Biographies
5 authors · 5 books
A land of revivals and great preachers. From a poet-priest of the 1600s to a coal miner who learned to pray, these Welsh-born believers left words that still warm the heart.
George Herbert (1593–1633) was a Welsh-born English poet and Anglican priest who left an aristocrat’s path to court to become a humble country parson at Bemerton. His devotional poems, published after his death as The Temple, and his pastoral manual The Country Parson made him a model of the devout parish priest.
Christmas Evans (1766–1838) was the greatest of the Welsh preachers — a poor, self-taught farm laborer, blinded in one eye by an assault in his youth, who became known as the “Bunyan of Wales.” For more than thirty years he oversaw the scattered Baptist churches of Anglesey on a stipend of £17 a year, preaching to thousands in vivid, dramatic open-air sermons. His ministry was revived after a famous covenant with God below Cadair Idris.
Rees Howells (1879–1950) was a Welsh coal miner turned intercessor whose life of costly, sacrificial prayer became the pattern taught in his biography by Norman Grubb. He founded the Bible College of Wales at Swansea in 1924, running it without fees or fundraising appeals, and led its community in sustained wartime intercession for Britain.
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981), known as “the Doctor,” was a brilliant young London physician — assistant to the King's doctor, Sir Thomas Horder — who left medicine for the ministry, convinced that humanity's deepest disease is spiritual. After eleven years pastoring working people at Sandfields in industrial South Wales, he preached expositionally at Westminster Chapel, London, for thirty years and became a central figure in the twentieth-century recovery of Reformed preaching.
Gareth Evans, born in 1938 in Merthyr Tydfil, is an itinerant pastor, teacher, and author. He studied physics, taught globally, authored devotionals, and now ministers to the hurting church through his website. Gareth, married to Anne, has three daughters, eight grand children, and fourteen great-grand children. His teachings emphasize practical faith and biblical wisdom. With a unique blend of scientific background and spiritual insight, Evans brings clarity to complex theological concepts.
Christmas Evans was the most celebrated Welsh preacher of the early nineteenth century, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones, born in Cardiff, was one of the great preachers of the twentieth.
The Welsh Revival of 1904–1905 swept through the chapels of Wales, bringing many thousands to faith. Rees Howells, a young coal miner at the time, was deeply shaped by it.
George Herbert was born in Montgomery, Wales, in 1593, into a noble Welsh-border family, and became a poet and country parson in England.
