FIRST GREAT AWAKENING

It was an evangelical revival movement that swept Protestant Europe and British America, and especially the American Colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American Protestantism.
Pulling away from ritual, ceremony, sacramental, and hierarchy, the Great Awakening made Christianity intensely personal by fostering a deep sense of spiritual conviction and redemption, and by encouraging introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality. Rather than listening demurely to preachers, people groaned and roared in enthusiastic emotion. Personal experience became more important than formal education for preachers. Such concepts and habits formed the foundation for the American Revolution.
The movement was a monumental social event in New England. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the German Reformed denomination. It focused on people who were already church members. New divinity schools opened to challenge the hegemony of Yale and Harvard.
George Whitefield (December 27, 1714 - September 30, 1770) was the most widely recognized figures in Britain and the American Colonies. He was born at the Bell Inn, South-Gate Street, Gloucester in England. He was the 5th son (7 child) of Thomas Whitefield and Elizabeth Edwards who kept an Inn at Gloucester. At an early age, he found he had a passion and talent for acting in the theatre, a passion that he would carry on with the very theatrical re-enactments of Bible stories he told during his sermons.
Whitefield accepted the Church of England's doctrine of predestination and disagreed  with the Wesley Brothers' views on the doctrine of the Atonement, Arminianism. He formed and was the president of the first Methodist conference, but soon he relinquished the position to concentrate on evangelical work. Three churches were established in England in his name and became known by the name of "Whitefield's Tabernacle."
He advocated in the task of raising funds in England to establish the Bethesda Orphanage, which is the oldest extant charity in North America. In 1740 he engaged Moravian Brethren from Georgia to build and orphanage for Negro children on the land he had bought in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.
Following a theological disagreement, he dismissed them but was unable to complete the building, which the Moravians subsequently bought and completed. This now is the Whitefield House in the center of the Moravian settlement of Nazareth. He preached everyday for months to large crowds of several thousand people as he traveled throughout the colonies, especially New England, His journey on horseback from New York City to Charleston was the longest then undertaken in North America by a white man,
Whitefield preached staunchly Calvinist theory. While explicitly affirming God's sole agency of salvation, Whitefield's reputation as a great open-air orator preceded his preaching in parks and fields reaching out to large and emotional crowd of people who normally did not attend church, eliciting countless conversions as well as considerable controversy. He had charisma, and his voice could be heard over 500 feet. His small stature, and even his cross-eyed appearance all served to help make him one of the first celebrities in the American colonies. He employed print systematically, sending advance men to put up broadsides and distribute handbills announcing his sermons. He also arranged to have his sermons published and given to the audience freely, saying at the end of it : "Come poor, lost, undone sinner, come to me just as you are to Christ."A crowd estimated at 30,000 met him in Cambuslang in 1742.
The message of spiritual equality appealed to many slaves and as African religious tradition continued to decline in North America, for the first time black people accepted Christianity in large numbers. Before the American Revolution, the first black Baptist Churches were founded in South Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia; in Petersburg, Virginia, two black Baptist Churches were founded.