In the 1730s and 1740s a series of revivals ran through the British colonies in America and through parts of Britain, and they had a common emphasis: that a person must undergo a conscious experience of conversion, a new birth, and that formal membership, correct belief and respectable conduct were not substitutes for it.
Jonathan Edwards, a Congregational minister at Northampton in Massachusetts, provided the movement's most careful theology and its most influential narrative account of a local awakening. George Whitefield, an Anglican preacher of extraordinary carrying power, provided its reach, touring the colonies repeatedly and preaching in fields to crowds that no meeting house could hold. In Britain the same impulse produced the Methodist movement under the Wesleys, within the established church at first.
The revivals divided the churches they touched. Those who welcomed them, the New Lights, valued the evident work of grace; those who opposed them, the Old Lights, objected to the emotional displays, to itinerants preaching in other ministers' parishes without invitation, and to the practice of judging a settled minister unconverted. Congregations split, new ones were founded, and a college was established to train ministers the existing colleges would not.