CHAPTER twO

The Fields of Fire

Kingswood, Bristol, and the Birth of Open-Air Preaching

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After my ordination in Gloucester, the world opened up before me like a vast and uncharted landscape, and I threw myself into it with everything I had. The first sermons of my ministry — preached in Gloucester, then in London, then in the towns and villages where God opened doors — were already producing fruit that astonished me. Congregations were moved. People wept. Some sought counsel after the service. The comfortable church attendance that had been the only Christianity most of these people had ever known was being confronted, in some cases for the first time, by the living, urgent, present-tense reality of the Gospel. It was not comfortable. It was not polite. But it was real — and real, as I was learning fast, was what people most desperately needed.

London received me well, at least in the beginning. The churches were full. There was a hunger among the people that the formal religious culture of the day had done nothing to satisfy — a hunger that stirred and woke up when they heard the Gospel preached with conviction and personal urgency rather than read from a paper in a monotone voice. I preached in church after church, morning and evening, sometimes twice or three times on a Sunday, and the people came in numbers that began, within weeks, to alarm the clergy who had initially welcomed me.

I was young — twenty-two years old when I began, twenty-three through most of those early London months — and I was aware of my youth even as I stood before those crowds. But I had not sought this. I had not marketed myself or lobbied for pulpits or cultivated the kind of social connections that advance a young clergyman's career. I had simply preached, as faithfully and as urgently as I knew how, and God had brought the people. When people ask how a young man of no family and no connections could fill the churches of London within months of his ordination, I give the only answer that is true: I did not fill them. God filled them. He drew the hungry to the place where He had chosen to feed them, and He chose to feed them, in those months, through the preaching of a wine merchant's son from Gloucester.

What I felt in those early London days was something I can only describe as a holy fire. When I stood up to preach, it was not my cleverness that took over — it was something else entirely, something that I did not produce and could not sustain in my own strength. I would begin, and within a few sentences I could feel the words take on a weight and a power that did not come from me. I was not performing. I was not demonstrating. I was burning — and the burning seemed to ignite something in the people before me. The Apostle Paul's description of his own ministry became real to me in those early days: (1 Corinthians 2:1-4 KJV) — "And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified... And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power." Demonstration of the Spirit and of power. That was what I prayed for every time I opened my mouth. Not my eloquence. Not my preparation, though I prepared with all diligence. His power. His demonstration. His Spirit convincing the hearts that I could only address in words.

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The Doors Begin to Close

But the goodwill of the London clergy was not to last. As the months passed and my preaching grew more direct — more insistent on the absolute necessity of the new birth, more honest about the spiritual bankruptcy of mere religious performance — the establishment began to grow uneasy. The same message that had filled their pews was now unsetthng their comfortable assumptions about the nature of Christianity itself. I was telling their congregations — their baptized, confirmed, respectable, church-going congregations — that they might be entirely unconverted. That church membership without genuine regeneration was not salvation. That the form of godliness without its power left a soul in exactly as much danger as the openly immoral man who had never set foot inside a church.

This was not a message that comfortable, well-positioned clergymen were eager to hear delivered from their own pulpits. Nor were their vestries pleased at the disruption to the settled, orderly religious culture they had spent their careers maintaining. One by one, pulpits began to close to me. Invitations dried up. Vicars who had initially been glad to host the young evangelist became cool, then distant, then hostile. The same establishment that had cheered a full church on a Sunday morning now viewed that fullness with alarm, because the people filling those pews were not sitting quietly and absorbing respectable doctrine — they were being moved, disturbed, weeping, repenting, seeking counsel. They were, in a word, awakening. And an awakening is a messy, uncontrollable, uncomfortable thing when you are a clergyman who has built your professional life on the orderly management of religious propriety.

I want to be fair to these men. Most of them were not wicked people. Most of them were doing, by their own lights, what they understood their calling to require. But they had so thoroughly confused the management of a religious institution with the proclamation of a living Gospel that they genuinely could not tell the difference between revival and disorder. What I called the power of the Spirit, they called enthusiasm. What I called conviction of sin, they called emotional manipulation. What I called the new birth, they called — with the special contempt of men who have never experienced the thing they are criticizing — fanaticism.

I had been warned this would happen. Not by a man, but by the Word of God. (John 15:18-19 KJV): "If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." And again: (2 Timothy 3:12 KJV): "Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." I had read those words. I believed them. But knowing something as a doctrine and experiencing it as a reality are two very different things, and as the doors closed one by one, I felt the personal weight of it in a way that no theological preparation could have entirely cushioned. These were men who had seemed friendly. Some had seemed genuinely supportive. The rejection stung. But it did not stop me. If anything, it clarified my calling. I had not come to please the establishment. I had come to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and if the establishment would not have it, I would find another way.

