The First Awakening: Northampton
1730s–1740s · New England and the Middle Colonies
The revival every pulpit praises left the colonies with rival churches in every town.
The Story Everyone Loves
Few chapters of American church history are told with more affection than the Great Awakening. Pulpits describe it as the season when heaven came down on the colonies, when sleepy congregations were shaken out of dead religion and crowds wept in open fields. Conferences borrow its name, and preachers pray for the next one by number.
One detail rarely makes the sermon. Nobody living through it in the 1740s called it “the Great Awakening.” The name was given by the historian Joseph Tracy in his 1842 book The Great Awakening, a full century later. The branding came after the fact, and so did the shine. What the people of the time actually saw was a church breaking apart.
This study covers only the high points. The full story of who split from whom in the 1740s runs far longer, and it rewards anyone willing to dig into it personally.
The Measure Scripture Sets
The psalmist called it “good and pleasant” for brethren “to dwell together in unity” (Psalm 133:1), and Amos asked, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” (Amos 3:3). Paul begged the Corinthians that there be “no divisions among you” and answered their party spirit with a question: “Is Messiah divided?” (1 Corinthians 1:10, 13). He named one body, one Spirit, one Master, and “one God and Father of all” (Ephesians 4:4-6) — one God, plainly the Father, not three persons. And he told the assembly to “mark them which cause divisions” (Romans 16:17).
The test of a movement, then, is not crowds or tears. It is whether the body came out of it gathered or split.
When It Happened
The Awakening swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. It grew out of small revivals in the 1720s, broke out in earnest in Jonathan Edwards’s town of Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734, and spread across the colonies when the English preacher George Whitefield began touring in 1739. Whitefield could hold a field of thousands spellbound, and people traveled for miles to hear him. For many colonists it was the first time religion had felt like an event rather than a habit.
The Sermon That Lit the Fuse
In 1740 a revival preacher named Gilbert Tennent gave a sermon titled The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry. His message was blunt: many pastors in the colonies had never truly been converted, and their people were free to leave them for preachers who had.
Consider what that did in an ordinary town. A family that had sat under the same pastor for twenty years was now told he might not even be saved. Neighbors began measuring their ministers by how much feeling they could stir up. Those who stayed were called cold; those who left were called proud. Within a year the Presbyterian Church split in two — a revival side and an anti-revival side — and it stayed split for seventeen years. A rousing start.
Old Lights, New Lights, and Separates
The churches of New England cracked the same way. Those for the revival were called New Lights; those against it, Old Lights. The labels said it all: each side was sure it had the light and the other was in the dark. Ministers fought it out in print for years.
Some of the revival’s fruit was hard to defend. In 1743 one traveling preacher led his followers in a public bonfire of books and fine clothing he judged worldly. He later apologized, but the scene caught the spirit of the hour: certainty, heat, and a pile of something burning.
Where the New Lights could not win over their church, they simply left and started their own. These Separates planted new congregations all over New England, and many became Baptist. The Baptists then divided too, into revival-style Separate Baptists and the older Regular Baptists. For the average believer, the result was a town with two or three churches where there had been one — each sure it was the true one.
Even the Champion Was Voted Out
In 1750 Jonathan Edwards was dismissed by his own Northampton congregation after a dispute over who could take communion. The town that had been the showcase of awakening sixteen years earlier could no longer agree with the man who led it. If the revival could not hold its own flagship together, it is fair to ask what it was holding together anywhere else.
A School for Every Side
Once the sides formed, each needed preachers trained its own way, so each built its own college. The revival Presbyterians started what became Princeton. The Baptists started what became Brown. The Dutch Reformed started what became Rutgers. A New Light minister started Dartmouth. Today these are remembered as great universities. They began as training grounds for one side of a church fight, and each turned out pastors who carried that side into the next generation’s pulpits.
The Tally
- Presbyterians split into a revival side and an anti-revival side for seventeen years.
- New England churches split into Old Lights and New Lights, then shed Separate congregations everywhere.
- Baptists divided into Separate and Regular.
- Four colleges were founded, each training clergy for its own camp.
- The revival’s own leader was voted out of its own pulpit.
One awakening. One Messiah. A new fence around Him in every county.
Meanwhile, the Remnant
While the crowds gathered in the fields, the few who kept Yahuah’s commandments as written were scattered and small. A Seventh Day Baptist church had met at Newport, Rhode Island, since 1671, keeping the seventh day when almost no one else in the colonies would. In 1732 a community at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, began keeping the seventh day as well, whatever its other errors. Neither drew Whitefield’s crowds. Neither made the history books’ chapter on awakening.
Scripture describes exactly this. Through Ezekiel, Yahuah said His sheep “were scattered, because there is no shepherd,” wandering “upon every high hill” with “none” to “search or seek after them” (Ezekiel 34:5-6). Yahushua looked on the crowds of His own day and saw the same thing: “scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). A revival with a thousand shepherds still left the sheep who kept the commandments without one.
Revelation describes the true assembly the same way — not filling the fields, but a woman carried “into the wilderness,” where she is “nourished” apart from the serpent (Revelation 12:14). Small, hidden, and fed: that is how the record shows the remnant in the season everyone calls the Great Awakening.