Roy Jenkins tells the story of how a hundred thousand people in Wales made a new commitment to Jesus Christ in a single year a century ago.
The Welsh Revival
By Roy JenkinsLast updated 2009-06-16
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The Welsh Revival
Just after eleven o'clock on a Wednesday evening in 1904, a solo voice rang out with the hymn "Here is love vast as the ocean". Maybe a thousand people were in Ebenezer Baptist Church, Abertillery at the time, leaning over the galleries, packing every pew and squeezing into every spare corner. They'd been here for more than four hours, in a service of intense emotion.
Meetings like it were taking place across Wales night after night, with fervent prayer and passionate singing - and similar disregard for the clock. They both excited and appalled, left many puzzled and some frightened, but it was reckoned that in little over a year a hundred thousand people had made a new commitment to Jesus Christ.
For a period whole communities changed, as men and women found themselves drawn into a powerful experience of God; and sparks from their awakening were soon to ignite fires in more than a dozen other countries. And the hymn that soloist struck up spontaneously about "love vast as the ocean" was heard so often that it became known as "the love song of the revival."
Revival in a single community
A hundred years ago coal was making Abertillery a booming commercial centre as families flocked in to find work in the pits. Churches were already thriving, but revival hit the place like a hurricane, and in less than ten weeks no fewer than three thousand people had made professions of faith - that's more than ten per cent of the population... a staggering response by any reckoning.
Week by week Abertillery's local paper the South Wales Gazette recorded events with the enthusiastic eloquence of the day.
"The Revival"... has been the absorbing theme of thought and discussion. Before it, the War, the state of trade, ordinary and extraordinary political topics, and even football, have been thrown into the shade as topics of general conversation.
Drunkards have been soberised, publicans have lost much business, conduct on public streets has been elevated, and the police and magistrates have had quieter times... The bottom of the pits have been utilised as centres for prayer and praise meetings, and there has been a general raising of the standard of public life.
The "Revival" still continues to monopolise general attention, almost everybody is talking about it, thinking about it, or working in its interests, and the movement does not seem to flag at all... Converts are being made nightly, and the enthusiasm is intensifying and spreading.
...the chapel was packed in the afternoon... and there was a warmer feeling in the assembly from the start. Probably this was chiefly due to the spirit which a company of colliery workmen - black faces, working clothes, and boxes and jacks - imparted when they dropped into the meeting on their way home... and started in a spirited manner the songs of the revival, creating a fervour which did not flag during the remainder of the meeting.
We have collected the following statistics as to the number of conversions recorded at some of the chapels in the district:
Cwmtillery (united meetings) 54
Blaenau Gwent Baptist 425
Blaenau Gwent Primitive 35
Brynteg Congregational 98
Trinity Calvinistic Methodist 92
Ebenezer Baptist 465
Tabernacle Congregational 131
Wesleyan Methodist 45
Somerset-street Primitive Methodist 350
Salvation Army 170
King-street Baptist 23...South Wales Gazette
The presence of God
Evan Roberts never preached in Abertillery, though, and while members of his youthful mission teams came, something strange was happening long before they arrived: people spoke of a powerful sense of the presence of God... and "chapel" had never been like this!
For those schooled in the stiff formal nonconformist worship of the time, often heavy with words and scholarship, meetings with spontaneous prayer and vivid personal testimony (and often very little preaching) were a shock to the system.
"...an elderly woman nearly in the front engaged in prayer, and asked that their spirits might be prepared to receive the Holy Spirit..."
"...a young man in the gallery prayed for the salvation of shop assistants in their temptations. Other prayers followed rapidly, and there was great intensity of feeling throughout the meeting..."
"...one elderly matron made a most impressive appeal to those in the prime of life to acknowledge the Saviour..."
"...A young man from near Liverpool said that they were wanting to know the might of God in England. He was a student of Rawdon College, Leeds, and had travelled 240 miles to attend that meeting, part of the way on a bicycle. They should pray for students, as they did not understand the temptations of college life..."
"...the congregation got on their knees and engaged in prayer in both languages, and at the same time. The effect was most transforming."
Members of the congregation
Many had doubtless turned up out of curiosity - this was the most sensational show in town. But some got rather more than they'd bargained for.
In an atmosphere which set spines tingling, the focus was on God, and on what he might make possible; fierce longing for deeper personal encounter, and an expectation that he would do unusual things… especially that he would bring men and women to a living faith - an expectation stimulated by a reading from the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.
