Basil Hall, my Director of Studies when I was an undergraduate, taught in a Presbyterian seminary in Wales, I believe, just after the Second World War. There, in a mental hospital garden, he encountered a quiet elderly man, rather broken in manner, whom they said was in fact
Evan Roberts, leader of the great
Welsh Revival of 1904-6. He suffered a massive breakdown in 1906 and withdrew from public ministry. The
Western Mail said of him, on his death in 1951,
He was a man who had experienced strange things. In his youth, he had seemed to hold the nation in the palms of his hands. He endured strains and underwent great changes of opinion and outlook, but his religious convictions remained firm to the end
As a young man in his twenties, Roberts, a former miner, ignited a chain of dramatic Evangelical conversions that swept 100,000 people into the chapels of the Principality. Before that time Wales wasn’t known for male voice choirs and teetotalism — it was the Welsh revival, they say, moved the goalposts.
Real life is strangely mixed — Swift satirised fair tulips sprung from dung. Among my favourite movies is Steve Martin’s
Leap of Faith, which affectionately parodies an Elmer Gantry shyster revivalist. Jonas Nightingale pulls all the tricks in the book but finally a little girl is genuinely healed, rain really does come to the dustbowl, and the joke’s on us all, as well as him.
Cue a couple of posts from
Maggi Dawn,
here and
here, about the breakdown of
Todd Bentley’s marriage (details from Brother Maynard
here). Earlier this summer a friend who’s a nearby Baptist minister was kindly critiquing the
Lakeland revival on the basis of some UK follow-on stuff he’d attended. Amidst much extreme stuff (people being knocked over in a supercharged atmosphere some outsiders would associate with stage hypnotism rather than religion),
I would lay serious money some people have actually been helped to genuinely good places they otherwise wouldn’t have reached.
If it’s a spiritual virtue to value the person more than the sins they commit, perhaps it’s also prioritising mercy before sacrifice to look to the human being amidst religious hype, to remember them personally and charitably in our prayers, and to recall that in the end we’re all in the same boat.
Real life is strangely mixed — Swift satirised fair tulips sprung from dung. Among my favourite movies is Steve Martin’s Leap of Faith, which affectionately parodies an Elmer Gantry shyster revivalist. Jonas Nightingale pulls all the tricks in the book but finally a little girl is genuinely healed, rain really does come to the dustbowl, and the joke’s on us all, as well as him.
Cue a couple of posts from Maggi Dawn, here and here, about the breakdown of Todd Bentley’s marriage (details from Brother Maynard here). Earlier this summer a friend who’s a nearby Baptist minister was kindly critiquing the Lakeland revival on the basis of some UK follow-on stuff he’d attended. Amidst much extreme stuff (people being knocked over in a supercharged atmosphere some outsiders would associate with stage hypnotism rather than religion), I would lay serious money some people have actually been helped to genuinely good places they otherwise wouldn’t have reached.
