Global Evangelicalism: Theology, History and Culture in Regional Perspective

Preface

This edited volume is the product of years of collaboration involving an international group of scholars. The origins of the initiative can be traced back to conversations in the late 1980s between some of the leading historians of evangelicalism: Mark Noll (then professor of Christian thought at Wheaton College), Edith Blumhofer (then director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton) and the late George Rawlyk, professor of history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. A conference on Evangelicals, Voluntary Associations and American Public Life, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, was held at Wheaton in June of 1991. Mark Noll drew together an initial core of historians to talk about how to advance the academic study of evangelicalism and to share the results of such research with a much wider audience. They included Mark Hutchinson from Sydney, Australia; J. W. (Hoffie) Hofmeyr from the University of Pretoria; John Wolffe of the Open University in England; Richard V. Pierard (then at Indiana State University); and Donald Lewis of Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. The group soon expanded to include many other experts. An initial conference was held in Sydney, Australia, in 1997, and resulted in the publication of A Global Faith: Essays on Evangelicalism and Globalization (Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity, Sydney, 1998), edited by Mark Hutchinson and Ogbu Kalu.

In the late 1990s funding was secured for the Currents in World Christianity Project (CWC) based at Cambridge University and headed by Brian Stanley. The CWC went on to sponsor several key international consultations and conferences in England, New Zealand and South Africa. One of the initiatives of the CWC was aimed at producing a single volume of essays that would acquaint a wide international audience with the latest research on global evangelicalism, and it was hoped that this volume would be translated into a number of languages and help many audiences beyond the confines of Western academia to understand this movement. This is that volume.

Our thanks and gratitude must be expressed to the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the funds that made the Currents in World Christianity Project possible, which in turn underwrote the costs of putting this volume together.

We also wish to express our sincere gratitude to Mark Hutchinson for his work in initially pulling articles together for this volume; in spite of his heroic efforts, after a few years of trying to complete the project he found himself overwhelmed with teaching and administrative duties, and as a result, we volunteered to see the volume to the finish line. There are a host of individuals who need to be thanked for their hard work in reading and critiquing the volume in various stages of its preparation: chiefly Doug Hills, whose administrative gifts were so helpful, but also to Hanna Dutko, Danae Yankowski, David Lewis, Laura Werezak, Tim Proudlove, Matthew Thomas and Paul Gutacker.

Thanks also needs to be expressed to Brian Stanley for his patience with us as we have endeavored to finish the editing process. Daniel Reid of InterVarsity Press has outshone Job in terms of patience with us; we are very much in his debt.

Donald M. Lewis and Richard V. Pierard

Introduction

Donald M. Lewis and Richard V. Pierard

In the second half of the twentieth century, proponents of the secularization thesis asserted that religion was a historical phenomenon associated with premodern societies and that its demise was inevitable in the modern world. This process would, of course, take time, but religion’s slow disappearance would become evident once a period of cultural lag had run its course. It is now widely recognized that these theorists were wrong. Instead of receding, religions throughout the world have been growing and often have been rigorous in their engagement with the public sphere. In response to these developments, some social theorists are now seeking to construct postsecular theories in order to explain where and how the secularization thesis went wrong.

Much scholarly attention is now given to the development of Islamic identities, but there is relatively little understanding of how various forms of evangelical Christianity have emerged as the mainstream Christian expression in many parts of the world, and in particular, in the non-Western world. Evangelicalism and its history have been effectively marginalized in the academy in spite of the fact that a case can be made that alongside popular Islam, evangelical Christianity is the most dynamic and expanding religious expression in the world today. However, many academics remain essentially ignorant of evangelicalism as a movement, unable to differentiate between basic terms such as evangelist, evangelism, evangelical and evangelicalism. Unfortunately, scholars who work in the field have not been very effective in communicating their findings or in persuading scholars that the global expressions of evangelicalism are important or interesting.

The nature of evangelicalism as a popular movement makes it particularly difficult to track and categorize, and this has contributed to its marginalization in the academy. Like popular Islam, its strength comes from the very diverse grassroots base on which it rests—a base made up of individuals, small groups, small and large churches, all spread across a bewildering variety of distinctly evangelical Protestant denominations—while many evangelicals are to be found within mainline denominations that are not self-consciously evangelical. In fact, some of its most influential thinkers and personalities are members of denominations that are not widely identified as evangelical, which would be true in many ways of evangelicalism within Anglicanism in the West. (Here one thinks immediately of George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican communion; of his successor, Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury; the late John Stott, leading evangelical author and pastor; and professor N. T. Wright, formerly Bishop of Durham and currently professor of New Testament at St Andrew’s University in Scotland.)

