16. Georgia On My Mind
George Whitefield finally found his ride to Georgia. One might say he was also finding himself. This first journey to America was another stage in a significant gestational process for him. We can see the five-year period of 1735 to 1739—from just before his conversion experience to his arrival in Philadelphia—forging his adult identity.
This was the boy who was steered toward the Anglican priesthood before he had much idea of what that meant. Young George carried the weight of his family’s fortunes—as a minister, he would restore their good name. He grew up as prodigy and prankster, overindulged in religious asceticism, and was now preaching to enthusiastic crowds, but who was he really? Struggler, servant, speaker, saint? At this point, he was prepared to find his life’s meaning as a missionary.
On board the ship, George volunteered his services as a chaplain. The captain, crew, and a large group of soldiers were now his congregation. Determined to convert them to Christ, he held daily services for prayer and preaching.
On this trip, Whitefield began keeping his journal, with daily reports of his meetings and preachings. Some entries are dry, others wonderfully detailed. He reported how he preached against swearing or drunkenness, or how he traded some books for someone’s playing cards, which he promptly threw overboard. Then he said he was “delighted with seeing the porpoises roll about the great deep,” and he quoted a nature psalm.1
In other entries, he described the storms or calms encountered on the way:
The waves broke in like a great river on many of the poor soldiers, who lay near the main hatchway. . . . I arose and called upon God for myself and those who sailed with me, absent friends, and all mankind. . . . the waves rose mountain high. . . . Then creeping on my knees (for I knew not how to go otherwise), I followed my friend H[abersham] between decks, and sang Psalms and comforted the poor wet people. After this, I read prayers in the great cabin. . . . Though things were tumbling, the ship rocking, and persons falling down unable to stand, and sick about me, I never was more cheerful in my life.2
Some of this prose recalls the shipwreck story of the apostle Paul in Acts 27, and this might have been intentional. George was living out an apostolic adventure, and he knew it. Like the journals of John and Charles Wesley, these entries were sent to friends in England, who had them published. They sold well.
But there’s another key feature of these journal entries. Amid the adventures and the preaching, George routinely visited the sick—and there were many who fell sick aboard this vessel, including Whitefield himself, for a time. It’s likely that this was the activity that won the hearts of the soldiers and sailors. We could imagine that these hard-living souls wouldn’t take kindly to a fancy preacher who chided them for their salty language, but when he came to their sickbeds, bringing food and water, cleaning up after them, and offering comfort—that might have made a difference. This sense of service set a tone for George’s whole Georgia mission. And there is some irony in the thought that perhaps his best preparation for this mission was not the Oxford degree or the Holy Club or even the practice preaching, but his work as servitor for ungrateful rich kids, or just helping out at his mother’s inn.
On May 17, 1738, with the ship anchored at Savannah, Georgia, Whitefield preached a farewell sermon to his fellow travelers. It was gracious, humble, and heartfelt. He had seen “some marks of partial transformation” among them. “Swearing, I hope, is in a great measure abated with you.”3
But George wasn’t just concerned with their outward behavior. He called them to a new awareness of God that would affect every aspect of their lives. Acknowledging that it was “uncommon” to see a “devout sailor,” he wondered why that would be so—especially when sailors live on the brink of death. “Remember the resolutions you made when you thought God was about to take away your souls,” he challenged them, “and see that, according to your promises, you show forth your thankfulness, not only with your lips, but in your lives.”4
Cleaning Up
Georgia was a mess. Much of it was swampland. Travel was often along creeks, by boat. And there were alligators.
The good-hearted experiment of James Oglethorpe had plenty of challenges: offering a new life in a new world to those who couldn’t pay their debts in the old world; dropping a colony in tribal territory with Spanish troops at the doorstep; trying to create a functioning economy with little connection to the rest of the American colonies. That’s not to say it was a failure. It was just difficult. Whitefield kept calling Georgia an “infant,” and it was indeed going through growing pains.5 Remember: it had been a scant six years since this colony had begun. Now new adventurers were showing up all the time—not just from the debtors’ prisons of London but also from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and France. They stirred together a rich gumbo of cultures, languages, and religions.
The Wesleys had done more harm than good for the Methodist cause in Georgia. As Oglethorpe’s secretary, Charles had just seemed to be overwhelmed by the conditions in the backwoods colony. He was a poet, not a pioneer. He had left Georgia in late 1736.
