Rees Howells — The Intercessor Who Fought Wars on His Knees

Who He Was Rees Howells was born on October 10, 1879, in the coal-mining valleys of South Wales — the seventh of eleven children in a working-class nonconformist family steeped in Welsh chapel tradition. He emigrated briefly to America in his early twenties, working in Pittsburgh, before returning to Wales in 1904 and being swept into the great Welsh Revival — an awakening that converted over 100,000 people in less than a year. A decisive encounter with the Holy Spirit in 1906 launched him into what he called “the life of intercession.” He and his wife founded the Bible College of Wales in Swansea in 1924, and during World War Two the college became internationally known for its sustained, specific intercession for the Allied cause. Howells died in 1950, leaving behind a legacy — preserved in Norman Grubb’s biography “Rees Howells: Intercessor” — that has sent more people into deep intercession than perhaps any other modern book on prayer.

His Core Teaching on Prayer Howells drew a careful and important distinction between ordinary prayer and intercession.

Prayer, he taught, can be offered by any believer at any time — bringing needs before God, expressing gratitude, asking for grace. Intercession is something more costly and more specific: it is the willingness to stand in the place of another before God, bearing their burden as if it were your own, taking their spiritual condition upon yourself and refusing to release it until God moves. This distinction, rooted in the example of Christ Himself as the Great Intercessor, was not merely theoretical for Howells. It was the operating principle of his entire life.

Howells grounded this theology in Ezekiel 22:30, where God says: “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one” (NIV). For Howells, these words described the most urgent need in every generation — not more programs or resources or gifted communicators, but intercessors willing to stand in the gap. The absence of intercessors, he believed, had direct spiritual consequences in the visible world. This was not mysticism. It was, for Howells, as practical as any other form of warfare: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world” (Ephesians 6:12, NIV).

The concept of “identification” lay at the heart of Howells’s intercession. He taught — and consistently practiced — that the true intercessor must enter into the experience of the one being prayed for. This meant far more than feeling sympathy or carrying a list. It meant a willingness, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, to take on a measure of the cost, the vulnerability, or the deprivation of the one being prayed for. Howells described repeated instances in which God led him to make specific financial sacrifices, give away possessions, or enter seasons of fasting and physical discomfort as the tangible expression of his intercession for particular people or situations. The sacrifice was not a transaction — it was a proof of genuine identification, the point at which intercession moved from the head into the heart and from the heart into costly, concrete action.

During the Second World War, Howells and the student body of the Bible College of Wales entered what he called an extended season of “gained position” in prayer for the Allied cause.

They prayed specifically — and recorded in their prayer journals — intercessions for the evacuation at Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the North Africa campaign, and the D-Day landings.

The journal entries reveal nights of anguished, weeping prayer followed by a sudden sense of spiritual breakthrough. Howells was convinced that Jesus’ words applied not only to church governance but to intercessory spiritual warfare: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 18:18, NIV). The intercessor who had truly gained the ground in prayer had genuinely altered the spiritual landscape through which events moved.

Howells also taught a theology of intercession rooted in the identity of Christ as the ultimate Intercessor. “He is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them” (Hebrews 7:25, NIV). When Howells’ students knelt through the night in their Swansea chapel, they were not trying to attract God’s attention — they were joining the intercession of the Son at the Father’s right hand, adding their earthly voice to the heavenly prayer already in progress. They were co-laboring with the risen Lord in the most important work in the universe.

The price of this kind of intercession was severe, and Howells never minimized it. But the fruit was equally undeniable. He believed Isaiah 62:6–7 described the intercessor’s mandate: “I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem” (Isaiah 62:6–7, NIV). The watchman did not pray when he felt like it. He did not leave his post when the night grew long. He watched and prayed without rest because the city behind him depended on it. This was not a call to religious performance. It was a call to love — a love so deep that it could not remain passive while souls and nations hung in the balance.

A Prayer: Lord, raise up in our generation intercessors who will stand in the gap as Rees Howells did — those who count the cost, enter the battle, and refuse to rest until heaven’s will is done on earth. Let our churches become true houses of prayer for all nations. Amen.