Another difficulty related to the term evangelicalism is that in the North American setting the term is often associated with a specific political agenda and closely aligned with laissez-faire capitalism, while in other areas of the world these associations would not be made (especially in Latin America). Thus it is often the case that many North American evangelicals hesitate to use the descriptor of themselves, lest they be linked in the broader culture with aspects of what some have come to associate with the term evangelicalism.

A third problem related to the marginalization of evangelicalism is its lack of visibility as a global religious entity. Unlike Roman Catholicism, evangelicalism has no visible focal point of unity. It has no Vatican, no St. Peter’s in Rome, no grand and imposing ancient buildings linking the movement and its followers to the past, no trappings of church-state links that still linger in western Europe, no pope claiming to be the visible representative of Christ on earth, no crowds of international media waiting for the election of a new leader, no global pronouncements emanating from a central headquarters. In the past several decades, the nearest thing to a visible global expression of evangelicalism has been the Lausanne Movement, which under the leadership of the World Evangelical Alliance has brought together evangelicals in three global conferences (Lausanne 1974, Manila 1989 and Cape Town 2010). And yet, although evangelicalism has no geographical center as such, it has succeeded in indigenizing popular forms of Christianity in widely diverse areas of the world where a Rome-centered Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have long been unable to set down roots (one thinks of both Korea and China in this regard).

Such marginalization of evangelicalism in the academy and the media is therefore understandable and yet regrettable because it means that this powerful international movement is not well understood by outsiders or—for that matter—by insiders. Many evangelicals themselves have little understanding of their own historical roots and little appreciation of the movement’s diversity across many cultures and nations. This book is an attempt to address these concerns, tracing the movement’s roots from the North Atlantic world of the eighteenth century, its spread outward from the West in the nineteenth century, and its development as an indigenous movement in cultures across the globe in the twentieth century. It has been written by a group of scholars broadly sympathetic to the movement and who are recognized experts in the study of evangelicalism, in order (first) to help evangelicals understand their roots and the diversity of the movement and (second) to enable those outside the movement to come to understand some of its internal dynamics.

Its primary intended readership is college, university and seminary students throughout the world, and it is the hope of the organizers and funders of this project that it be translated into the five major languages of the world and made available on every continent. So it is in one sense an in-house history, but it is also meant to be rigorously fair-minded and accurate, and it is hoped that it will be read by those outside the movement who seek to gain understanding.

For many evangelicals around the world, questions of identity are upper­most. Embracing an evangelical Christian identity in societies dominated by radical forms of other religions can be a matter of life and death, particularly if the person is a recent convert. An evangelical convert to Christianity in Nepal may find him/herself excluded from family and kinship networks, unwelcome to participate in the annual harvest, isolated from those closest to him or her. For African evangelicals, the legacy of colonialism may cause them to question the compatibility of evangelical Christianity with their African identity. Latin American evangelicals struggle with the fact that Roman Catholic spokesmen and secular academics oppose them by identifying them with foreign powers and dismissing them as mere sects, untrustworthy as part of the body politic.

This book’s main purpose is then to trace the recent history of evangelical churches and evangelical movements while providing a general introduction to the beliefs, practices and characteristic emphases of evangelical Christianity. A second important purpose is to offer a worldwide survey of where evangelical movements have come to exist and of the greatly varying conditions under which evangelicals now carry on their work.

Using This Book

This is a textbook for people who wish to approach the study of global evangelicalism. The book is broken up into three major sections. The first section provides historical and theological background and offers a discussion of the vexed question of evangelicalism’s relationship to the process termed globalization. The second section offers surveys of evangelicalism’s history in different geographical areas of the world. The final section includes discussion of important themes in evangelical history.

It is hoped that readers will find the book useful and enlightening, either as a reference book or as a starting point to more in-depth study. Of course, no single book can cover any globally extensive subject exhaustively, let alone a subject with the complexity of world evangelicalism. To assist you, we have included sections on further reading at the end of each chapter, and a glossary at the end of the book.