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Into the Fields: Kingswood, February 1739

The decision I made in February of 1739 was one of the most important of my life — and at the time, it felt as much like necessity as choice. The pulpits of Bristol were largely closed to me. The churches had heard the reports from London and had drawn their own conclusions. I was too controversial, too disruptive, too likely to cause exactly the kind of awakening that threatened the settled order of religious propriety. And so I did what a man does when the doors close: I looked for a window.

The window was Kingswood. Just outside Bristol lay a community of coal miners — rough, unchurched, largely forgotten by the entire religious establishment of England. The Kingswood colliers were not what polite society considered promising material for Gospel ministry. They were men whose lives were defined by hard labor in dangerous conditions, men whose hands and faces were perpetually darkened with coal dust, men who drank hard and fought hard and had never in their lives been inside a comfortable drawing room or a cathedral service. The church had made no serious effort to reach them. They had no pastor. They had no congregation. They had, in the estimation of most English clergymen, very little to recommend them as an audience for serious theological preaching.

But they were souls. That was enough for me. They were souls made in the image of God, souls for whom Jesus Christ had shed His blood just as surely as He had shed it for the educated gentlemen of Oxford or the elegant ladies of London. And they had something that most of those gentlemen and ladies did not have — they had not been inoculated against the Gospel by years of comfortable religious performance. They had no pretense of having already been saved. They were, in the most literal sense, wide open.

On a February morning in 1739, I rode out to Kingswood and stood on a small rise of ground in the open air. There was no pulpit, no church building, no formal setting of any kind. There were approximately two hundred men who had gathered out of curiosity to see this strange young preacher who had come to find them in their own territory. I opened my Bible, I opened my mouth, and I preached.

What happened next was something I had not anticipated, even having seen remarkable things in the London churches. The men listened. They did not shuffle or scoff or wander away as I had feared they might. They listened with an intensity that silenced even the noise of their own roughness. And then, as I pressed deeper into the message of the new birth, as I described the condition of a soul lost and undone and the mercy of a Saviour who had come to find exactly that kind of person, I began to see something that stopped my breath and nearly stopped my words entirely.

I saw furrows of white tears cutting down through the coal-black faces before me.

These men did not cry easily. These were not refined gentlemen who had been taught that public emotion was an acceptable expression of religious sentiment. These were men who worked underground in the dark, who faced danger and death as a matter of routine, who had hardened themselves by necessity against the softer instincts of the heart. And they were weeping. Not one or two — many of them. The tears ran clean tracks through the grime on their faces, and they did not seem to care. They did not seem embarrassed. They seemed, in that moment, to have been reached by something so large and so real that the ordinary defenses of pride and self-sufficiency had simply given way before it.

I wept myself, if I am honest. Standing there on that Kingswood hillside, looking at those coal-black faces streaked with white tears, I felt something I have never entirely been able to put into words. It was the love of Jesus breaking through — not through my eloquence or my preparation or any quality I possessed, but through the simple, powerful truth of the Gospel applied by the Spirit of God to men who had never heard it before in their lives. (Luke 4:18 KJV) — the words Jesus used to describe His own mission: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised." Those words were being fulfilled before my eyes. The poor. The brokenhearted. The captives. I was standing in the middle of them, and the Gospel was doing its work.

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From Two Hundred to Twenty Thousand

Word spread faster than I could have imagined. The story of a young preacher who had come to the Kingswood colliers in their own fields, who had stood in the open air without any church building or formal setting and preached with a passion that made hard men weep — that story traveled. And by the time I returned to preach at Kingswood again, the crowd had grown.

Two hundred became five hundred. Five hundred became two thousand. Two thousand became ten thousand, then twenty thousand, as the spring of 1739 wore on and the revival fire spread through Bristol and beyond. People walked miles to hear the preaching. They came before dawn and waited in the cold to secure a position close enough to hear. They stood in rain and wind and did not leave. They came sick and they came old and they came carrying their children. They came from the mines and they came from the shops and they came from the counting houses. The great and the ordinary came together, because the Gospel that I was preaching made no distinction between them — it reached every heart at the same level, because every heart, whatever its station in life, stood equally lost before God and equally welcomed at the cross of Jesus.

