The Welsh Revivals

I’ve never been to one and I can’t say I have ever seen one firsthand, but I am told that at Welsh soccer games, the crowds will often break out into song. And sometimes they’ll sing hymns. It is quite a phenomenon for an entire stadium filled with Welsh football fans to sing in perfect harmony. How is this possible?

It is a result of an event that occurred more than a century ago: the Welsh Revival. It occurred in 1904–5. This was a time of intense revivals all over Wales. It started with a man by the name of Evan Roberts. He was born in 1878, and his family did not have significant means. As a young child, he worked in the coal mines and later apprenticed as a blacksmith, but all along he felt a calling to preaching. And he would preach. He started off in a group that was more of the Calvinist Methodist conference. This group could trace its lineage back to that famed revivalist of the Great Awakening, George Whitefield. Roberts later migrated to more Presbyterian communities, where he was urged to go to seminary. The community recognized that this young man had a calling on his life to be a preacher. And so, in 1904, at the age of 26, Evan Roberts went to seminary.

Upon hearing of a preacher who was holding some revivals nearby, Roberts asked the principal of the seminary if he could be relieved of his classes for a week to attend. The principal said he thought he would probably learn more about the essence of Christianity by attending one week of revivals than by sitting in class. That little decision made a huge difference. Roberts was so encouraged by what he saw at the revivals that he committed himself to prayer that he might be “bent by God” and be bent according to God’s will. He started preaching all around the seminary. Eventually, he had to pay another visit to the principal and ask to take leave of his studies so that he could return home and begin his ministry as a preacher.

When he got home, his parents thought something was wrong, that maybe he had failed out. He assured them that he just wanted to get about his work. And so, he started preaching. He had four points to his message. He would stand up in front of people and say, “I have a message for you. Number one: You must confess your known sins and you must make all of your wrongs right. Second, you must put away any doubtful habits. Third, you must obey the Spirit promptly. And fourth, you must confess your faith publically.” Those became the four points of his message and they became the four points of the Welsh Revival.

Evan Roberts preached all over the land of Wales and over the course of two years, an estimated one hundred thousand souls were converted. As he continued in his revival ministry, he started to move away from a more subjective approach to the gospel—of the things that a person has to do—and moved toward emphasizing the objective truth of the gospel and stressing the atoning work of Christ and how Christ’s work has accomplished redemption. As the first decade of the 1900s wore on, he also became concerned with some of the excesses of the revival and even began to distance himself from it. He died in 1951 in relative obscurity in a small suburb in Wales.

The impact of the Welsh Revival can be seen in that, according to one historian, as much as ten years after the revivals, 82.5 percent of those who attended them were still members of churches. And, of course, we have the singing of hymns as Welsh football games. And that is the Welsh Revival.