We are continuing this week celebrating our anniversary and looking at our top five favorite moments in church history

We've looked at the Nicene Council on 325 Thomas Aquinas in 1245 and yesterday together we looked at 1517 and the inimitable Martin Luther.

Well today we're moving ahead a little bit closer to the modern age and the date for today is 1740.

This date is significant in that it marks what historians have come to call the Great Awakening.

The Great Awakening, sometimes seen as an event in New England,

it's much bigger than that.

It was an event that not only encompassed

all of the colonies, the New England colonies,

the middle colonies, and the southern colonies

in the United States, before the revolution and before its independence.

But it was also a transatlantic phenomenon.

And so we have to go across the Atlantic and see this as an event that also takes place in old England, not just one in New England.

When we go across the Atlantic, of course we meet up with George Whitfield and we meet up with the brothers Wesley, John, and Charles.

So here we have all our players of the Great Awakening,

George Whitfield, John and Charles Wesley,

and over in the colonies Jonathan Edwards.

And there were a host of secondary characters as well,

but these four are probably enough for our time today. As we look over in England,

one of the things we begin to see is George Whitfield's great

sermon that he would preach called the Almost Converted or the Almost Christian.

And this of course he would preach in these Anglican churches and he would talk about someone who was an almost Christian but who was not a

Christian, one who was as we might say a nominal Christian who was simply

...