Itinerancy in Historical Perspective

I

On October 30, 1739, George Whitefield disembarked at Lewes, Delaware to commence an itinerant ministry that altered the face of Christianity in the English-speaking world. His itinerancy across the parishes and counties of England and Wales had already "employ'd the Thoughts, Pens and Tongues" of Georgian Englishmen who heard him. The youthful Anglican minister and his entourage ensured that this fame would precede him to America by sending to colonial newspapers third-person accounts describing the tens of thousands who thronged to hear him preach in London. These accounts began appearing in the Pennsylvania Gazette early in 1738 and continued until he set foot in America. Within days of his arrival, his preaching was already drawing crowds estimated at six thousand to the Philadelphia courthouse steps.

Within days of his arrival, Whitefield also made the audacious proposal to "preach the Gospel in every province in America," an effort which no regularly ordained minister had yet undertaken. By the end of 1740 he had made good his promise with tours more extensive and personal contacts more numerous than anyone before him. Newspapers reported crowds of thousands "melted by the power of the Word" in nearly every place he preached, and Whitefield and his allies supplemented those reports with a steady stream of pamphlets and correspondence. The Grand Itinerant had successfully introduced a new category of ministry—itinerancy—into the dynamics of Anglo-American religious life.

Whitefield returned to England in January of 1741, leaving behind a contest over itinerancy which reached far beyond doctrinal disputes to include alternativeconceptions of religion's role in the maintenance of the social order. In its transgression of local boundaries throughout the colonies, Whitefield's itinerancy challenged a historically sanctioned symbolic system—a deeply rooted conceptual model of Anglo-American society. Colonial Anglican and dissenting elites alike tended to think of this model in terms of the English parochial system, which they had succeeded in replicating throughout much of New England and Virginia. Elsewhere social and religious conditions often rendered a pariochial system difficult if not impossible, yet elites persisted in employing the parish as an important social fiction. In breaching the parish line, Whitefield had assaulted a comprehensive network of mental as well as geographical boundaries—a complex set of assumptions concerning the nature of community and its constituent members, the relationship between community and church, the place of the minister in community life, and the place of the parish and community in the surrounding world.

Colonial revivalists exacerbated this conflict by welcoming Whitefield's itinerancy as God's unexpected means of snatching colonists from the brink of damnation. Where "Irreligion had been rushing in like a flood," observed Reverend Josiah Smith of Charleston, God had sent this thundering Anglican to "discharge the artillery ofHeaven upon us" through a preaching style Smith imagined similar to that of the Apostle Paul. A New England observer wrote that "Ministers, Rulers and People" welcomed Whitefield "as an Angel of God, or Elias, or John the Baptist risen from the Dead." Colonial poets lauded the "crying Voice," sent "to bid the World repent," and assured Whitefield that at the final resurrection heaven would rejoice "with Millions thou hast saved." A year after Whitefield's departure Thomas Prince of Boston exulted that Christ's "riding forth in Magnificence and Glory thro' divers Parts of our land," which began during the itinerant's visit, continued in a manner "never seen or heard among us ... since the Apostles' Days."

The revivalists' hyperbole galled local ministers, who felt beleaguered by itinerancy and who saw in Whitefield's ability to "sway and keep the Affections of the Multitude" an unprecedented threat to "Gospel order." Opponents throughout the colonies defended their ecclesiastical bounds against this man whose "travelling preachments" fomented disorder and error among the "Mob," presaging disaster for colonial society. Itinerancy appeared in antirevival rhetoric under metaphors of Subversion, Flux, disorder, and cataclysm such as Comet, "will-with-wisp," "wandring Spirit," and "Popish Emissary." Its practitioners disrupted the peace by provoking "Enthusiastick" outcries, fits, and ecstacies among their audiences. The "Mobs and Disorders" attending itinerancy betrayed not the spirit of the apostles but the presence of "Belial, taking a Tour in Disguise."

This contest between itinerancy's apostolic power and the local ministry's "gospel order" expressed underlying tensions over sweeping changes taking place in the eighteenth-century social world. The parish had constituted a fundamental unit of European social life for a thousand years but was becoming an increasingly inadequate means of comprehending and ordering new social realities. The parochial model had arisen gradually during the Christianization of Europe as church leaders, government officials, and local communities struggled to impose order on the social and political landscape in the wake of the Roman Empire's collapse. The pattern had become so ingrained that many settlers, churchmen, and magistrates viewed the imposition of parish boundaries on the colonial landscape as an essential part of their effort to recreate a stable European civilization in the New World. Yet the effort to do so was becoming increasingly problematic under the pressure of ongoing Migration, expanding Commerce, and improving Communication. A more mobile, fluid society was emerging to challenge the stable world of the parish—a society for which no clear model yet existed. The itinerancy of Whitefield and his imitators soon came to function as such a model: one that held millennial promise for defenders while threatening anarchy, flux, and Chaos for opponents.

II

The eighteenth-century contest over itinerancy tapped an ancient set of tensions between a global apostolic vision and a stable gospel order. These tensions were present in the New Testament itself, whose language and narratives helped structure eighteenth-century perceptions of the social world. The evolution of the Parochial System had provided ecclesiastical and civil leaders a particular means of resolving these tensions by balancing a mediated, hierarchical unity within the parishes of Christendom against missionary activity in the "Heathen regions beyond." This way of dividing and ordering the social world came to dominate European categories of thought until well into the seventeenth century. The enduring strength of this localistic worldview precluded fundamental renegotiation of the balance between settled and mobile ministry until Whitefield's itinerancy upset it in the late 1730s.

The New Testament language and...