Part One

Theoretical Issues

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1

Defining Evangelicalism

Mark A. Noll

At the start of the twenty-first century, evangelical Christianity constituted the second largest worldwide grouping of Christian believers. Only the Roman Catholic church enjoys more adherents in today’s world Christianity than the evangelical churches. By comparison with other world religions, evangelical Christians—taken only by themselves rather than as part of the world’s two billion Christians—are more numerous than all but Muslims and Hindus.

So, who are the evangelicals and where are they to be found? The need for a survey volume such as this is great because the twentieth century witnessed a nearly unprecedented globalization of distinctly evangelical movements and of movements that share many evangelical features. Not that long ago, evangelical Christianity was predominately restricted to Western Europe and North America. According to one estimate, in 1900 well over 90 percent of the world’s evangelical Christians lived in Europe or North America. ¹ For a number of reasons having to do with Western missionary activity, cooperative efforts at translating the Bible into local languages, the dedicated efforts of national Christians in many parts of the world, and developments in worldwide trade and communication, that earlier situation has been dramatically transformed. Today, the number of evangelicals in each of Africa, Latin America and Asia exceeds the total in Europe and North America combined. ² Increasingly, those people who most effectively contribute to the spread of evangelical Christianity are recruited from the southern rather than the Northern Hemisphere.

But, of course, before there can be a history of evangelicals and the evangelical presence as it exists on all the continents of the earth today, we must have a definition of evangelical Christianity. Providing a workable definition for a book with a worldwide perspective, however, is surprisingly complicated. Much of the complexity arises from the necessity to define evangelical alongside a number of other terms like Pentecostal, charismatic, fundamentalist, apostolic and indigenous that are often used in conjunction with the term (see the glossary at the end of the book).

After attempting definitions of these key terms, this chapter then goes on to several other necessary preliminary tasks. It sketches with very broad strokes the historical emergence and spread of evangelical Christianity, outlines where evangelical and evangelical-like Christian groups now exist in the world, and specifies the main Christian denominations and Christian movements that are the principal carriers of evangelical energy in the world today. But definitions are the place to begin.

Definitions

The word evangelical designates a set of beliefs, behaviors and characteristic emphases within the broad Christian tradition. That broad Christian tradition has itself appeared in many forms in many places throughout the nearly two thousand years of Christian history. Missiologists (those who study the transmission of Christianity from place to place and generation to generation) say it is possible to identify several characteristics shared by virtually all of the world’s Christian movements. ³ First and foremost, Christians affirm that ultimate meaning is found in the person of Jesus Christ. They also turn to the sacred writings of the Bible for authoritative guidance on who Jesus was and what his person and work continue to mean for all the world. The Bible is important for both its New Testament, which speaks directly of Christ, and its Old Testament, which tells of the people of Israel from whom Jesus was born. Almost all Christians also think of themselves as joined with other believers through history back to the time of Christ. Most also practice water baptism as an initiation rite, and celebrate the Lord’s Supper (or communion, or the Eucharist) as a way of focusing attention on the death and resurrection of Jesus as key elements in the sacred story. Where Christian bodies have come to intellectual self-consciousness, they regularly affirm God as a Trinity, one supreme deity who exists in three persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).

Throughout history, the designation evangelical has been applied to many different movements within this broader Christian story. The word itself has several legitimate senses, but all are related to the original sense of good news. The English word comes from a transliteration of the Greek noun euangelion, which was used regularly by the writers of the New Testament to signify the glad tidings—the good news—of Jesus’ appearance on earth as the Son of God to accomplish God’s plan of salvation for needy humans. Translators of the New Testament usually used the word gospel (which meant good news or glad tidings in Old English) for euangelion, as in passages such as Romans 1:16:

I am not ashamed of the gospel (euangelion), because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. (NIV)

Thus, evangelical religion has always been gospel religion, or religion focusing on the good news of salvation brought to sinners by Jesus Christ. As news it implies the need for the message to be spread—indeed, evangelical Christianity takes the speaking and Word elements of the faith as definitional. An unspoken faith is no faith at all—and thus foundational to evangelicalism is the need to witness to the good news of Jesus Christ, to go into all the world. At its core, it is a faith with a global vision. This emphasis also creates some of the unique tensions in the movement—some expressions of evangelicalism (the Reformed or Calvinistic tradition, for example) emphasize the external and rational in ways that are foreign to evangelicals who place an emphasis on the heart and on the evidence of experience. As either word spoken or word lived, however, both forms have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to cross borders, to locate themselves in many places and within a wide variety of organizational forms, and yet, in adapting, to retain their essential character.

