From the Valleys to the Nations

Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come. PSALM 71:18

A boy of the valleys. Gareth Evans was born in 1938 in Merthyr Tydfil, among the coal valleys of South Wales. His father, Cyril, served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and was remembered for his singing voice and his love of cricket; his mother, Ethel, was a gifted pianist who gave herself to making a home. At eight he went to live at his grandfather’s home in Bonvilston, near Cardiff, and at eleven he entered Cowbridge Grammar School, where the boy who loved cycling, football and telling stories turned out to have an unusually good head for mathematics. When he was thirteen his mother died. He did not cry at the time; boys, he had been taught, did not. His father never remarried and carried the family on his own, and the loss pressed the boy into an early independence.

A question he could not answer. He grew up in an Anglican household, familiar with the Christian faith but not yet possessed by it. At sixteen he began attending Friday-night meetings for young people run by Betty Bishop in her home, evenings of choruses, Bible quizzes and visiting speakers. One night she asked him directly what he would do with the Lord Jesus Christ. He had no answer, and for several weeks he avoided her. Then a young lay preacher he knew from school, speaking at a small chapel nearby, put exactly the same question to him after the service. That night he knelt by his bed for the first time since his mother’s death and asked Christ to forgive him and come into his life. Nothing seemed to happen. A few days later, walking into a school assembly while his friends were making fun of his new religion, he was flooded with the settled knowledge that he was a child of God. He has never doubted it since.

Teachers and a motto. He found his spiritual home in the Elim Pentecostal church at Bridgend, whose pastor, Wynne Lewis, expected young converts to follow Christ wholeheartedly or not at all. At the University of Swansea he lodged with the family of Donald Evans, a young Christian he had met on a cricket field, later a distinguished scholar of medical ethics. It was Donald’s father, Aubrey, a man with little formal education, who gave the student the counsel that became the motto of his life: that those who follow the Lord from a distance can still see Him, but those who run a step ahead of the Light of the World find themselves walking in their own shadow. From that came his resolve to walk with Jesus, neither ahead of Him nor behind. During those student years, in the spring of 1961, he also had an experience of the Holy Spirit which he has always regarded as the lighting of a fire that has never gone out.

The scientist in the classroom. He took an honours degree in physics at Swansea and a Diploma of Education. There he met Anne, a quiet young secretary in the same church, whose Norwegian father was a minister of the gospel and whose mother had been part of the prayer band associated with Rees Howells. They married in 1961. For the next two decades his pulpit was a classroom. He taught physics at Kenfig, and then, remarkably young, was appointed to teach the children of British service families in Germany, at Hamm, and later with the British forces in Hong Kong. There he joined the young Jackie Pullinger on visits into the notorious Walled City of Kowloon, and led Bible studies for British soldiers and Gurkhas. Back in Wales from 1969 he became head of physics at Ogmore Grammar School, served on a panel developing a new advanced-level curriculum, and, with Anne, saw a small Bible study for teenage girls in their home grow into a youth work across the churches of the Bridgend area. Many young people came to faith, and some of them later said that they had been living in revival without realising it.

Canada, and a school of rabbis. In 1975 the family emigrated to Canada. Evans headed the physics department at the Toronto French School and then the science department at the Toronto Hebrew Academy, an Orthodox Jewish school, where he was one of only two Gentiles on the staff. There, by invitation, he found himself answering the questions of senior students about Christ, and talking about the meaning of sacrifice with the school’s senior rabbi, conversations he counts among the high points of his life.

A teacher turned shepherd. It was in Toronto that his church’s district superintendent asked him to consider becoming a pastor with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Evans said he would not go without a clear call from God and could not afford seminary; he was told that seminary was not required and that what was wanted was the witness of the brethren. Over the following months that witness came, unprompted, from several directions. Anne, who had grown up in the poverty of an itinerant evangelist’s home and had no wish to be a pastor’s wife, told him that if God was calling he had better obey. He left one of the best-paid teaching posts in the country for a pastor’s salary. He served first at Hazelglen Fellowship in Kitchener, Ontario, where the small congregation grew and built its own building, then briefly at Sidney on Vancouver Island, and from 1984 as pastor of Victoria Alliance Church, in the city that has been his home ever since.

Out onto the sea. In 1990 a breakdown in his ability to sleep, which his doctors attributed to stress, forced him to resign. It was a dark valley, and he later traced part of it to griefs he had never faced, going back to his mother’s death. Then came an invitation to serve with Anne as chaplains aboard the Mercy Ship Anastasis, and from 1991 to the end of 1994 they lived on board as the ship worked in West Africa. Alongside the surgery, building and clean-water projects of the ship, Evans taught pastors and church leaders, among them a series of weekly classes for over a hundred and fifty leaders in Sierra Leone, and conferences in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Nigeria.

To the ends of the earth. After the ship, Anne urged him not to take another congregation but to travel and teach, while she opened their home in Victoria to students to support them. Invitations came without his seeking them: a Bible school summer school in Australia, where his teaching on the Upper Room became his first book; Youth With A Mission training schools in Mexico and Brazil; pastors’ conferences in Baja California, Haiti, India and Nepal. A long illness following surgery in 2003 kept him at home for two years, and he spent it reading, writing poetry and deepening his prayer life. Later he mentored the young founder of the SermonIndex website and helped to moderate a series of conferences on revival, and many of his sermons found listeners around the world. His books were written, he says, simply because people kept asking whether his teaching was available in print.

Holding the hand that holds tomorrow. Gareth and Anne had three daughters, and in time many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Anne, his companion of more than sixty years, lived for many years with cancer, and died at their home in December 2025; he has written of her with deep gratitude, and gives her the credit for much that others have praised in him. In his late eighties, by his own account, he has found a new work among the addicted and homeless of Victoria, mentoring a couple who came to Christ out of that life and now serve on the streets they once knew. He describes himself simply as a worshipper, and his life as a series of stepping stones laid down by God one at a time. It is not a bad summary of what he teaches.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Trace the stepping stones of your own life. Write down three events, including at least one disappointment, through which you can now see God leading.

2. Evans came to faith because two people asked him the same direct question. Is there someone to whom you should put a simple, honest question about Christ this month?

3. Consider whether there is an old grief in your life that you have never brought to God. Ask Him, gently, to show you.

4. Anne’s willingness to follow God’s call shaped her husband’s whole ministry. Thank God by name for someone whose quiet obedience has made your service possible.

5. Ask whether you have been tempted to think your useful years are behind you. Write down one way you could still serve this generation.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You were at work in the valleys and the classrooms, on the ship and in the city streets, long before Your servant could see it. You are at work in my life in the same way.

Thank You for every stepping stone, and forgive me for the times I complained at a closed door that You shut in love.

Heal the old griefs I have buried, and make me willing to go wherever You lead, at whatever age.

Hold my hand today, and hold my tomorrows, until I see You face to face. Amen.