Before Azusa Street: The Welsh Revival and the Birth of a New Era

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Bracket, I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Bracket, at William-Brandom.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Daniel Bright, almost Y-Wammer. Daniel is good to have you back and almost Y-Wammer. I think last time you said something like Y-Wam adjacent, and that's how we ran with it, but there's so many topics that you and I explore, and I'm actually excited for this one, because I have been asked by multiple people through the years to talk about the subject we're getting into,

which is the Welch Revival, and as people know, my history usually starts around Pentecostalism just slightly before and then goes up through Blatterrain, New Apostolic Reformation, but I started to form this question whenever I began researching the Pentecostal movement, what if the person who began the Pentecostal, the most famous person in the Pentecostal revival, what if he's not the one who started it, and that led me into Chosvox, Param, and some of the background into Dauy and Sanford, and interestingly enough, fast forward through time, I'm looking at the revival that sparked the assemblies of God, and to anybody

who's looked at the research that I've published, it's the same kind of thing. You have a revival, well the most famous person who's in this revival, or in this case it's a group of people, they're not actually the one who starts it, and so I started seeing this pattern that's emerging, and I'm not saying that it's good or bad, but I was looking at the Welch Revival, and it has the same type of pattern, the most famous person in the Welch Revival, it's not actually the guy who started it, and this will be an interesting discussion

because for those who don't know, Daniel looks at the Welch Revival very favorably, and I look at it somewhat skeptically, I'll say it like that, it doesn't lead into all of the weird nonsense with sexual stuff that you have in some of the other revivals, but there's some weirdness in it, so I view it with skepticism, Daniel looks at it favorably, but I wanted to tackle the Welch Revival from an open and balanced perspective.

Yeah, and I should say from the outset, if anyone listening thinks Daniel was just biased because it's British, well not necessarily, because I did do an episode with you about Jane Lee, and she was awful, oh everything she led to.

When I was looking into this, I emailed you about this years ago, and while we were discussing what we were going to do about this, someone emailed us again and said, you're going to cover the Welch Revival.

And yeah, there's a lot to look at. From the cursory glance, it can be quite obvious to anyone who knows about Pentecostalism that there would have been crossover, because the Welch Revival is from 1904 to 1905.

And that's exactly when the Azusa Street Revival happens in 1905. On my primary research website I was using was the Welch Revival.co.uk, and they actually have a section on their website called the Welch Revival and Azusa Street, which really surprised me.

Now, being British myself, I actually visited some of the churches in South Wales, in South Wales, which sparked, well, didn't spark, that's the thing, they didn't spark the Revival, the Revival was happening well over the country.

And I was like many people, I would have assumed it started with this one guy, that he wasn't the catalyst to all of this. So going into this, I'll qualify our two different perspectives.

I came up with an eight-point flimflamery index, which I think can work quite well to apply to any of the Revivals when you're wondering, is this genuine is it of God? Well, Moses said, if the prophet tells you something that happens and it doesn't, then you know they're not to be trusted.

My list, much like the Bible, my list is much more extensive. So number one, as your granddad said, where's the money? And so from that perspective, I would say, thankfully, from 1904 to 1905, the Welch Revival, there wasn't large amounts of money.

Number two, who's having the sex scandals, who's sleeping with who? No one, obviously, I don't imagine that many people were, hopefully, but there was no one scandal-wise that was sleeping around. Number three, does the leader start it all with bizarre visions and then convinces a hard put on upon following?

No, not so much, earlier on, yes, but I'll get onto that. Do the main denominations kick them out and they get all in a half and start their own thing? No. No, which splits and splits and splits?

No, they stay in. Number six, can you trace various movements in the charismatic world back to this one dodgy guy, Evan Roberts? No, although qualified, perhaps in a sense, because of Azusa Street later, seven, most importantly, fake healings, fake speaking in tongues, fake the Lord told me, you're street address?

No. The eighth one is specific to William Brannon, where he would always go to the next city and say, hey, back there, there were healings, there were revivals, it was all over the newspapers.

That's not necessarily what happened really with the Welch Revival, it was external newspapers coming into the cities and towns and villages. and Wales to be like, what's going on here? There seems to be a lot of people converting.

Now, where the interesting point of I would say attention between you and I, they would be 0.9, which I think is worth examining how much did the prime instigators become burned out in a very standard way in the Welsh revival?