I remember one occasion when I looked out over a crowd assembled in the open air outside Bristol and tried to estimate how many people were before me. Benjamin Franklin — my future friend and printer in Philadelphia — would later apply his scientific mind to this question when he heard me preach in America, calculating from the geometry of sound that my voice could reach upward of thirty thousand people in the open air. In Bristol in those early weeks, I did not have Franklin's mathematical precision, but I had my own sense of the staggering scale of what God was doing. Thousands of souls, standing in the cold, with their faces turned toward a twenty-four-year-old preacher who had no business filling their hearts with this kind of hunger — and yet there they were, and there the hunger was.

The open-air meeting had not been my idea, exactly — necessity had backed me into it. But I came quickly to see it not as a compromise but as a providential liberation. Jesus had preached on hillsides and from boats and in open squares. Paul had preached on the Areopagus of Athens. The earliest Gospel proclamation had happened in the streets and the courts and the public spaces of the Roman world. The church building — whatever its uses and dignities — was a late invention, and the kingdom of God was never meant to be confined within its walls. The fields of England were my cathedral. The sky was my ceiling. And the congregation that gathered in those fields was more honest in its hunger and its response than many a polished congregation I had ever addressed from behind a carved pulpit in a carpeted nave.

I used to say to my critics who complained about preaching outdoors: what is a field but a house without a roof? God made the fields before men made the churches. He made the open air before He made the stained glass. And He is not confined to the structures His people build in His honor. (Psalm 24:1 KJV): "The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." All of it belongs to Him. Every hillside and every valley, every marketplace and every field, every square and every common — all of it is His territory, and He may preach His Gospel wherever He chooses, through whatever instrument He chooses. If He chooses to fill Kingswood and Moorfields and Boston Commons with people hungry for the Word, who is any bishop or any vestry to say that He may not?

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The Preacher's Voice and the Actor's Training

I want to say something here about the preaching itself — about what it actually sounded like and felt like to be in one of those open-air meetings — because I think it matters to understanding why it worked, and why the same Gospel preached by a dozen other men of that era produced a fraction of the response.

From childhood, as I described in the previous chapter, I had a gift for performance and a passion for the spoken word. I had memorized plays and acted them out in the corners of the Bell Inn. I had learned, before I knew what I was learning, how to inhabit a character, how to bring an audience into a scene with me, how to shift the emotional register of a room through the modulation of my voice. These were theatrical gifts — gifts that the conventional preaching culture of the eighteenth century had no framework for and was, in many cases, actively suspicious of.

The conventional sermon of that era was read. A minister sat or stood in his pulpit, read his prepared text in a measured, generally monotonous voice, and concluded. The congregation received this performance in roughly the same spirit in which they received the reading of a legal document — with polite attention and very little personal engagement. There was no drama. There was no urgency. There was, in most cases, very little apparent conviction on the part of the preacher that what he was saying had any immediate and pressing relevance to the eternal destinies of the people sitting before him.

I could not preach like that. Not because I scorned the tradition — I was, and remained, an ordained minister of the Church of England, and I honored many things within that tradition. But the content of what I was preaching would not permit the manner of conventional address. If I genuinely believed — and I did, with every fiber of my being — that the men and women before me were standing between heaven and hell, that the choice they made about Jesus Christ in the next hour or the next day might determine where they spent eternity — then I could no more deliver that message in a mild monotone than a man could announce a fire in a crowded building in a calm and polite voice. The urgency was in the message itself. The passion was simply honesty about the stakes.

So I preached the way the message demanded. I used my voice as the instrument it was — the full range of it, from the tender and quiet to the urgent and thundering. I described scenes from Scripture with the vivid immediacy of a man who had been there, because in prayer and in meditation I had been there, as surely as any imagination fed by the Spirit of God could be. I wept when the message called for weeping. I cried out when it called for crying out. I threw my whole body and soul into the proclamation, because less than that would have been dishonest about what I was proclaiming.

The famous actor David Garrick — the most celebrated performer of his era, a man who understood the craft of vocal delivery better than almost anyone alive — reportedly said that he would give a hundred guineas to be able to say the simple word 'Oh' the way I said it. Coming from David Garrick, that was no small compliment. But I never thought of what I was doing as performance. Performance is the rehearsed display of an emotion you are not necessarily feeling. What I was doing was the opposite: feeling an emotion so genuinely and so deeply that I had no choice but to let it be visible. The grief over lost souls was real. The urgency about eternity was real. The joy in the mercy of Christ was real. And real things, expressed honestly, reach people in a way that performances never can.

