Gareth Evans Biography and Books

Gareth Evans was born in 1938 in Merthyr Tydfil, among the coal valleys of South Wales, and it is hard to think of a life that has ranged farther from that starting point. Physics teacher and pastor, chaplain on a mercy ship off West Africa and Bible teacher on five continents, he has spent more than six decades walking out a single conviction — that the Lord who saved a Welsh schoolboy also holds every one of his tomorrows. He describes himself simply as a worshipper, and his life, in his own telling, as a series of stepping stones laid down by God one at a time.

I see so many stations or ‘stepping stones’ in my life that have led on to deeper experiences with the Lord, and, without which, I would not have the story I want to relate. Each stepping stone led on to the next, each one being a direct intervention of the Lord in my plans.

— Gareth Evans

A Childhood in the Welsh Valleys

Gareth was born to Cyril Evans, an RAF man of the Second World War remembered for his singing voice and his love of cricket, and Ethel Evans, a gifted pianist who gave herself to the making of a home. Music, sport, and story ran in the family, as they run through Wales itself — a land famous for its eloquent orators and impassioned preachers. At eight, Gareth moved to his grandfather's home in Bonvilston, near Cardiff, and at eleven he entered Cowbridge Grammar School, the second oldest school in Wales, a community of some three hundred boys. There the boy who loved cycling, soccer, storytelling, and music also proved to have an exceptional head for mathematics. He shared those years with a younger sister, Barbara, who today lives in Australia.

Then, when Gareth was thirteen, sorrow entered the house: his mother died of a prolapsed heart, leaving a void in a close-knit family. His father, who never remarried, admirably shouldered the burden of providing for his children, and entrusted his son with responsibilities beyond his years. Grief pressed the boy into an early independence — and, quietly, into the shape of the man to come: an introvert, as he discovered, yet one with a surprising gift for meaningful conversation with all kinds of people.

“What Will You Do with the Lord Jesus Christ?”

Gareth grew up in an Anglican household, at home with the Christian ethos but not yet possessed by it. The turning came at sixteen, through the Friday-night youth meetings of Betty Bishop, a devout Christian and founder of a children's ministry — lively evenings of choruses, Bible quizzes, and visiting speakers. One night Ms. Bishop put a question to him directly: “Tell me Gareth, what will you do with the Lord Jesus Christ?” For five weeks he evaded it, all the while watching the authentic devotion of the young people around him and feeling the living presence of Christ pressing in. Then a friend named David brought news that a young preacher called Austin — a familiar face from their school days — was to speak at a nearby chapel. Twenty young people went, Gareth among them. Afterwards Austin fixed him with a determined gaze and asked the very question he had been running from: “Tell me Gareth, what will you do with the Lord Jesus Christ?”

The Spirit of God came upon me and at that moment I knew that Jesus loved me, and I was a child of God. At that moment something was birthed within me.

— Gareth Evans

The new faith became the bedrock of his identity, and he embraced it boldly among friends and at school. Sunday school under Mr. Collins, the local postmaster, laid his foundations; his first pastor, Wynne Lewis — a man with, as Gareth put it, “a fire burning in his belly” — ignited his zeal; and the Elim church at Bridgend, with its young adults' group, the Elim Crusaders, grounded him in the Word. “I was blessed by having some good teachers who loved the Lord and His Word,” he recalls. “I was beginning to discover the riches of our inheritance in Christ and discovered the fruit of His Spirit.” While at university he lodged in the home of Donald Evans, who went from Bible college and pastoral ministry to become one of the world's leading authorities in medical ethics — living proof that faith and rigorous scholarship could walk together. And it was Donald's father, Mr. Aubrey Evans of Swansea, who gave Gareth the counsel that has stayed with him ever since: that those who follow afar off can still see the Lord, but those who go one step ahead of the Light of the World can no longer see Him, and find themselves walking in their own shadow. From that word came the motto of his life: “I will walk with Jesus, not ahead of Him nor lag behind.”

The Scientist in the Classroom

From Cowbridge Grammar School, where he took pure mathematics, applied mathematics, and physics at Advanced Level, Gareth went up to the University of Swansea to read for an Honours degree in Physics, adding a Diploma of Education. Swansea gave him something better than a degree: there he met Anne, a dedicated young secretary whose mother belonged to the Rees Howells Prayer Band, and whose profound Christian character he came to cherish. They were engaged on the day of his graduation and married a year later, on 15 July 1961. Anne's father, a dedicated Norwegian minister of the Gospel, became another wellspring in Gareth's life; the two men shared a love for the devotional writings of A. W. Tozer and Watchman Nee that kept the fire of the Spirit burning.

For the next two decades Gareth's pulpit was a classroom, and the disciplines of the laboratory — precision, patience, a refusal to rest in vague answers — would later lend his Bible teaching its characteristic clarity. He began at Kenfig Comprehensive School, teaching physics to Advanced Level. “I never understood how I obtained that position,” he says. “It must have been another of the Lord's appointments because it was an opportunity I never sought.” In his third year came an invitation to the Windsor Boys School in Germany, a school of more than five hundred children of military personnel — making Gareth, remarkably, the youngest teacher ever hired by the Ministry of Defence, despite lacking the National Service and five years' experience such posts normally required. “God can even override army regulations!” he laughs. Postings followed to Hamm in West Germany and then to Hong Kong with the British Army education service; and everywhere he taught, he also witnessed, founding Christian Unions or similar gatherings in each school. In Hong Kong he partnered with Jackie Pullinger in her work among drug addicts, venturing into the walled city of Kowloon to join a Bible class in ‘the dragon's den’; he and Anne visited a countryside orphanage each month to tell the children about Jesus; he led weekly Bible studies hosted by the veteran missionary John Bechtel for up to thirty British soldiers, including Nepalese Gurkhas; and he even joined a Chinese choir, daring solo parts in an Easter cantata sung in Cantonese.