During the sixteenth century the word evangelical began to take on a more specific meaning associated with the Protestant Reformation. In this usage, evangelicals were those who protested against the corruptions of the late medieval Western church and who sought a Christ-centered and Bible-centered reform of the church. Because of these efforts, the word evangelical became a rough synonym for Protestant. To this day in many places around the world, Lutheran churches reflect this older sense of the term (for example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, or [in India] the Tamil Evangelical Lutheran Church).

Since the eighteenth century, however, the word has taken on an even more restricted usage, and it is this usage that refers to the movement this book takes for its subject. This usage refers not to Protestants in general but to those Protestants who, beginning about three hundred years ago, placed a heightened emphasis on experiencing the redeeming work of Christ personally and on spreading the good news of that message, whether to those with only a nominal attachment to Christianity or to those who had never heard the Christian gospel. In one of the most useful definitions, the British historian David Bebbington has identified four key ingredients of this kind of evangelicalism: ⁴

Conversion: Evangelicals stress the need for a definite turning away from self and sin in order to find God in Jesus Christ.

The Bible or Biblicism: Evangelicals may respect church traditions in varying degrees and may use schooling, reason and science to assist in talking about Christianity, but the ultimate authority for all matters of faith and religious practice are the Christian Scriptures;

Activism: Evangelicals have historically been moved to action—to works of charity, sometimes to works of social reform, but above all to the work of spreading the message of salvation in Christ—because of their own experience of God.

The Cross or Crucicentrism (cross-centeredness): Evangelicals have also consistently stressed as the heart of Christian faith the death of Christ on the cross and then the resurrection of Christ as a triumphant seal for what was accomplished in that death. Evangelicals have regularly emphasized the substitutionary character of this atonement between God and sinful humans whereby Christ receives the punishment due to human sins and God gives spiritual life to those who stand in Christ.

While holding to such core essentials, evangelicals are often flexible about nonessentials, which has been a key to their spread around the world. So one sees not only revivalistic fervor (the religion of the heart) in South America, but also Reformed revivals in the Southern Baptist Convention in America, and among Anglicans in Sydney, Australia. In this sense, evangelicalism is compatible with global expansion, particular local emphases and strong denominational identities.

Consequently, though evangelicals are marked out by Bebbington’s four commitments, important questions still remain concerning the use of other terms that often arise when considering the worldwide dimensions of evangelicalism:

Fundamentalism is a term that arose in the United States during the early years of the twentieth century to designate conservative evangelicals who protested against what they saw as the undermining of orthodoxy by ration­alist and modernist ideas (called liberalization or liberalism). ⁵ Fundamentalists insisted on holding to traditional Christian teachings concerning the infallibility of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary nature of the atonement and the return of Christ at the end of history. In general, fundamentalists were strident in defense of the supernatural elements in the Christian Scriptures that were being questioned in some academic and church circles. In more recent decades, some groups have used the term fundamentalist with regard to themselves in order to demonstrate their separation from other forms of Christianity (including Roman Catholic, liberal Protestant and other varieties of evangelicalism) and to maintain a strict view of the Bible’s errorless character. In North America, fundamentalists have also contributed a moral urgency to politically conservative movements like the New Christian Right. ⁶ Most evangelicals have not been fundamentalists, but many fundamentalists do fit within the traditional bounds of evangelicalism.

Pentecostalism is a term that arose about the same time as fundamentalism. It describes evangelical believers who placed fresh stress on the active work of the Holy Spirit and on the restoration of the direct experience of God commonly reported in the New Testament. In its classic form, Pentecostals taught that the baptism of the Holy Spirit would be marked by speaking in tongues (unlearned speech produced by the Spirit’s direct agency) and also by miracles of healing and prophecy. Around the end of the nineteenth century, Pentecostal-like expressions began to emerge among Christians in many parts of the globe, particularly those who had roots in Methodism or the Keswick higher Christian life circles in England. Revivals occurred in Australia, India, Wales and among indigenous peoples (giving rise, for instance, to the variegated African independent churches) who were coming to terms with modernization and rapid cultural change. In 1906, one of these outbreaks intersected with one of the more dynamic and globally open cultures in Los Angeles, in what is often referred to as the Azusa Street Revival, and from that point, Pentecostal beliefs and practices have spread like wildfire. Today Pentecostal and Pentecostal-like churches make up the fastest growing segment of world Christianity. Pentecostalism grew directly from historical evangelical emphases, and most Pentecostals fit securely into historic channels of evangelical Christianity. ⁷

