Baptistic Theologies, 2009

ipitated a revival. His report of the events, A Faithful Narrative (1737), is the classic account of a Congregational revival. 11 The movement in Northampton was one of the first expressions of the Great Awakening that was to sweep America over coming decades. It was a general revival in the colonies, persisting down to the American Revolution, with George Whitefield, though himself an Anglican, as its Thomas S. Kidd, ‘“Prayer for a Saving Issue”: Evangelical Development in New England before the Great Awakening’, in Michael G. Haykin and Kenneth J. Stewart (eds). The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2008), pp. 128-45. 11 Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God (London: for John Oswald, 1737). Revivals, Revivalism and the Baptists 5 12 leading figure. " At first it was shunned by most of the Baptists. They saw Whitefield as an ‘enthusiast’, a fanatical preacher who ignored the church order that Baptists prized. As the Great Awakening developed, however, it remoulded Baptist life in America. Many Congregationalists who were drawn in could no longer tolerate the half-way covenant. To allow the unconverted church privileges was a breach of a fundamental principle of the gospel. Consequently Edwards tried to terminate the half-way covenant at Northampton, but was dismissed by the congregation as a result. Other- awakened Christians experienced similar difficulties with the Congregational parish churches and so started to worship apart as ‘Separate Congregationalists’. As some of them examined scripture to discover how church affairs should be regulated, they rejected infant baptism. This section of opinion turned into the Separate Baptists with Isaac Backus at their head. They grew rapidly, outpacing the Regular Baptists. The Separate Baptists soon spread to the South, establishing the Sandy Creek Church, North Carolina, in 1755, the centre for the denomination’s evangelism in the region. In the excitement of the Great Awakening, the revival traits inherited from the Congregationalists were modified. The tight control of events by the ministers relaxed, with greater scope for emotion, visions and physical prostrations. The new body was still Calvinist, but more often than in the past there was an expectation of immediate conversion. The Baptists of the American South turned into excitable revivalists, a characteristic that endured in most places long into the nineteenth century and beyond. A third model of revival was associated with the Methodists. The Evangelical Revival in England that was closely bound up with the Great Awakening had John Wesley as its central figure. Converted in 1738, Wesley was the founder of the movement that came to be called Methodism. The features of Methodist revival largely contrasted with those of the Presbyterian and Congregational varieties. For one thing, lay leadership