During the First Great Awakening church sermons started to become which of the following

An evangelist, named George Whitefield, believed that people weren't going to church because 'dead men preach to them.' Whitefield and others like him began to preach in a much more energetic way. They tried to get their listeners to have a personal, emotional response to their preaching. The goal was for hearers to look at their own souls, to be convicted about their moral failures and then turn their hearts toward God.
'Come to hear them, not out of curiosity, but from a sincere desire to know and do your duty. To enter His house merely to have our ears entertained, and not our hearts reformed, must certainly be highly displeasing to the Most High God, as well as unprofitable to ourselves. ... When preachers are dissuading from any sin or persuading to any duty, instead of crying, 'This was intended for such and such a one!' Oh, that persons instead would turn their thoughts inwardly, and say, 'Lord, is it I?' How far more beneficial should we find discourses to be than now they generally are!'

Like Edwards, Whitefield taught that people needed to have changed, repentant hearts. His admonition that listeners think about how a sermon applies only to themselves was a jab at the Puritan tendency to watch each other for signs of evil. However, many of his sermons also underscored the futility of boring ritual as seen in the Anglican Church he came from. Whitefield is credited with starting the practice of preaching in public, since the Church of England wouldn't give him a pulpit.

- Instead of seeing faith as a matter of tradition, Americans now felt free to choose their own religious affiliation. New denominations were founded, most of the established churches were reshaped and, by the 1760s, there was religious diversity in every colony.
- But the Great Awakening reached much further than church pews and may have been even more effective than the Enlightenment in shaking up the establishment.
- In the North, it challenged the authority of the Puritan church because anyone could step up to the pulpit and share his own testimony. Differences in doctrine came to be seen more as a matter of opinion, not a matter of salvation.
- The Awakening challenged the social order of the South because slaves were as welcome as anyone else. The idea of salvation being available to anyone directly from God, regardless of race, gender or economic class, made church a thoroughly democratic experience. People became more tolerant, seeing themselves not as members of a particular religious group but as Americans who shared convictions about virtue, united in opposition against any establishment that tried to tell them how to think, feel or behave. In many ways, it prepared the colonists to defy the king and start a revolution.
- The Awakening also fueled social reform. George Whitefield's death prompted a slave named Phillis Wheatley to publish a famous poem in his honor. Her obvious intellect, paired with the religious testimonies of escaped slaves, helped energize the northern abolition movement.
- New colleges were established by churches to train their preachers and educate their followers, including Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers and Columbia Universities.

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