fellow had named. There is a theology of friendship in that choice that is as clear and as eloquent as anything I ever said from a pulpit.
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Fifty-Five Years: Was It Enough?
People who know the story of my life sometimes ask whether fifty-five years was enough. Whether the ministry was cut short. Whether a man who had crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and preached eighteen thousand sermons and reached ten million souls should have been given more time, more years, more sermons.
I find the question interesting. Not because I know the answer with certainty — I do not, and I am not sure any human being can. But because the way we answer it reveals something about what we think ministry is for and what we think gives a human life its significance.
If we think that more is always better — more years, more sermons, more people reached — then fifty-five may seem insufficient. There were still fields white with harvest when the voice fell silent. There were still communities that had not yet heard the Gospel as fully as they needed to hear it. There were still individual souls on both sides of the Atlantic who were not yet converted and who might have been converted if the ministry had continued. By that standard, no ministry is ever quite enough, because the need is always greater than any single human life can meet.
But if we think that a life is significant by what it was rather than merely by how long it lasted — if we think that the question is not how many years but what quality of faithfulness was packed into whatever years were given — then the answer is different. Fifty-five years that included the Great Awakening on two continents, the founding of an orphanage that cared for the least of these, the building of educational institutions that educated generations, the modeling of a trans-denominational evangelical fellowship that crossed every human boundary in the name of the one Lord who was Lord of all — fifty-five years of that kind is not a short life. It is an extraordinarily full one.
I had said, for years, that I wanted to die in the work. I did. I had said I wanted to wear out rather than rust out. I did. I had said I wanted to finish my course with joy, and the accounts suggest that what joy I could still summon in those final hours was present and genuine. The Lord who calls His servants to the work does not always give them the number of years they might prefer. He gives them the years He has determined, and He asks them to fill those years as fully and as faithfully as they can. I tried to fill mine. I failed in more ways than I would like to recount. But I tried, and the trying was, in the mercy of a God who uses the willing and the imperfect, sufficient.
There is a question that haunts every serious Christian who takes the brevity of life and the vastness of the work seriously: did I do enough? I have never been entirely free of that question, and I do not expect to be until I stand before the One who is the only Judge of enough. What I can say is what I have said throughout these pages: I gave what I had. I spent the capital God gave me rather than conserving it for a comfortable old age. I ran the course as it was set before me rather than walking it at a pace more congenial to the flesh. (Matthew 25:21 KJV): "His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord." Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Not: well done, thou exhaustively complete servant who left nothing undone. Faithful. The standard is faithfulness, not completeness — and faithfulness is available to every person in every calling, regardless of how large or small the field, regardless of how many years are given to work it. I was given fifty-five years and eighteen thousand sermons and thirteen Atlantic crossings and ten million souls. I was given a voice and a burning message and a burning love for the people who needed to hear it. I gave it all back. And I trust the One who gave it to judge what the giving was worth.
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The Candle That Would Not Be Blown Out: One Final Night
There is an account of the night after the last sermon in Exeter — the night of September 29, the night before the morning that did not come — that I want to include here because it captures something true about the character of the ministry and the man who conducted it.
After being brought to the parsonage in Newburyport, exhausted as he was, Whitefield climbed the stairs to his room with a candle in his hand. Friends and companions were gathered below, concerned, watching. At the top of the stairs he paused, and stood, and began to speak — to the people below, perhaps, or to himself, or to God, or to some combination of all three. He spoke of the Gospel. He spoke of Christ. He pressed the invitation one last time, in the stairwell of a New Hampshire parsonage, to no gathered crowd, with no barrel to stand on, with no expectation that the words would be heard beyond the small group of companions already gathered in the room below. He preached until the candle burned down to nothing and went out. Then he went to bed. And in the morning he was gone.