Charismatics are Christians not associated with Pentecostal churches who nonetheless adopt some Pentecostal practices. ⁸ During the second half of the twentieth century, charismatic movements appeared in many of the older, more traditional Protestant denominations, and also in the Roman Catholic Church. Like Pentecostals, charismatics stress the direct presence of God through the activity of the Holy Spirit, but do not necessarily organize entire churches, denominations or agencies defined around this special work of the Holy Spirit. Theologically, charismatics have attempted to maintain the link between their personal experience and traditional Christian theology by deemphasizing the uniqueness of speaking in tongues as a sign of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Charismatic movements have been important in the shaping of recent evangelicalism, especially for making modified versions of historical Pentecostal practices much more common among evangelical churches in the Western and non-Western worlds alike.

Part of the genius of evangelicalism is its ability to adapt to local cultures, but this adaptability makes clear-cut definitions more difficult to maintain. The most difficult groups to categorize with respect to historic evangelicalism are the Apostolic, Zionist and other indigenous Christian movements that proliferated in the Southern Hemisphere over the course of the twentieth century. In Africa, these groups are sometimes known as aladura churches, from a Yoruba word meaning owners of prayer, or are called African independent (or initiated) churches (AICs). Examples from literally thousands of possibilities include the Zion Christian Church of Southern Africa and the Cherubim and Seraphim Society of West Africa. But churches and movements with many similarities have also proliferated in other parts of the world, such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil, the house church movements in China, and many other rapidly developing church networks in India, the Philippines, Pacific Islands, Africa and Latin America. ⁹ Through missions and migration, many of the practices and emphases of these non-Western groups have spread back to First-World churches.

As the names suggest, these indigenous Christian movements usually exercise a high degree of independence in charting their own courses, they are usually well adapted to the religious and social practices of their different regions, and they are as determined to recover the supernatural practices of New Testament Christianity as the Pentecostals. Their variety and global spread has caused some concern among traditional evangelicals regarding the nature of their faith and threats to the traditional ways the term (and so the identity) of evangelical has been used. The result has been ongoing, and quite vigorous, debates over the meaning, inspiration and role of the Bible, and repeated reorientations of evangelical groupings. These indigenous groups are sometimes criticized by more traditional evangelicals for exalting the prophetic powers of their leaders or subordinating the work of Christ to the work of the same leaders. Some critics see too much ancestral religion surviving in these groups, as well as a penchant for promoting Christianity as a means to gain health and wealth in this life. But there is no doubt that a history of modern evangelical Christianity must pay considerable attention to such groups. Many of them originated from contact with historic evangelical missionaries and most of them promote beliefs and practices that overlap with traditional evangelical emphases. Case by case analysis is the only way to discern whether such independent movements are best studied as merely another variant of evangelical Christianity or should be classified as something other than evangelical. Some methodological rigor is also required in not simply identifying popular revival movements with previous layers of shamanism or popular religion that exist elsewhere in the community in question.

Efforts to define evangelicalism will always remain somewhat imprecise because the phenomenon designated by the word represents a set of beliefs and practices rather than a single organization. A survey conducted in North America, for example, was deliberately constructed to probe the dimensions of evangelicalism in Canada and the United States. ¹⁰ It found that not all of those who called themselves evangelicals or use a related term held to traditional evangelical beliefs (although 74 percent in the US did so, with 51 percent in Canada). It also discovered that many people who did hold traditional evangelical beliefs were to be found among members of the Roman Catholic Church (13 percent of the Americans and 25 percent of the Canadians who called themselves evangelical). And it found that only about half of those in the denominations descended from historical evangelical movements used terms like evangelical to describe themselves (44 percent in the US, 57 percent in Canada). In other words, there is (as with fundamentalism) an increasing vagueness in the use of terminology about evangelicalism, both by scholars and among evangelicals themselves.

