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May 2008 Issue

TAKE5: When God Came to Town

By Diane Brask

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TAKE5
May 2008
Volume 13, Number 5

When God Came to Town:
The Welsh Revival of 1904-1905
by Diane Brask

“Yes Lord, walking in the way of your laws, we wait for you; your name and your renown are the desire of our hearts.” (Isaiah 26:8)

The spiritual condition in the little country of Wales in the late 1800s and early 1900s was, in a word, pathetic.

Churches were poorly attended, people had little interest in prayer meetings, young people in the communities were wild and had no interest in church or Christianity, and genuine conversions to Jesus Christ were few and far between.

The church was becoming less and less relevant in everyday life in the hamlets of Wales. Thoughts of God, the Bible, or going to church on Sundays were far from most people’s minds. Work, personal pleasures, gambling, drinking, sports, and friends consumed their days.

Many families were suffering, the taverns of the day were always busy, crimes were on the increase, and the courts and prisons of the country certainly did not lack for business.

The Childhood of Evan Roberts

Little did Wales – or the world – know what would happen in 1904. God had been working behind the scenes for years, quietly preparing a young man whom He was about to use to turn Wales around. Evan Roberts was born to Henry and Hannah Roberts on June 8, 1878, in Loughor, Wales.

His family was far from affluent: Evan was one of 14 children born into this simple, humble, Christian home. His dad was a coal miner who worked long, hard days for meager wages that were barely sufficient for such a large family.

The Roberts family was poor by the world’s standards, but rich in faith. They never missed a church service or prayer meeting at Moriah Chapel. As a child, Evan loved the Lord, learned the great hymns, read his Bible faithfully, memorized verses regularly, and developed a consistent prayer life. He always evidenced a genuine hunger for Jesus.

Just before Evan turned 12, he dropped out of school to work with his dad in the local coal mine to help support the family. Days were long, and the work was hard for young Evan.

Most of the men in the mines were “tough guys” who used foul language, told coarse jokes, and took out their frustrations on the poor donkeys and horses who had to haul the coal out of the mines. It was in those coal mines that Evan learned firsthand what it was like be with men who were totally lost and separated from the love of God.

The Call to Ministry

After 13 years of working in the coal mines, Evan was ready for a change. He wanted to learn a new trade, so he went to work for his uncle as an apprentice to become a blacksmith. Although this was Evan’s plan, God had other plans for him. One spring night in 1904, God woke Evan up at 1:00 a.m. to pray for Wales. This went on night after night for three months, as God consistently woke Evan up to pray from 1:00-5:00 a.m.

Those nights, spent in God’s presence, were the turning point in Evan’s life. He knew God was calling him into the ministry. So on September 13, 1904, he went to Newcastle Emlyn to begin his training.

Two weeks after he arrived, Evan attended some special meetings at which a man named Seth Joshua spoke. He challenged those in attendance to cry out to God in earnest prayer, saying “Bend me, O Lord.” Evan did just that. He lay prostrate for hours and cried out to God in fervent prayer. Roberts believed that on that day he was filled with the Holy Spirit in a way that he had never experienced before. “I felt ablaze with a desire to go through the length and breadth of Wales to tell of the Savior,” he said.

So Evan’s time in school was cut short by an invitation from God to go back home. He asked the school principal’s permission to go home for a week to speak to the youth group. And so on Monday night, October 31, 1904, Evan spoke in his home church of Moriah Chapel and told the seventeen young people who were present what God had been doing in his life. Evan’s message that night had four points:

  1. You must humble yourself and confess openly and fully any known sin.
  2. You must put away anything doubtful from your life.
  3. You must obey promptly anything the Holy Spirit tells you to say or do.
  4. You must profess your faith in Jesus openly.

And then revival fell on Loughor and began to spread like wildfire with a tail wind around Wales and throughout the world. There is no human explanation for what happened in the weeks and months after that. Within six months, 100,000 people were saved, and their lives were radically transformed. All-night prayer meetings and special services sprang up everywhere. Church attendance exploded across denominational lines. Jesus was the talk of the town.

The Welsh Revival was a mighty invasion of the Spirit of God upon a simple, young, uneducated man; a youth group; a little coal mining town; the churches of a small nation, and then the world. Drunks were saved and delivered, and used their wages to support their families, rather than their drinking addictions. Outstanding debts were being paid by thousands of converts.

Restitution was the order of the day. Family feuds and friendships that had been strained or broken for years were healed. Bars were empty and theaters were closed down due to lack of customers. The police and the court systems had nothing to do. Football games were forgotten by both players and fans as people would not think of missing what God was doing. The people had new lives and new interests.

Political meetings were cancelled or abandoned. They seemed completely out of the question since nobody was interested. Manmade denominational barriers completely collapsed as pastors and lay leaders worshipped God together.

Even the donkeys and horses that worked in the coal mines needed to be retrained, because the language of the coal miners was transformed so radically that the animals didn’t understand what they were supposed to do!

Evan Roberts will always be remembered for his extraordinary involvement in one of the world’s greatest revivals. Not only was Wales changed; nations all over the world were changed by what God started in Wales.

So what was the secret of this young man’s powerful ministry? It is in Evan’s own diary entry that he gave the answer to this miraculous revival when he wrote, “Prayer is the secret of this power.”

Do we long to see God move like this today in our youth groups and churches? If so, there is no other way for it to happen but through humble, persistent, broken, desperate prayer. SO LET US PRAY!  

- Diane Brask is a country girl who grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. She is the executive director of Passion International Ministries, which seeks to “network the kingdom of God to inspire, empower and serve small-town rural communities and churches in the U.S. and around the world.” She serves as the NNYM Rural Affinity Network national coordinator, and is an ambassador to unreached people groups in the remote or neglected places of the world.