John had stayed longer, making a number of enemies along the way. His rigid insistence on his own Methodist ways of worship did not succeed in the variegated religious landscape of the new colony. He also fell madly in love with the wrong woman, a much younger daughter of a leading citizen. She was not so interested in him. His unwise wooing resulted in charges brought against him—and the colonial kangaroo court tacked on a number of complaints about how he pastored the parish. After trying to respond to the charges, John ultimately fled prosecution, literally hiking through the swamps before dawn to evade constables and get to the coast to catch a boat to England.
This was the situation George Whitefield entered. Welcome to Georgia.
As we chart George’s learning curve, we can add a few more bits of wisdom that would affect his ministry in the years to come. First, any successful work in America would have to recognize a much broader religious background. England had its Anglicans and a few groups of Dissenters, and the Methodist movement was sort of bridging that gap, but America had a larger menu of faith traditions. How could someone effectively minister to all of them? Eventually George would proclaim a message that could be embraced by those in many different denominations. This strategy might have begun in the Georgian gumbo.
A second bit of wisdom came from John Wesley’s sad infatuation. We have no indication that George was smitten with anyone yet, but this would happen later, and George would be extremely cautious about it. As he experienced the fallout of Wesley’s bad romantic decisions in Georgia, he might have determined never to let courtship derail a ministry.
A third point of growth for Whitefield in this time would be his growing independence from John Wesley. Remember that John was a mentor, more than a decade older, a “big brother” not only to Charles but to the whole Holy Club. But John was already in America when George had experienced his emotional conversion. George had processed that mostly on his own, without John’s guidance. In the Wesleys’ absence, George had taken a leading role among the Oxford Methodists, and he had attained a level of fame far beyond John’s. Yet he was now beginning a ministry in Georgia largely because John had asked him to come there. There is no doubt that he highly respected John and valued his wisdom—which makes this next story all the more remarkable.
When John Wesley fled Georgia, he took a ship that landed him in England, putting in at the seaport town of Deal in the early days of February 1738. By chance (if anything is “by chance”), Whitefield’s ship was still docked there, waiting for favorable weather to begin its ocean journey. Wesley sent a quick message to his old friend, saying that Whitefield should not proceed to Georgia. John had sought the Lord’s guidance on this matter, and this was the answer he got.
Of course George was stunned. As he explained it later, “Here was a good man telling me . . . that God would have me return to London. On the other hand, I knew that my call was to Georgia.”6 He prayed with a friend about this, and they read a strange story in 1 Kings 13, in which God tells a prophet, “You shall not . . . return by going the way you came” (v. 17). This was the confirmation George needed. He would not return to London but sail on to America.
Then imagine how George must have felt when he reached Savannah and learned of the mess that John had left there. This did not ruin the relationship between these two men (though it would be broken later), yet it might have reminded George that he was not a disciple of John Wesley, but of Jesus. He would not be trying to do the will of John Wesley in Savannah, but the will of God. And even the so-called Methodist doctrine that he was developing would not need to be vetted by John Wesley. It was the Lord’s message, and George Whitefield would speak as the Lord instructed.
Cords of Love
After the huge delay in getting there, Whitefield spent only three months in Georgia in 1738. The tone of his ministry there was very different from John Wesley’s. Perhaps he learned to avoid the mistakes of his predecessor—though his journal praised Wesley and complimented his work. George spent much of his time visiting the people of the Savannah area, listening to them, overcoming barriers of language and culture to show them compassion.
“I have endeavoured to let my gentleness be known amongst them,” he journaled, “because they consist of different nations and opinions; and I have striven to draw them by the cords of love, because the obedience resulting from that principle I take to be most genuine and lasting.”7 George saw people trying to build a society in a wilderness, and his heart went out to them. He recognized that it would do little good to try shaming them out of their unholy behavior. The only “genuine and lasting” obedience to the call of God would come from a response of love to a God who loved them, as demonstrated by a loving minister. Yes, he warned a young Native American about the dangers of drinking, but he also sat quietly with that boy’s ailing uncle, who knew no English. With the money he had raised in England, George provided food and medicine to the neediest people in the colony. He also set up schools.
This emphasis on love represents a sea change in Methodist ministry. This is not to say that the Holy Club was unloving. They were known for charitable deeds in their community—visiting the sick and prisoners, for example—but by their own accounts, they were lacking a certain spiritual passion. They were striving for holiness and obedience and urging others to follow, but there was a crucial motivational component lacking. It’s not an oversimplification to call this component love—the love of God that woos human souls, the love for God that compels his ministers, and the loving response of their hearers.
John Wesley had served in Georgia before the conversion experience that changed his life. He had urged the locals to get serious about following God, and he chided them for their failure to live God’s way. Whatever obedience Wesley could muster from them was apparently not “genuine and lasting,” in George’s analysis.
