August 31, 2022
President- Mrs. Billy Cary
Secretary- Mrs. Glenn Tippitt
The Huntingdon Woman’s Club met on August 31 at Long Rock Church with twelve women in attendance. Ms. Charlotte Horn served as the hostess on this last day of August and welcomed the ladies to another lesson on the significance role of the protestant ministers of “The First Great Awakening” in the 1740’s.
Ms. Horn opened the meeting with a favorite verse of Jonathan Edwards taken from 1 Timothy 1:17 which says, “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever.” After the blessing, the ladies were served chicken salad and a platter of cheese and sausage with crackers, a delicious chess cake and peach and mango punch.
President, Mrs. Billy Cary opened the business meeting. The roll was called and the minutes from August 17 were read and approved.
Ms. Horn continued the program on “The Great Awakening” sharing on one of the greatest and most influential American Preacher, Theologian, and Philosopher Jonathan Edwards.
Jonathan Edwards is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential American philosophers and theologians. He played a very significant role in the religious revival known as “The First Great Awakening” that revolutionized the Protestant religion in Europe and British America during the mid-18th Century. He was born on October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut being the only son of the eleven children of Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard. He enrolled at Yale College in 1716 when he was just thirteen years old and graduated as valedictorian in 1720 at the age of seventeen. Edwards was ordained a pastor of the church at Northampton that was one of the richest and most influential ones in the colony at that time. He played a significant role in the Christian Revival of that time preaching about the sovereignty of God and encouraged people to develop a profound spiritual conviction. One of his very famous sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” projects a vivid description of hell as was common in the sermons of the time. As a scholar-pastor, he devoted thirteen hours a day to his studies. He maintained a vision that the revivals he had experienced would affect people from every tribe, tongue, and nation on earth.
Edwards married Sarah Pierpont, daughter of the head founder of Yale College in 1727 and the couple were blessed with eleven children.
A Christian revival which ultimately led to the First Great Awakening began to sweep Northampton in 1733 which made several hundreds of people join the church. This revival inspired him to study the process of conversion in all its forms. Edwards, though he could be thought of as intense, overly studious, and socially inept, had a deep and abiding love for the people of God under his care. He sought to guide them to a place of ever-increasing maturity, knowing they will one day stand before Christ as Judge.
In June of 1751, Edwards settled in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, as pastor and missionary to the Housatonic Indians. This time afforded him more time to write, and some of his most important works came out during this time such as “Freedom of the Will” in 1754, “The Nature of True Virtue” in 1755, “Original Sin” in 1758, and “Dissertation on the End for Which God Created the World” in 1765. He wrote an astonishing number of books on a variety of subjects.
On February 16, 1758, he was installed as President of the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton University). He was inoculated for smallpox on February 23, 1758 of which he was a strong supporter. However, he was already in ill health, and he contracted a fever from which he died on March 22, 1758. The Jonathan Edwards College, the first residential college at Yale University was established in his honor in 1933.
The next meeting will be on September 14, 2022 with the great British evangelist George Whitefield who arrived in Georgia in 1738 to be presented by Mrs. Glenn Tippitt.