Benjamin Franklin, who was not a religious man and never professed personal faith, nonetheless became my close friend and my printer in Philadelphia. He once attended one of my open-air meetings with the express intention of testing my voice scientifically — measuring how far the sound could carry, working out from geometry how many people could hear me. He estimated that I could be heard clearly by thirty thousand people in the open air. But Franklin also wrote something else about my preaching that I treasure more than his acoustic calculations. He described how I was raising money on one occasion for the Bethesda Orphanage, and how he had resolved, before the sermon began, not to give anything. As he listened, he relented to the point of thinking he might give a few copper coins. As the sermon continued, he decided he could give some silver. By the end, he emptied his pockets entirely. This from a man who was, by his own admission, entirely unconverted. The power was not mine. It was the Gospel itself, bearing down on a human conscience with the weight that only truth can carry. (Romans 1:16 KJV): "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth."

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The First Voyage to Georgia: 1738

In the midst of the early Bristol revival, I must step back briefly in the narrative and speak of something that had already happened before the Kingswood meetings — my first voyage to the American colonies in 1738. Because Georgia and the orphanage that would become so central to my life were not an afterthought; they were part of the original commission, and understanding them is essential to understanding everything that followed.

I had been deeply moved by the accounts coming back from Georgia — the newest and most southern of Britain's American colonies, established only a few years earlier and struggling with all the difficulties of a frontier settlement in a harsh climate with limited resources. The people there were desperate in ways that the comfortable churchgoers of London or Bristol could barely imagine. There were children without parents, families without provision, souls without any Gospel ministry to speak of. John Wesley had been to Georgia before me and had come back, in many ways, a broken man — his ministry there had not gone well, and he had returned to England in a state of spiritual doubt that would not be resolved until his own conversion experience in Aldersgate Street in 1738. But the need in Georgia had not diminished with Wesley's departure. If anything, it had grown.

I felt God's call to go. There was no dramatic vision, no audible voice — but there was a settled, persistent, growing conviction that Georgia was where He wanted me, and that the orphanage that I had been dreaming of building there was part of His purpose for my life. I sailed in December of 1737, arriving in Georgia in the early months of 1738. The crossing itself was an education. At one point during the voyage, I was laid low with a violent fever that reduced me to what seemed like the last extremity — I genuinely thought I might not survive it. But God was gracious. He brought me through, and I found that even in the middle of sickness and weakness and the tossing of a ship at sea, the peace of Jesus Christ was a real and present thing. It did not require comfortable circumstances. It did not depend on good health or favorable winds. It was there in the dark of a ship's cabin with a fever burning through me, and that knowledge — that the peace of Christ is not contingent on circumstances — was one of the most practically useful things I ever learned.

I wrote from the ship to my friends in England, and those letters — raw and honest and full of the particular intensity of a young man who believes he is at the center of God's purposes and wants desperately not to fail them — capture something of the spirit of those early months. I wrote that I was on my way to do my Master's work. I wrote that the whole world was now my parish. I wrote that wherever God sent me, I would go, and that His service was, in my experience, perfect freedom.

Georgia confirmed everything I had felt about the need. The colony was struggling in ways that broke my heart. And among the most urgent needs was the situation of the orphan children — children who had lost parents to disease or accident or the grinding hardships of frontier life and who had nowhere to go and no one to care for them. I had seen something similar at Oxford, where I had visited prisons and debtors and the poor, and the same instinct rose up in me now: these are souls Jesus died for, and they need someone to stand in the gap for them.

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Bethesda: The House of Mercy

The vision for the orphanage came together in my mind and heart during those first Georgia months and solidified into a firm plan. I would build an orphanage in Georgia. I would call it Bethesda — a name taken from the Hebrew, meaning House of Mercy, after the pool in Jerusalem where the helpless and the broken gathered waiting for the moving of the waters and the healing that only God could bring. The name was deliberate and prophetic. I wanted Bethesda to be exactly that — a place of mercy for those whom life had broken, a place where the practical provision of food and shelter and education was woven together with the spiritual provision of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The scale of what I was proposing was, by any practical measure, far beyond my personal resources. I had no great wealth. I had no institutional backing. The Church of England was not disposed to fund the enthusiast projects of a young preacher who had already made himself controversial by preaching in fields. I would need to raise the money myself — from the crowds that came to hear me preach, from the wealthy friends that God would bring across my path, from the general public on both sides of the Atlantic. And so the orphanage and the preaching became, for the rest of my life, inseparably linked. Wherever I preached, I took collections for Bethesda. The same voice that called souls to repentance also called hands to open purses for the children of Georgia.

Construction on the orphanage grounds began on the twenty-fifth of March, 1740, on a plot of land spanning five hundred acres. It was a massive undertaking — buildings to be raised, staff to be hired, children to be housed and fed and clothed and taught, all in a climate that was often harsh and in a colony that was still finding its feet. My wife Elizabeth, when we married in 1741, would prove invaluable in managing Bethesda during the long months and years when my preaching took me away from Georgia. She was a practical and godly woman, and the orphanage would not have survived without her steady management.