When Whitefield arrived in the second shift of Methodist ministry in Georgia, he had already had his conversion. The love of God had awakened his soul, bringing meaning and power to his search for holiness. He had been preaching about the new birth, but it seems he was still figuring out how that worked. In his year of preaching in England, he had continued to rail against the various vices that were keeping so-called Christians from communing with God. He knew that giving up card playing and theater going would not win entry into God’s kingdom, yet this was the fruit of repentance. Holy living went along with the new birth. Without worldly distractions, a person could hear and respond to God’s call.
Yet Georgia had a whole new audience. George could not assume that they had any Christian background. In fact, he encountered a number of different religious traditions. This had tripped Wesley up. How can you scold people for not being serious about their faith when you don’t know what their faith is? When all your assumptions are shattered, where do you start? You start, Whitefield decided, with love.
This transformed George’s ministry—and his attitude. In a report quite different than those John Wesley had sent back, George wrote to a friend in England, “All things have happened better than expectation. America is not so horrid a place as it is represented to be. The heat of the weather, lying on the ground, etc. are mere painted lions in the way, and to a soul filled with divine love not worth mentioning.”8
Note that, in these same weeks that George Whitefield was learning to practice the principle of love in his ministry, John and Charles Wesley were both back in England, opening up to God’s love. It was May 24, 1738 when John Wesley stepped into a London meetinghouse and felt his heart “strangely warmed.” Charles had experienced something similar a few days earlier. The ministries of George, John, Charles, and their associates would be forever changed by this principle of love. They would never give up their commitment to holiness, but their service would be propelled by love.
For the Children
About two weeks into his stay in Georgia, George began focusing on an idea that would dominate the rest of his life. As he visited the people of Georgia, he “also enquired into the state of their children, and found there were many who might prove useful members of the colony, if there was a proper place provided for their maintenance and education. Nothing can effect this but an Orphan House, which might easily be erected at Savannah.” Here, in the genesis of the idea, there’s not only a sense of charity, but of empowerment. This would not just be a poorhouse, getting undesirables off the streets, but a place of education, preparing children to be “useful members of the colony.” Even then he recognized that it would require contributions from “some of those who are rich in this world’s good.”9
George had already proven himself as a successful fund-raiser. In less than a year of preaching throughout England, he had used his oratorical gifts to gather thirteen hundred pounds for the vague cause of “Georgia’s poor.”10 Imagine how people would respond to a specific project such as an orphan house! In a way, such an endeavor would provide legitimacy to George’s preaching. That’s not to say there was anything illegitimate about evangelism. George knew he was doing God’s work, calling souls into the kingdom, but an orphanage would be a tangible outcome of this ministry. If God could use George’s speaking skill to melt the hearts of those who were “rich in this world’s good” enough to part with some of those goods and help some children, that would be a lasting testimony.
Ben Franklin testified about George’s unique ability to tug at heartstrings and elicit contributions. Once, as George brought his preaching tour through Philadelphia, Ben attended one of his meetings. Knowing that George would finish by taking up a collection, Ben said, “I silently resolved he should get nothing from me.” In his pockets, Ben had “a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold.” You can probably guess what happened next.
“As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably, that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”11
At that time George was, of course, raising funds for this Savannah orphanage project. And while this story could be one of Ben’s fabrications, it might also be a delightful retelling of actual events in April 1740, when Ben reported in the Pennsylvania Gazette: “On Sunday last the Reverend Mr. Whitefield preached two sermons on Society Hill, and collected for the orphans in Georgia . . . about £150 Sterling, besides sundry benefactions sent in since.”12
Clearly George had a persuasive gift, which he had been using both to win souls and to inspire charity. He would continue to do both. Over the years, as thousands responded to Whitefield’s preaching and received new birth in Christ, there would always be naysayers. Some would claim the preacher was just whipping up a temporary emotional fervor and that people would just settle back into their old lives. But the orphanage would stand as a very tangible result of God’s work through him.
“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this,” the Bible says, “to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27). Jesus urged his people to care for “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). The neediest members of society and orphans would certainly fit that category. The Methodists’ spiritual forebears, the German Pietists, had already established an orphanage in Halle. They realized they couldn’t just talk about communing with God; they had to act in accordance with God’s desires. So they set up an orphanage, with a school, in 1695, and it became a centerpiece of their spiritual movement. Perhaps a similar thing could happen in Savannah.