Yet if disciplined rather than ideological distinctions are observed, much of the imprecision fades away. As several historians have recognized, evangelicalism can be described as a series of three overlapping constituencies that differ in their self-consciousness but are at least loosely related in their shared history and convictions. ¹¹ What we might call intentional evangelicals form relatively small numbers of individuals and agencies—often active in networks of voluntary societies or mission agencies—who deliberately label themselves and their efforts as evangelical. Much larger numbers are associated with formal churches and other institutions embedded securely in historical evangelical movements. And still larger numbers from throughout the world, who may have only loose connections with original evangelical movements, nonetheless share the historic beliefs and practices of evangelicalism and so may functionally be included in wider considerations of evangelicalism as well.

Later chapters in this book will refine questions of definition, and indeed also the relevance of conceptual boundary marking as applied in the various corners of the globe. Enough has been said here, however, to show why the study of worldwide evangelicalism is both a defensible and necessary task.

Brief History

Protestant Christianity was transformed in the century that followed the close of religious warfare in early modern Europe—that is, from the Peace of Westphalia on the continent in 1648 that brought to an end the Thirty Years War and the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 following the Puritan Commonwealth period. That transformation involved many factors. Some were obviously religious, but others (like adjusting to new demands of commercial society or resisting grabs for power by divine-right monarchs) were more subtle in their relationship to faith. The most overt religious factor in the transformation of Protestantism was spiritual renewal expressed as a multifaceted protest against ecclesiastical formalism and an urgent appeal for a living religion of the heart. The form of Christianity that historians describe as evangelicalism originated in these movements of pietistic revival. ¹²

On the European continent the emergence of such emphases is usually dated from the publication in 1675 of Philipp Jakob Spener’s Pia Desideria (Pious or Heartfelt Desires). This was an appeal for heartfelt religion and for lay study of Scripture in the Lutheran state churches of Germany. Positive responses to this booklet marked the beginnings of the Pietist movement, which spread from Germany to many other parts of Europe. It influenced later English-speaking evangelicalism in many ways, and also pioneered in missionary proclamation of the gospel beyond European borders. But similar longings after true religion were also evident in English-speaking areas, as indicated by the nearly simultaneous appearance in England of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), an allegorical account of Christian existence that moved from the cross of Christ (and the joyful loss of the burden of sin) through the trials of earthly existence to final entrance into the Celestial City. Such stirrings could also be found in other parts of England, in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as well as in the American colonies.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, Pietist protests against cold, formal religion gathered increasing strength even as the widening search for a true religion of the heart broadened and deepened. ¹³ In the English-speaking world the result was evangelicalism. From the 1720s and 1730s—in London and English market towns, the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands, Wales, Ireland and the North American colonies—English-speaking Protestantism was significantly renewed through a series of often intense religious awakenings. The most visible human agents of these revivals were larger-than-life figures—the spell-binding preacher George Whitefield (1714–1770), the indefatigable evangelist John Wesley (1703–1791) and the brilliant theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). But if these and other leaders (like Howell Harris in Wales, John McLaurin in Scotland, or Gilbert Tennent in America) were foremost in the public eye, experiences of ordinary men and women made up the driving force of the evangelical awakening. ¹⁴ From the start, news about evangelical experiences in particular places was passed on with great excitement to other interested parties in the North Atlantic region. In Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England, concerned Protestants read about the experiences of Abigail Hutchinson of Northampton, Massachusetts, who on a Monday morning in 1735 was turned from despair and alienation to God. As her minister, Jonathan Edwards, explained the event, when these words came to her mind, ‘The blood of Christ cleanses from all sin’ [they were] accompanied with a lively sense of the excellency of Christ, and his sufficiency to satisfy for the sins of the whole world. . . . By these things, Edwards concluded, Abigail was led into such contemplations and views of Christ, as filled her exceeding full of joy. ¹⁵ Not long thereafter Protestants throughout the English-speaking world could read in the published journal of John Wesley what had befallen him at a small group meeting organized by Moravians, a group of German Pietists who had recently come from the continent to England. It was on Wednesday, May 24, 1738, at the Moravian gathering on Aldersgate Street in London, "where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans . About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine , and saved me from the law of sin and death." ¹⁶

Many English-speaking Protestants followed just as closely reports concerning the great crowds that came out to hear George Whitefield as he traveled through Britain and North America and then news of the extra­ordinary revival at Cambuslang, near Glasgow in Scotland, which began in February 1742 and continued for several months.

Soon congregations and small gatherings