That image — the old preacher standing on the stairs with a guttering candle, preaching into the dark until the light ran out — has stayed with me as the truest portrait of the whole ministry. Not the Bristol fields or the Cambuslang crowds or the Boston Commons. The stairwell. The burning-down candle. The words that kept going even when the physical circumstances were as stripped-back and as quiet as they could be, because the urgency that had filled thirty-five years of public proclamation was not a performance that required an audience to sustain it. It was a conviction. It was a love. It was the nature of a man who had been born again by the Spirit of God in an Oxford room in May 1735 and had never entirely recovered from it, who had spent every subsequent day of his life in the grip of a truth too large and too wonderful and too urgently needed to be kept quiet about, even on the last night, even in the stairwell, even as the candle burned down to its final inch.
The candle burned down and went out. The voice fell silent. The world turned and kept turning without the voice that had shaken it, and the fields that had been white with harvest were still white, and the laborers were still few, and the work was still not finished. But the Word that the voice had carried was not extinguished with the candle. It was still going out. It is still going out. It will continue to go out until every soul for whom it was sent has heard it — and then, in the fullness of time, it will have accomplished what God sent it to accomplish, and the harvest will be home, and the voice that cried in the wilderness for thirty-five years will join all the other voices in the one great anthem that has no ending. (Psalm 150:6 KJV): "Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD." Every thing that hath breath. Every breath I drew across fifty-five years was a borrowed breath, given by the One who made it and meant to be returned in the service of the One who gave it. I tried to return it faithfully. And in the returning — in the thirty-five years of field and barrel and pulpit and stairwell — the message was carried, and the harvest was gathered, and the glory was not mine but His. To Him be the glory. Forever and ever. Amen.
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Under the Pulpit: The Meaning of a Burial Request
I want to close this chapter with the image I asked to define my burial. I wanted to be placed beneath the pulpit. Not beside it, not near it, but beneath it — in the literal physical position of the preached Word resting over me, the ongoing proclamation of the Gospel standing above my grave as it had stood above my life.
This was not a whimsical request. It was a theological statement, as deliberate as any sermon I ever preached. It said: what mattered in my life was not me. What mattered was the message. The voice was an instrument; the Word it carried is eternal. The preacher decays; the Gospel endures. The barrel in Exeter is long since rotted; the message preached from it is as alive as it was the evening I stood on it and pressed the invitation one last time. You must be born again. Christ is sufficient. Come.
I wanted to be placed beneath the pulpit because I wanted the last image of my life to be a visual representation of what I had always believed: that the Word of God is above every human instrument, that the preacher serves the Word and not the other way around, that the greatest thing any person can do with their life is to be a vehicle for the proclamation of the Gospel — and that when the vehicle is done with its service, it should be set aside with gratitude and rest in the shadow of the one enduring thing, which is the Word itself.
People still visit that grave in Newburyport. They come from many different traditions and many different countries, drawn by the story of the voice that once cried across two continents. They stand over the vault and they think, I imagine, about what it meant to preach to ten million people in an age before amplification, to cross the Atlantic thirteen times for the sake of a message, to die on a barrel at fifty-five still pressing the invitation. They think about whether the message that drove all of that urgency was true.
It was true. It is true. The invitation that was pressed from the first Gloucester church to the last Exeter field is the same invitation that stands open in every generation, to every soul, in every condition: come to Jesus Christ, in genuine repentance and genuine faith, and receive what no human effort has ever earned and no human need has ever exhausted. Come poor, lost, undone. Come and find in Him what thirty-five years of standing in fields and climbing onto barrels and crossing oceans was always pointing toward — the wisdom that makes sense of existence, the righteousness that covers everything that has been broken, the sanctification that bends the whole person toward the image of the One who made it, the redemption that will one day make all things new. (Isaiah 55:10-11 KJV): "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." It shall not return unto me void. The voice of the Great Awakening is silent. The Word it carried is not. It is still going out. It is still accomplishing what God pleases. It is still prospering in the thing for which He sent it. And it will continue to do so until the last soul for whom it was sent has heard it and come home.
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The Voice of the Great Awakening
— George Whitefield —