As George left Georgia in late August 1738, the orphanage was still just a dream, but he was committed to make it a reality. “What I have most at heart,” he wrote to a friend, “is the building of an orphan-house, which I trust will be effected at my return to England.”13
Field Day
Back in England in December 1738, George picked up his preaching ministry where he left off, visiting various churches and consistently drawing crowds. But something had changed. Opposition to his work had grown, especially among the clergy.
While he’d been away, the early installments of his journals had been published and distributed in England. As a result, all sorts of feelings for him and against him had intensified, even in his absence, and he had no opportunity to mollify his critics or rein in his fans. He now returned to a highly charged environment. Pamphlets ripped his preaching style as too dramatic and exposed the so-called errors in his theology. His fame had increased, so he was drawing even greater crowds, but more and more churches were being closed to him.
George’s main task now was to get approval and funding for the orphan house in Savannah. To that end, he needed another level of ordination. He had already been ordained a deacon of the Church of England, and that equipped him for certain ministries. But now he needed to be fully recognized as an Anglican priest. That would allow him to preach in any Anglican church in support of his new charity. That was the plan, anyway. In order to receive this ordination, he needed a “living”—that is, a church in which to serve, or perhaps an appointment as a missionary.
As it turned out, the trustees of the Georgia colony approved Whitefield’s orphanage idea. This, then, became his living, with the somewhat grudging approval of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London. (According to one early biographer, they received him “civilly” but “coldly.”14) George was fully ordained by his old friend, the bishop of Bristol. “And now my prayer is answered,” he wrote to a friend.15
Yet controversy continued to swirl around him. Though he was officially permitted to speak in any church about his orphanage, many church leaders opposed him, and others were pressured to turn him away. Some of this opposition was based on misunderstandings and slander, but much of it just came from a basic disagreement with Whitefield’s message. The idea of a “new birth” rankled many church leaders. Was George really saying that all their loyal church members needed some sort of personal spiritual experience? They were already good people. Why would they need to become “new creatures”? That might be necessary for those of other cultures, or those who had wasted their lives in debauchery, but church people were just fine. How dare this preacher suggest they were missing something! A message like Whitefield’s could tear a church apart.
As more and more churches denied him access, George turned this to his advantage. About a year earlier, he had struck up a correspondence with a Welsh preacher named Howell Harris. A maverick himself, Harris had specialized in holding outdoor services, in the countryside of Wales. Whitefield began to think that this option would work for him.
He began to preach in the open. His brother let him use a field near the old Bell Inn. People in one community gathered on the town’s bowhng green to hear him. There, he stood on a table in his ministerial gown. Some of his critics sneered that this was “unconsecrated ground,” but George didn’t care. The more resistance he faced, the clearer his message became.
In one journal entry, he mentioned a sermon he preached on the parable of the Pharisee and the publican (Luke 18:9–14). As Jesus’ story went, the religious leader and the smarmy tax collector both offered their prayers in the temple. The Pharisee was full of self-congratulation and disdain for the sinner beside him. The publican knew he was a sinner and begged God for mercy. This could have been a portrait of English society. “I was very earnest in endeavouring to convince the self-righteous Pharisees of this generation,” George journaled, “and offering Jesus Christ freely to all, who, with the humble publican, feelingly and experimentally could cry out, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’ ”16
Venturing outside church walls, he was finding more and more “publicans” to preach to—those who were sinners and knew it, who had long since given up any hope of impressing God with their behavior. In the familiar area of Bristol, George found such people in the coal mines. “The colliers [miners], he had heard, were very rude, and very numerous; so uncultivated, that nobody cared to go among them; neither had they any place of worship; and often, when provoked, they were a terror to the whole city of Bristol.” So wrote John Gillies, George’s friend and early biographer. Considering it “a matter of great importance” to bring them “to the profession and practice of Christianity,” George stood on a hill near the mines and began preaching about being “poor in spirit.” About a hundred miners came to hear him, then more, and eventually an estimated twenty thousand. Gillies exulted in more than just numbers: “But with what gladness and eagerness many of these despised outcasts, who had never been in a church in their lives, received the word, is above description.”
The biographer quoted Whitefield himself: “Having . . . no righteousness of their own to renounce, they were glad to hear of a Jesus who was a friend to publicans, and came not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” George said he knew he was getting through when he saw “the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their black cheeks, as they came out of their coal pits. Hundreds and hundreds of them were soon brought under deep convictions, which . . . happily ended in a sound and thorough conversion.”17
George had a message of redemption for everyone, and if the churches didn’t want it, he would find those who did. He continued this strategy as he preached in America. In August 1739, it was time to leave England once more. He was headed for Georgia again, but first he would check in at the heart of the American colonies, Philadelphia.