John Berridge

Had John Berridge lived in London or Edinburgh, he would have been famous for his powerful preaching, but the Lord placed him in out-of-the-way villages where he became the “Whitefield of the countryside.” John was quaint and eccentric, but his strange ways merely added to the appeal and power of his ministry.

He preached to great crowds in rural England, in one year alone leading over four thousand people to Christand he evangelized nonstop for thirty years. He insisted he could most effectively minister by remaining unmarried, and he worried that the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield didn’t do likewise. George Whitefield had ===◊=== Singular Thought Aloneness and Loneliness are rwt the same thing. -ANONYMOUS SINGLE ==;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ◊ ==;;;;;;;;;;;;;; married a woman with whom he had spent less than a week; she died in 1768. And poor John Wesley had marital woes.

Writing to Lady Huntingdon, patron of the English evangelists, Berridge observed: No trap [is] so mischievous to the field-preacher as wedlock; and it is laid for him at every hedge corner. Matrimony has quite maimed poor Charles [Wesley], and might have spoiled John [Wesley] and George [Whitefield], if a wise Master had not graciously sent them a brace [pair] of ferrets. Dear George has his liberty again, and he will escape well if he is not caught by another tenterhook. Eight or nine years ago, having been 1 From a sermon by the author.