Bethesda grew to become the best-known orphanage in the British colonies. It was not merely a charitable institution — it was a statement of the Gospel. It said, in brick and timber and daily bread, what the preaching was saying in words: that Jesus Christ cares for the poor, the orphaned, the forgotten, the helpless. That His mercy reaches the child who has no father and no future, just as surely as it reaches the soul that has no righteousness and no hope. I thought often, as I watched those children being fed and taught and loved, of the words of Jesus in (Matthew 25:40 KJV): "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." The least of these. That was Bethesda's congregation — the least, the overlooked, the thrown-away. And Jesus was in them. He was in every small face at every meal table in that house of mercy, and to serve them was to serve Him.

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The Power of the Printed Word

Before I speak of the great colonial tour of 1739 and 1740 that would become the heart of the Great Awakening, I want to pause and acknowledge something about my ministry that is easy to overlook in an account that focuses on the dramatic scenes of open-air preaching: the critical role of the printed word.

From very early in my ministry, I recognized that the effect of preaching could be multiplied enormously by putting its content into print. I published accounts of my preaching. I published sermons. I published journals of my travels — the journals that would eventually fill multiple volumes and give posterity a remarkably detailed and honest record of what these years actually looked like from the inside. I advertised my meetings in the newspapers. I understood, in a way that many of my clerical contemporaries did not, that the new age of print culture was not an enemy of the Gospel but an instrument for it — that the same technology that was spreading the ideas of the Enlightenment could equally well spread the ideas of the Kingdom of God.

My journals were read on both sides of the Atlantic. They created a sense of shared participation in what God was doing — people in London read about what was happening in Bristol and in Philadelphia and in Boston and felt themselves part of a movement that was larger than any single place or any single sermon. They built anticipation. Before I arrived in a city, people had often already read about what had happened in the last city, and they came already curious, already expectant, already primed to hear something that might touch their own souls.

I was not, in other words, simply a preacher. I was — in terms that my era would not have used but that capture the reality accurately — a communicator in the fullest sense: a man who understood that the Gospel needed to move through every channel available, that every medium was a potential instrument in the hands of a God who wanted to reach every soul. The voice in the field and the word on the printed page were partners in the same work.

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Returning to Bristol: The Revival Deepens

After my first Georgia visit I returned to England in late 1738, burning with renewed urgency. Georgia had confirmed the need. Georgia had deepened my sense of what the Gospel could do in the most unpromising circumstances. And England, when I came back to it, seemed to me more spiritually cold and more desperately in need than ever — the contrast with what I had seen of genuine hunger among the rough colonists and the desperate orphans of Savannah made the comfortable emptiness of English religious culture all the more stark.

I returned to Bristol. I returned to Kingswood. And this time there was no question of waiting for the churches to open their doors. I went straight to the fields, and the people came in numbers that had grown even since the first meetings of February 1739. By the spring and early summer of 1739, the crowds at Bristol and Kingswood numbered in the tens of thousands. The revival had developed a momentum of its own — it was no longer about me attracting crowds to hear myself preach, but about the Spirit of God moving through a community and drawing people to the place where He was working, the way a fire draws people on a cold night.

I watched things happen in those crowds that I could not have produced if I had tried. Men who came to mock stayed to weep. Women who had never prayed in their lives cried out to God in the open fields and were answered. Families were transformed. Marriages that had been broken were healed. Men who had been drunkards put down the drink and took up the Bible. The visible, practical, social effects of the revival were undeniable even to those who wanted to deny them — and there were plenty who wanted to deny them, because what was happening in Bristol in 1739 made the neat, controlled, establishment religion of England look like exactly the empty shell it was.

I thought constantly of Ezekiel's valley of dry bones as I stood before those crowds — that great vision in which God asked the prophet, (Ezekiel 37:3 KJV): "Son of man, can these bones live?" And God's answer was to send breath into the bones, and they lived, and they stood upon their feet, an exceeding great army. England was a valley of dry bones. The churches were full of the bones of a religion that had stopped breathing. But God was sending His breath again — not through the institutional channels that had failed, but through the open air, through the fields, through the voice of an unlikely young preacher who had been born in a tavern and broken in an Oxford room and set on fire in the mercy of the cross. (Ezekiel 37:5 KJV): "Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live." They were living. Right before my eyes, they were living.

