George Whitefield

George Whitefield (1714–1770) was an Anglican clergyman and Calvinist Methodist evangelist who became one of the most celebrated preachers of the eighteenth century. Educated at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he joined John and Charles Wesley's "Holy Club," he underwent a dramatic conversion experience around 1735 and was ordained a deacon in the Church of England in 1736. His practice of open-air preaching, launched at Kingswood near Bristol in February 1739 when parish pulpits were closed to him, drew enormous crowds and ignited the evangelical revivals on both sides of the Atlantic now known as the First Great Awakening. Making seven voyages to North America, he helped found the Bethesda Orphan House in Georgia and preached to audiences of tens of thousands from Georgia to New England. Theologically distinctive for his Calvinist soteriology — which set him apart from the Arminian Wesleys — Whitefield left a lasting imprint on Protestant evangelicalism, transatlantic revivalism, and the tradition later institutionalised through Selina Hastings's Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, in which he served as chaplain.