And that ninth point is a good probability, yes. So we were a bit opaque into who we're referring to. So the guy we're talking about, or not talking about, is Evan Roberts, and jumping right in there with the Star Trek reference and analogy.

It's that in Star Trek, of course, they said, be me up Scotty. No, no one ever said be me up Scotty. It just sounds like something that I would say in Star Trek. But no, Scotty was in the engineer, he was downstairs in the engine room, but it just sounds like something he would have said.

So likewise, with the Welsh revival, we think it started with Evan Roberts in 1904, in the autumn, but it didn't. So I'm gonna go back a little bit further. Way back to 1859, you have a guy called Henry Morgan who's just come back, oh, I might be mixing the names up.

So anyone looking, anyone looking these things up, I might have mixed some of the names up. Meet Evan Phillips. Okay, it doesn't help that they're all called Evan. But Henry Morgan, sorry, I said Evan Phillips.

I meant Henry Morgan. Focus on the dates here. A guy goes to Wisconsin, who is also Welsh and he then goes on to New York in 1859 and he's present there during the Fulton Street Revival.

I'd a cursory look at the New York Street Revival and it suffers a little bit from 0.7, which is 0.8 over exaggerated healings and newspaper reports. But this guy doesn't quite do very well in New York and he comes back to Wales in 1859.

And then he, this isn't Evan Roberts, this is someone else, he ends up burning out and making millennial prophecies which don't come to pass. So that first revival, well, one of the rivals in 1859 doesn't really work out.

Evan Roberts spiritually and in terms of the timeline, he's a grandson of that revival from 1859. So that's very much still in everyone's memories. It's freshen Wales. Then a guy comes onto the scene who actually sparks off the current Welsh roots.

That Welsh revival in 1904, this is Jacob Jenkins. If I slip up later and say Joseph Jenkins, it's because I got his name mixed up with someone else. So I may say Joseph or I may say Jacob, but the important surname is Jenkins.

So we're just calling Jenkins from now on. He was in a place in Northwest Wales, well South of Aberystwyth, Wales only has one coast, it's on the west. And he was in drumroll, wait for it, the Calvinistic Methodist Church.

Now, normally from what we've been looking at, these pentacostal charismatic leaders, they start their own thing, or they just start their own church, or they got kicked out of something else. But what's unique about the Welsh revival here is it's happening within a very uncharismatic, unbentacostal denomination.

You can't really get much more to the other side of things than Calvinistic Methodist. But the Methodist remember, had already come out of revival from the Wesleyans, who were in the Episcopal Church. So this chap, Joseph Jenkins, he is the person who started the 1904 Welsh Revival.

It's famously from a young woman who stands up in the meeting and says, I love Jesus with all my heart. And then she sings a song in Welsh, which I'm going to butcher the first verse of the Magadiade fell in Mordeweth, Tostiade fellithly, which is, here is love, advised as the ocean, loving kindness as a flood.

And that hymn becomes the hymn of the Welsh Revival. Now for this sort of Amazon rings of power retelling of the Welsh Revival, she would have sung that with Evan Roberts in November 1904.

But no, Evan Roberts wasn't on the scene yet. Joseph Jenkins was holding his Revival meetings independently. Later on, Joseph Jenkins invites someone called Seth Joshua to preach at his Revival meetings. That's where Evan Roberts comes into the picture.

And Evan Roberts says that he wants to be bent by God and to be used by God most famously. And that's where we think the Revival starts. I'm not sure why we focus on Evan Roberts so much.

Maybe it was the he just had better publicity and a lot of people talked about meeting him. So to round off the beginning bit to establish where we are, it starts with Joseph Jenkins in 1904 with a woman who sings here as love vast as the ocean.

Then it goes, then Seth Joshua preaches at the Calvinistic Methodist church and then Evan Roberts gets in on the scene and is convicted in his words to turn his life over to God. So so far, so good.

My perspective isn't to look at a particular movement, Revival group as either good or bad. They're just a movement, they're simply that. Now they may later turn into something that is destructive, but I'm not gonna say it did or didn't.

But my perspective is we are all swayed by the influences that we come in contact with. No matter who you are, if you grew up in a Baptist church, you listened to Baptist doctrine, that was your influence, you listened to a Baptist preacher, you probably had Baptist parents, you had Baptist upbringing, you think like a Baptist.

