Today the Episcopal Church (USA) honours George Whitefield with a special feast day. There is good reason for this since Whitefield played a seminal role in the spiritual formation of the United States. The article below, which first appeared in Christian Voice’s July 2009 newsletter, explains about Whitefield’s remarkable life and his influence in both Britain and America.
If you had been at the Bell Inn, in Gloucester England in the 1720’s, you would have witnessed an unusual site. A small boy was acting out a sermon for the entertainment of the guests. It was not uncommon for this boy, the youngest among widow Elizabeth Whitfield’s seven children, to engage in theatrical re-enactments of sermons and Bible stories for the guests at his mother’s inn. But this time, something was different. Reciting the sermon he had heard on Sunday as a type of game, young George Whitfield was quite unprepared for the response he received as some of the onlookers began to weep.
It was a portent of things to come. When George grew up and became a famous preacher, he found that his words had a strange affect on people, provoking emotions for which he was often unprepared.
Born in 1714, George’s childhood was far from easy. His father died when he was only two, leaving the running of the inn to Elizabeth. After a disastrous second marriage and divorce, George’s older brother eventually took over the management of the inn, while George was sent to the cathedral school of Saint Mary.
From an early age George had showed a keen interest in matters of religion. However, as Stephen Mansfield reflects in his biography of Whitefield, the boy was not without a touch of paradox. “He stole money from his mother’s purse but then used it to buy religious books. He would fight viciously with boys in the streets and then fall weeping on the floor of his bedroom to pray for the souls of those he had just pummeled. His brothers and sisters thought he loved church just because it was a grand drama that suited his vain, theatrical little mind, but his mother later found him asking such astute questions that she knew something of the divine was penetrating his soul Sunday after Sunday.”