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Handed on to Wesley

One of the most significant decisions of my ministry in these Bristol years was the decision to hand the Kingswood and Bristol meetings over to John Wesley when I departed for America. Wesley and I had been friends since Oxford — he was eleven years my elder, the older brother I had never had in some ways, the man whose circle had introduced me to Henry Scougal and the serious seeking that had led to my new birth. Our friendship was deep and genuine, whatever tensions would later develop between us over theology.

I had corresponded with Wesley and urged him, as I was preparing to leave for America, to come to Bristol and take up the open-air work. Wesley was initially reluctant — he was, by temperament and training, a more orderly and institutional man than I was, and the irregularity of field preaching troubled him. He wrote to me about his hesitation. I wrote back urging him to come. He came. And the rest, as they say, is history — Wesley took the Bristol work, built it into the foundation of the Methodist movement in England, and the infrastructure of Methodism that would eventually spread across Britain and into America had its roots in those Kingswood fields where I had first preached to two hundred coal miners on a February morning in 1739.

I take no credit for what Wesley built — he built it, and he built it magnificently, with a genius for organization and pastoral care that I frankly did not possess. I was a preacher, not an organizer. I could light a fire, but Wesley could tend it, contain it, give it structure and channel its energy into lasting institutions. God knew what He was doing in giving each of us our particular gifts. He needed both: the fire-starter and the fire-keeper. I was glad, and have remained glad, that He gave me the one role and Wesley the other.

But the Bristol handover also marks the beginning of the great American chapter of my ministry — the chapter that would make me, within a single year, arguably the most famous man in the colonies. I was heading west across the Atlantic for the second time, and this time I was not merely visiting a struggling frontier colony. I was stepping into a spiritual moment that God had been preparing for years, in a land that was ready to receive a revival unlike anything the old world had yet seen.

The harvest was white. The laborers were few. And I was on my way. (Matthew 9:37-38 KJV): "Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest." I was one laborer. One voice. One man crossing an ocean with a Bible and a burning conviction that the Gospel of Jesus Christ could shake a continent. But God has always been in the business of doing the impossible with the unlikely. The fields of Kingswood had proved it. The colonies were about to prove it again.

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What Whitefield Actually Preached: The Sermon in the Field

I want to give you a sense, as concretely as I can, of what it actually sounded like when I stood in those Kingswood fields and opened my mouth. I have spoken of the effect — the tears on coal-black faces, the growing crowds, the fruit in changed lives. But the effect came from the content, and the content was not vague or abstract. It was pointed, specific, and deliberately aimed at the heart of every person standing before me.

I typically began a field sermon with the human condition — not the human condition in the abstract or the philosophical, but in the immediate and personal. I would describe what it felt like to be a man or woman made in the image of God who had wandered far from Him. I would describe the emptiness, the restlessness, the futile attempts to fill the hollow place with the things of the world — with pleasure and wealth and social position and the approval of other people. I would describe these things not as a distant theologian analyzing the human condition from a safe academic distance, but as a man who had lived them, who knew from the inside what it felt like to be outwardly religious and inwardly bankrupt.

From the human condition I moved to the divine provision — the cross of Jesus Christ, the single most important event in the history of the universe, the moment when the Son of God took the sin of every person who had ever lived or would ever live upon Himself and exhausted the wrath of God against it. I did not preach the cross as a historical fact to be acknowledged and filed away. I preached it as a present and personal reality — something that had happened for the specific person standing before me, for the coal miner in the front row and the merchant in the back, for the woman with the sleeping child in her arms and the old man who had not been inside a church in forty years. Jesus died for you. Not for humanity in the abstract. For you, with your name and your face and your sins and your particular weight of guilt and shame and secret brokenness. He died for you.

And then I made the application. This was the part that made the establishment so uncomfortable — the part where I did not leave the matter at the level of information but pressed it to the point of decision. You have heard the Gospel. You have understood it, at least in your mind. What will you do with it? You cannot remain neutral. You cannot nod politely and continue as before, because continuing as before, now that you have heard the truth, is a deliberate choice to reject it. The almost Christian — the man who has heard and nodded and gone home unchanged — is in a worse position than the man who has never heard, because he has sinned against a light that the other never received. The call is not to agree with the Gospel. The call is to come to Jesus, now, in genuine repentance and living faith, and receive what He freely offers to every soul who will come.

I would close every field sermon the same way — with an open invitation. Not manipulative. Not coercive. But urgent, passionate, and absolutely genuine. Come. Come just as you are. Come poor, lost, undone, empty-handed. Do not wait until you are good enough — you will never be good enough, and that is precisely the point. Come in your rags and your shame and your confusion and your doubt. Come to the One who receives sinners and eats with them and makes them something altogether new. Come to Jesus Christ, and live.

