We’re tracking the importance of repentance in revival in this series, and the Welsh Revival of 1904–’05 is key to seeing how the Lord has been reviving his people up to the present.

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As with reading Hebrew, we understand how the hand of God is at work by looking backward. Tracing back through the nine revivals at Asbury College/University, it’s clear there was a redigging of the bountiful well on that campus.

What can we learn from that first time of outpouring?

It took place in February 1905. Looking first at the month, we can see that all nine revivals at Asbury broke out in either February or March. When Judy McDonough, IFA’s editor in chief, heard this, she burst out: “Lent!” It certainly is a season of repentance. As we heard students at Asbury say during the 2023 Outpouring: “It’s a time of getting low.”

Now let’s consider the year. In November 1904, Evan Roberts asked the Lord for the salvation of 100,000 souls. Scholar J. Edwin Orr, whom Billy Graham called “one of the greatest authorities on the history of religious revivals in the Protestant world,” has said that Evan Roberts’ prayer was answered within five months.

February of 1905 was three months into that meteoric growth in Wales, but America had started to catch fire as early as December 1904. In The Flaming Tongue: The Impact of 20th Century Revivals, Orr wrote: “An awakening in Wilkes-Barre began suddenly. … the Rev. J.D. Roberts having been moved by news received directly from Wales by Welsh Pennsylvanians.”

In Worship Through the Ages: How the Great Awakenings Shape Evangelical Worship, Vernon Whaley tracks a number of revivals in America that broke out during that season, including the first revival at Asbury.

Missionary E. Stanley Jones was one of a handful of students holding a prayer meeting in the room of classmate Jim Ballinger. In Song of Ascents: A Spiritual Autobiography, Jones wrote:

“I remember I was almost asleep with my head against the bedclothes where I was kneeling, when suddenly we were all swept off our feet by a visitation of the Holy Spirit. We were all filled, flooded by the Holy Spirit. … For three or four days it could be said of us, ‘They are drunk.’ I was drunk with God. … That morning there was no chapel service, in the ordinary sense; people were in prayer, some prostrate in prayer. No one led it, and yet it was led — led by the Spirit. For three days there were no college classes. Every class room was a prayer meeting where students and faculty were seeking and finding and witnessing. It spread to the countryside. People flocked in, and, before they could even get into the assembly hall, would be stricken with conviction and would fall on their knees on the campus praying for God — and pardon and release.”

The Welsh Revival

This account echoes the stories told of the Welsh Revival. Evan Roberts told the Lord he would pay Him — if he could — to let him travel and tell of what the Lord was doing. He and others went from one meeting to the next, sometimes walking on shoulders to get to the pulpit. And there are stories of revival breaking out where those “with a name” didn’t preach at all. T.C. Thomas left a meeting at which Evan Roberts spoke, and when he got back to his village of Bedlinog, he was so filled with God that he couldn’t walk home. He knelt on the cobblestones and praised the Lord so passionately that patrons in two taverns could hear him. They went out, drinks and pool cues in hand — probably to mock him — but one by one they fell to their knees and joined in the praise.

The result of such widespread revival and spiritual awakening in Wales was the utter transformation of society. Here’s my portrayal of Evan Roberts reflecting on it decades later, in our “singing play,” Songs of Revival: Hungry After God Himself:

Bend Me

What was the source of that level of transformation? Repentance. Evan Roberts heard evangelist Seth Joshua pray, “Bend us,” by which he meant the Church. But Evan Roberts, struck by the Holy Spirit (as Jones and his colleagues would soon be), bent prostrate and prayed, “Bend me!” The Welsh word for bend  — plygwch — has much deeper meanings than just to bend. Orr pointed to a phrase from the song “Spirit of the Living God,” popular during the 1970 Asbury Revival: “Break me, mold me, fill me, use me.”

This was the heart of the Welsh Revival, and it is why, I believe, the transformation was so widespread.

Evan Roberts advocated his own version of John Wesley’s Great Experiment that fueled the First Great Awakening:

1. You must confess any known sin and put any wrong done to man right again.
2. You must put away any doubtful habit.
3. You must obey the Spirit promptly.
4. You must confess your faith publicly.

Rev. Timothy J. Mercaldo, who studied under Orr, said the scholar made the point that revivals are marked by desperation for God and by spiritual surrender:

Transformation at Asbury

This same desperation and surrender marked the first Asbury Revival as well. Jones wrote:

“When we took stock of what had happened, every single student had professed conversion and apparently had found it as witnessed by their changed lives, and many from the townspeople and countryside were converted and transformed.”

And it was that well of revival that was redug eight times more at Asbury.

This series will continue, covering the importance of repentance in the 2023 Asbury Outpouring. Search for #ImportanceOfRepentanceInRevival to pull up all the articles and interviews.

Below, post your praise for the repentance and revivals of before, plus your prayers for the repentance and revival our world needs so desperately now!

Rich Swingle is an actor who has performed in 39 nations across six continents, mostly in his own one-man plays, five of them presented Off-Broadway. He has also appeared in roughly 45 film projects. He and his bride, Joyce Swingle, another contributing writer for IFA, have collaborated with Rev. Timothy J. Mercaldo to create a “singing play” titled Songs of Revival: Hungry After God Himself. The Swingles live in New York City. Visit www.RichDrama.com for more information. Photo Credit: The Bible College of Wales.