English Anglican preacher (1714-1770), the most popular evangelist of the 18th century and the chief human agent of the Great Awakening in both Britain and the American colonies. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times — in an era when a single crossing took six weeks and might kill you — and preached more than 18,000 sermons in his 56 years. Contemporaries estimated he preached to ten million people at a time when the total population of Britain and the colonies was under ten million. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin calculated (as a skeptic conducting an experiment) that Whitefield's unamplified voice could be heard clearly by 30,000 people in the open air.
Whitefield was Calvinist where Wesley was Arminian; the two were dear friends who debated doctrine in letters and remained in fellowship though their movements ultimately split. Whitefield's distinctives: (1) field preaching — when Anglican pulpits closed to him, he preached in fields, marketplaces, coal-pit mouths, cemeteries, wherever people gathered; (2) theatrical delivery — the actor David Garrick said Whitefield could make audiences weep merely by saying "Mesopotamia"; (3) gospel-centered content — the new birth was his constant theme; "you must be born again" was his lifelong text; (4) partnerships across denominations — he preached in Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Baptist pulpits indifferently, and founded an orphanage in Georgia (Bethesda) that still exists. His great sin: he supported and practiced slave-holding in Georgia, a blot that historians rightly call out. He collapsed and died in a parsonage in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the night before a preaching engagement, at age 55.