I preached those words ten thousand times in the fields of England and the squares of America and the hills of Scotland. I will preach them to you now, from these pages: Come. If you are reading this and you have not come to Jesus Christ in genuine repentance and saving faith — come now. The invitation is still open. His arms are still wide. (Matthew 11:28-29 KJV): "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls." Rest. Real rest. Not the exhausted sleep of a man who has run out of energy for pretending, but the deep rest of a soul that has stopped fighting God and found in that surrender not defeat but the most profound and durable peace that exists in the universe. Come and find it. It is yours for the taking, through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

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The Skeptics, the Mockers, and the Converted

Not everyone who came to the field meetings came hungry. Some came hostile. Some came to mock — the intellectual sneerers of the era, men who had absorbed enough of the Enlightenment's skepticism about religious emotion to think that weeping in a field was evidence of mental weakness rather than spiritual reality. Some came out of pure curiosity, the way people in any era slow down to watch an unusual spectacle. And some came, as I have mentioned, with active intent to disrupt — to shout or throw things or organize a counter-demonstration that might drive the crowd away.

I learned to preach through all of it. The interruptions, once I had experienced a few, ceased to frighten me and became, in a strange way, almost useful — because an interruption gave me the opportunity to respond in real time, in front of a crowd, in a way that demonstrated that my faith was not a rehearsed performance but a living conviction that could hold its own under pressure. When a man shouted something obscene from the back of the crowd, I could address him directly, without heat and without backing down, and often the very act of addressing him brought him to a kind of shame that opened him to the Gospel more than any prepared sermon paragraph could have done.

There was one memorable occasion in Bristol when a group of organized opponents positioned themselves near my speaking position with the clear intention of disrupting the meeting. They made noise. They heckled. And then, as the sermon progressed and the Spirit began to move, something happened to several of them that they had not anticipated and could not explain. They found themselves unable to continue their mockery. Several of them were reduced to the same tears I had seen on the Kingswood colliers. Some sought counsel afterward. I do not tell this to boast — I was not the cause of their conversion. God was. But it is worth noting that the Spirit of God is not intimidated by organized opposition, and that a heart that comes to mock is sometimes precisely the heart that is most ready to be broken, because the very energy it brings — the passion of its rejection — can, in the hands of God, be redirected into the equally passionate energy of genuine seeking.

Among the most significant responses to the Bristol and Kingswood preaching were those that came from the educated and the wealthy — people who might have been expected to have their defenses more firmly in place. There were merchants, lawyers, minor gentry, educated women of good family who came to the field meetings, perhaps initially with the same mixture of curiosity and condescension with which the sophisticated always approach a popular movement they have not yet categorized, and who left having been as thoroughly undone by the Gospel as any coal miner. The Gospel has no respect of persons. It cuts the same way through silk as through homespun, through a cultivated mind as through an unlettered one, through the comfortable as through the desperate. Because the condition it addresses — the condition of a soul separated from God, living in sin, facing death and judgment without the righteousness of Christ — is not a condition peculiar to the poor or the ignorant. It is the universal condition of every human being who has not been born again by the Spirit of God.

I heard reports of conversions from these Bristol and Kingswood months for years afterward — people who wrote to me or came to me in person and said: I was there. I was in that field. I heard you preach about the new birth. And that day changed my life. Some of these reports came a decade or more after the events they described, from men and women who had gone on to live transformed lives, who had raised children in the faith, who had started small societies for mutual encouragement in the Gospel, who had told the story to their neighbors and seen them come to Christ in turn. The ripple effects of a single Spirit-filled sermon in an open field can spread in ways that no human being can calculate or predict. That thought has always been one of the great encouragements of my preaching life — that I need not see the full fruit of what God is doing through a given sermon, because much of that fruit will not appear until years after the seed was planted.

The Apostle Paul expressed this beautifully in (1 Corinthians 3:6-7 KJV): "I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase." God gives the increase. Not the preacher's eloquence. Not the preacher's passion or preparation or persistence, though all of these matter. God gives the increase. My job was to plant — faithfully, urgently, without holding back — and trust Him for the harvest. That trust has never failed. Not once in all the years of standing in fields and on barrels and in market squares, has the seed of the Gospel fallen on ground where God had not already been working. Not once. He always goes before. He always prepares the heart. And He always brings to harvest what He has planted in grace.