Back in Wales in 1969, Gareth became Head of Physics at Ogmore Grammar School, led its Christian union, and conducted school assemblies, while serving on a select team of physics teachers at Cardiff University devising a new advanced-level curriculum. At home, Anne started a teenagers' fellowship that spread across churches throughout the Bridgend area; from it grew a youth newspaper, a thirty-voice choir singing Easter and Christmas cantatas in halls, chapels, and prisons, summer camps, weekend youth nights, community outreaches, and YMCA programmes. In August 1975 the family emigrated to Canada, where Gareth headed the physics department at Toronto French School and then the science department at the Toronto Hebrew Academy — an Orthodox Jewish school where he coached the soccer team to its first winning season and shared the Gospel with students and the senior Rabbi alike.

A Teacher Turned Shepherd

The Hebrew Academy proved the last stepping stone of his teaching career. When the pastor of his church resigned, Gareth was invited to speak at the farewell, and two former pastors told him plainly that he belonged in ministry. After prayer, and with Anne's wholehearted support, he left teaching to become a pastor with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. At Hazelglen Fellowship in Kitchener, Ontario, he shepherded the congregation, led the youth, served as chaplain to Malaysian Christian students at a local university, conducted seminars, and ran summer camps in Toronto. In March 1983 came an invitation to Vancouver Island, and by September 1984 he was installed as pastor of Victoria Alliance Church, where he served for eight years — and where he and Anne have made their home ever since. All of it, be it noted, without a day at theological college: the Lord had trained His teacher in classrooms, choir lofts, and army bases instead.

Out onto the Sea

In September 1990 an unforeseen turn arrived: a sudden illness that placed Gareth in the care of a sleep clinic at the University of British Columbia and forced him from the rhythm of ministry for two years. Undeterred, he prescribed himself exercise and voracious reading to keep spirit and mind alive — and then the telephone rang again. He was invited to serve aboard the Mercy Ship M/V Anastasis, working in West Africa. Not yet fully restored, Gareth and Anne sailed anyway, joining the ship at Rotterdam in May 1991 as chaplains. With their fellow missionaries they became builders of hope — schools, hospital wings, clinics, freshwater sources, hygienic latrines raised against deadly disease — but Gareth's deepest joy lay in the souls they touched. He ministered to missionaries and pastors in weekly seminars and conferences, instructed over 150 church leaders in Sierra Leone, carried his teaching into French-speaking Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and Senegal, and taught a week-long pastors' conference in Nigeria.

To the Ends of the Earth

When Gareth and Anne left the Anastasis at the end of 1994, they did not leave the itinerant life it had opened. January 1995 found Gareth leading the summer school at Capernwray Bible School in Moss Vale, near Sydney, Australia, its students drawn from around the world. Invitations multiplied, many from YWAM leaders eager for his help with their Discipleship Training Schools: Mexico in February 1996, with a two-day pastors' conference and a marriage seminar besides; YWAM Fortaleza in north-eastern Brazil that August, and again in 1997 and 1998; a men's retreat with some seventy men from a Baptist church in Kelowna; Baja California, the UK, India, Nepal, and Brazil in 1998; a year of speaking across the churches of Victoria in 1999. The new millennium brought an invitation from Ade Ajala to a new ministry in Nigeria, a second trip to India in 2001 — to Chennai in the south — and, in 2002, ministry at home and abroad spanning Haiti, Manitoba, the UK, Portland, Fortaleza, and Australia. Looking back, he can trace the decades like chapters: Gurkha soldiers in Hong Kong in the sixties, the young people of Bridgend in the seventies, the Jewish Academy in Toronto in the eighties, pastors' conferences in West Africa in the nineties. Three times in that long walk, he recalls, he has audibly heard the Holy Spirit speak to him.

In September 2003 trial visited again, as a routine hiatus hernia operation left him in prolonged weakness. Once more he refused to waste the wilderness.

The Storyteller at His Desk

Out of all that teaching came his books. Gareth wears the mantle of a storyteller, and his writing is unhurried, plain, and pastoral, aimed at the hurting church — believers worn down by suffering or disappointment who need to be reminded that God holds their tomorrows. Titles such as He Holds My Tomorrows, The Key in My Hand, Stepping Stones, Soar Like the Eagle, and Feasting at the Table lead the reader slowly through Scripture, pairing careful exposition with the encouragement of a man who has pastored real congregations through real trouble.

Some would even title Hebrews 11 as “Heroes of Faith.” I see no heroes there.

— Gareth Evans, He Holds My Tomorrows

That single sentence opens a window onto his whole approach. For Gareth the great examples of faith are not spiritual giants to be admired from a safe distance but ordinary, flawed people who simply took God at His word — which means theirs is a faith the reader can actually share. It is the note he returns to again and again: faith is practical, faith is for the weak as much as the strong, and it is walked out one obedient step at a time.

Family remains a cornerstone of it all. The Lord blessed Gareth and Anne with three daughters — Corinne, born in Wales, and Andrea and Lynette, born in Hamm, West Germany — and in time with eight grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren, alongside the countless children and young people they have parented in the faith. Today, no longer tied to a single pulpit, Gareth ministers largely through his website, where his devotionals, books, and poems gather the wisdom of an expansive journey for the scattered and the isolated. He continues to carry a particular burden for the young — to disciple and equip them to maturity in Christ — and to walk, still, by the motto given him long ago in Swansea: not ahead of Jesus, not lagging behind, but with Him, one stepping stone at a time.