And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine.
Acts 2:1-13
And there was another strange sight awaiting the congregation. The comment on this passage was given by a girl barely out of her teens... one of the young women who figured prominently among the revival preachers - a rare public equality which disappeared rapidly when the initial fires dimmed. Miss Olwen Davies of Pontycwmmer spoke directly to her listeners:
Their hearts must be clear in the sight of God.
They must forgive everybody.
They must obey the Spirit of God implicitly.
They must trust God implicitly.Olwen Davies
This address was listened to, says the Gazette reporter, "with breathless silence", and it sounded notes which Evan Roberts placed at the heart of his own message: holiness before a holy God, absolute obedience, and total trust.
It might appear austere, forbidding, accessible only to the rigorous, the specially devout. It was meant to be a practical response to the love of God demonstrated in Jesus. And on many occasions such appeal had dramatic effects.
Practical effects
The pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Abertillery at the time, the Rev David Collier, described some of them in a letter.
...some deeply intelligent but unconverted men, who had always led exemplary lives, would feel such sorrow of soul as made them tremble, turn deathly pale, and cry out for the prayers of their brethren...
Others, very different in their past record, were, even when sodden in drink, so overwhelmed that they professed to be unable to continue in their drunken way, but were forced up to the Schoolroom or Chapel, preferring to wait there until they had sobered than fail to give themselves to the Lord.
Others, among them the most desperate characters, were so impressed by the work of grace going on around them, that they came with more resolution of will than agony of repentance, with more set of jaws than weeping of eyes, determined to have done with the past and begin life anew...
Rev David Collier
It was a determined response to an encounter with holiness, and with the appeal of love.
And when people did "open the door" of their lives to Christ, just what difference did it make?
On the fly-leaf of one pulpit Bible from a hundred years ago are the signatures of those who had come forward to make a new beginning with God. Writing their names declared that they wished to join the church, and, for some, that they were signing the pledge, promising to abstain from alcohol.
Now we might regard that as just a bit quaint, point out that Jesus was no teetotaller. Indeed. But that's to ignore the devastation which drink was causing whole families at the time - we might as well, it seems to me, mock a pledge today to keep off drugs or give up binge-drinking.
For many it was a simple, down-to-earth way of affirming that they now had a new allegiance.
Long-term consequences
The revival spread far and wide. Within a decade, in Korea and India, in France and Madagascar, and in a dozen other countries, movements influenced by the revival in Wales were touching many thousands.
But in Wales the fires died down. Services quickly reverted to sober respectability. Religion was no longer "the absorbing theme of thought and conversation".
But David Collier, the pastor who'd seen the membership of his church grow from 500 to 750 in a matter of months, remained in no doubt that they had been privileged to be part of a strange but life-changing movement of God. He wrote about it four years later.
Men who had not taken one penny home in 17 years now took all home...Houses became decently furnished, women and children became decently clad. The public houses became practically empty, for though all accustomed to frequent them did not attend places of worship, yet the fear of God had fallen upon them for a time.
Bridges and walls, instead of being covered with obscene remarks, were now covered with lines from Bible and hymn book. The streets echoed with hymns, rather than the drunkard's songs once wont to be heard. Visitors from London, from the south of England, from the north of Scotland, visited the Church to gaze upon the Lord's great and gracious work.
Alas, that so many of the converts have fallen away - fallen away through such causes as always operate; but for the Glory of God and the encouragement of men, let it be known to all those who will carry God's work on when the present generation has passed to its rest, yea, let it be known that drunkards, swearers, gamblers of most abandoned and hopeless type became holy men, that backsliders of 20 years returned to the fold, men who had entered only on the profession of religion, entered into its power, and they are with us still, and by the Grace of God will remain faithful unto death.
Rev David Collier
A hundred years on, and with the pits long closed and the population halved, the number of regular worshippers in Abertillery is a fraction of what it was in those heady days. It's a story reflected across Western Europe.
Some have always dismissed the whole event, and not just its wilder excesses, as an emotional spasm, with little relevance either to historic Christianity or to the needs of contemporary society.
And in the yearning for a fresh revival today, it can be easy to miss the quiet, unspectacular and infinitely varied ways in which God's Spirit brings new life to individuals and communities. That's never stopped.
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