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The Lesson of the Open Field

As I look back on those Bristol and Kingswood years — the months between early 1739 and my second departure for America in the autumn of that same year — I want to draw out the lesson that I believe God was teaching me through them. Because every season of ministry, rightly understood, is a classroom. God does not merely use His servants; He shapes them while He uses them, and the shaping is as important as the using.

The lesson of the open field was this: God is not limited to the places and the structures and the methods that His people have declared acceptable. He was not limited to the church buildings that had closed their doors to me. He was not limited to the approval of the bishops who thought me an enthusiast. He was not limited to the educated audience or the respectable congregation or the comfortable arrangement of a Sunday morning service. He could — and He did — pour out His Spirit on rough men in a field, on coal miners who had never opened a Bible, on crowds that had assembled more out of curiosity than reverence, and transform them just as powerfully and just as permanently as any carefully nurtured congregation that had been sitting under sound ministry for a generation.

This does not mean that the church and its structures are worthless. They are not — they are gifts, when they are alive and faithful. But the lesson I learned in those Kingswood fields is that God's Kingdom is bigger than any one container, and that a man or woman who is genuinely available to Him must be willing to go wherever He sends them, by whatever means He provides, to whatever audience He has prepared. If that means a cathedral, well and good. If it means a field — also well and good. The same Spirit moves in both places. The same Gospel transforms lives in both settings. The walls and the roof matter far less than the Word and the Spirit.

There is also a lesson here about the courage required to step outside the boundaries that other people have drawn for your ministry. It was not easy to walk into those Kingswood fields the first time. It was not easy to stand on an open rise of ground and address men who had no particular reason to listen to me, who had never been inside a church, who regarded clergymen in general with a mixture of indifference and suspicion. Every reasonable calculation said it would not work. Every established precedent said this was not how things were done. But God had called me to it, and when God calls a man to something, the courage to obey is its own reward — not because it feels courageous in the moment, but because the fruit of obedience vindicates the risk, and the white-streaked faces of weeping coal miners are a vindication that no amount of respectability could match.

I learned to trust the calling more than the method, more than the circumstances, more than the opinion of people who had never tried. I learned that (Philippians 4:13 KJV) is not a decorative sentiment: "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." Not through my gifts alone, however genuine they were. Not through my preparation, however thorough. Not through the size of the crowd or the warmth of the reception or the favorable opinion of the establishment. Through Christ who strengthened me. He was the source, and the source never ran dry. From the first Kingswood hillside to the last barrel in New Hampshire, He was always there — always sufficient, always faithful, always ready to breathe on the words of a flawed and ordinary man and make them do what only He could make them do. That is the lesson of the open field. And it is the lesson I carry into every page that follows.

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A Note on the Price of the Calling

Before we follow that ship westward across the Atlantic, I want to say something honest about what this season cost me personally — because I think the honest accounting matters, not as complaint but as testimony to the grace that sustained the cost.

My health in those Bristol and early Kingswood years was not good. The pace was punishing. I woke at four in the morning. I preached at six. I preached again in the evening. I sometimes preached ten, twelve, fifteen times a week. I crossed and re-crossed the countryside on horseback, in all weathers, arriving at fields and meeting houses and squares in towns I had never seen before, preaching to people who knew nothing about me except that someone had told them a young man was coming to preach. I ate when there was food to eat and slept when there was a moment to sleep. I was, at twenty-four years old, already showing signs of the physical wear that would age me far beyond my years by the time I reached my fifties.

And there was the opposition. Not all of it was the polite withdrawal of establishment clergy. Some of it was active and violent. On one occasion I was preaching at a site where a cudgel-fighting tournament was taking place — a rough entertainment much enjoyed by people who were not inclined to welcome a Gospel preacher into their midst. I preached anyway. I took a blow. My companions and I were thrown out of our inn. We were in genuine danger of being beaten. I wrote about it to my friends with a kind of exhilarated defiance — not because I enjoyed suffering but because suffering for the name of Jesus Christ, when it comes to a man who has been born again by His Spirit, carries a strange and inexplicable quality of joy.

The Apostle Paul knew this joy intimately. (Acts 5:41 KJV): "And they departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name." Counted worthy to suffer. That is not the language of a man who regards suffering as a punishment or a failure. It is the language of a man who regards it as an honor — a mark of identification with a Saviour who Himself suffered everything that could be suffered, and who promised His followers that they would drink from the same cup. I was twenty-four years old, sore from a blow I had taken at a cudgel fight, thrown out of my lodgings, in danger on the road — and underneath all of it, there was a peace and a joy that I cannot explain except as the direct gift of Jesus Christ to a man who was doing His work. He was with me. He had promised to be, and He was. That was enough.

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The Voice of the Great Awakening

— George Whitefield —

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