Re-digging the Well of Revival in Loughor - 31st October 2011

Twenty five of us gathered together in the schoolroom of Moriah Chapel in Loughor to “redig” this well of revival on this historic date (Monday 31^st October).  Many of us in Wales are sensing that God, by His Spirit, is on the move in our land and, from the beginning of the meeting, there was an urgency and a crying out to God for Him to move among us once again. After a time of worship, followed by open prayer, we divided into small groups to pray.  The emphasis in these groups was much the same as in the larger group, with a strong spirit of intercession prevailing the whole time.

Many of us stayed on after our time at Moriah Chapel, taking our lunches to a nearby park beside the Loughor river.  After lunch we gathered together by the riverside and prayed for Carmarthenshire and West Wales remembering especially the farming communities.

We then drove round to the other side of the river to pray for Swansea and the rest of Wales, not forgetting England, Europe and Israel. One of our group suggested we pray for Llanelli and the healing of any bad feeling from a bloody incident in August 1911, just over a hundred years ago.  It was the last time English troops on the British mainland fired on workers during an industrial dispute and some local men were killed.

 
                                                                                                      Background

Of all the names that are linked with the 1904/5 Welsh Revival, Evan Roberts is the best known.  At 26 years of age in the Autumn of 1904, he was an unknown ex-miner attending a grammar school in Newcastle Emlyn, in order to prepare himself for the ministry.  He had left school when only 11 years old to help his injured father in the coal mine near his home in Loughor and later became an apprentice blacksmith. During this time he felt the call to full-time ministry, revival and heavenly visions being never far from his consciousness, but the only avenue that seemed available to him at the time was the Presbyterian Ministry.  It was while he was in pursuit of this that God baptised him with the Holy Spirit and radically changed his plans.  He was at the grammar school for only six weeks because he felt that the training disturbed the Spirit from moving and, finally, in response to a persistent vision of the youth of his home chapel of Moriah seated in rows in front of him, he eventually obeyed the Spirit’s promptings.With the permission of the aged Evan Phillips he left the school at Newcastle Emlyn for Loughor on Monday, 31^st October 1904.  Seventeen young people attended the after service youth meeting in the Moriah schoolroom, four of whom were members of Evan Roberts' own family, and one was a little girl. They were seated in rows just as he had been shown in the vision earlier.  After a difficult beginning, there was a breakthrough, and, by the end of the evening (10pm), all those present confessed Christ and declared themselves open to God’s Spirit.

The next night, a meeting was held at nearby Pisgah chapel, and on the following day at Libanus, in neighbouring Gorseinon, with an evening meeting then being held at the main chapel building at Moriah on Thursday.  By Friday people were attending from other chapels in the area; but it was not until after the formal close of the third and final meeting in Moriah at midnight on Sunday 6th November, that the full breakthrough occurred, when some fifty, mostly younger people, were baptised in the Spirit. From this time forward the move of God became unstoppable, spreading to the South Wales valleys and beyond.

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