Whereas if you're a Methodist, it's different or Pentecostal so on and so forth. So we are a product of our influences and like my studies with Christian identity, whenever I began to understand that Henry- Board helped to distribute this very anti-Semitic doctrine through his Dearborn Independent, and this began to sway Americans on that ideology.

It was called the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This pamphlet goes all throughout the United States. Well, it had an impact. It had an influence, and it strongly influenced what would eventually impact parts of Pentecostal ism, especially in Los Angeles.

So that is one area of influence that I can say goes into Azusa Street. It doesn't mean that Azusa Street subscribed to this by and large, but it was a factor of their influence.

Well, the Welsh Revival is also a factor of their influence, and there are clearly documented paths that you can find from the Welsh Revival Pentecostalism among other pathways of influence. For example, on the website, I think it might be on the Azusa Street Revival page, you can find a strange article about these weird Russians who are having a revival of their own, and they're doing many of the same things.

So it's kind of odd when you think about it. Well, there was a, it was either a book or a pamphlet that was written about what was happening in the Welsh Revival, and it made its way into Los Angeles.

And so there were connections because people were reading this. If I recall correctly, it was called The Great Revival in Wales, I think is what the book was called. SB Shaw's The Great Revival in Wales.

Well, this influenced another figure that I've been asked to talk about, Frank Bartelman. And also, if I remember correctly, there was a Baptist minister who was strongly influenced by this book so much so that he actually traveled to Wales and came back.

So he's holding another Baptist Revival adjacent to the Pentecostal Revival. And so you see all of these things breaking out. And to each person who is in their particular revival and they encountered others who are experiencing similar things, at that point in time, the answer to this logically is, there's a move of God around the globe.

This must be the end. And that's the way the Pentecostal viewed it. You can look at the Pentecostal prophecies and predictions, and you can see this. They all think it's the end. Many of those prophecies failed, which is why I'm highly skeptical of the Pentecostal experience that happened there.

Well, if you continue that line of thinking, it didn't succeed in the way that they thought, well, what happens when it doesn't succeed in the way that you think, now you start to change and adapt to the times.

And that's what happened with the Pentecostalism. I can see some similarities in the fact that if you study the presence of the stage presence of people who are in the Welch Revival, especially when you're talking about Evan Roberts, he has a very charismatic...

stage presence like the Pentecostals. He's starting to link his maybe not prophecies, but divine predictions of where a revival will be and how successful it will be based off of what he feels is the move of the spirit. And those things don't always come out as exact as he says. And so there'll be a revival and it'll just fall flat on its face. Well, he told everybody that it wouldn't fall flat on their face to him. Maybe it wasn't a prophecy, but to his listeners, to his audience, they thought it was. That's the way that this

thing kind of works. So to his audience, those who got frustrated with the failures, there were some who backed out and said, this isn't really of God. This is a false prophet. Was he actually prophesying? I don't know. But it does for me, it just raises a level of skepticism.

And that's, I think, the only point I'll make. Yeah, and that's a very reasonable point, because I think people would identify Evan Roberts with all of it. And what really struck me with researching this was I ended up with a lower view of Evan Roberts specifically, but a much higher view of the well-survival generally, because what was happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the charismatic world, and say Jane Leed was one guy starts it, sometimes a woman, and it all just goes off the rails a bit. But what was really interesting with the well-survival is when they had newspaper people coming to visit

Wales, they were like, where's Evan Roberts? Where is he? A lot of the time they couldn't find him, and sometimes he came anonymously into some of the prayer meetings. And for example, Joseph Jenkins, who kicked it all off, he didn't have much to do with Evan Roberts' son afterwards.

But you are right. That letter that he sent to Frank Bartleman, who I mentioned to you about a year and a half ago, he writes three letters to Frank Bartleman. And all of the letters paint the picture of a rather troubled young man. And it's really interesting looking into the timeline of what happened with Evan Roberts, because in October, he starts off a prayer meeting in the church, but he doesn't think he's going to get enough people. So he just has 16 or 17 people in the adjoining school building. And a lot of them are young women, which brings a few

alarm bells in the Michael Bickle area. But no, it all went fine. It's just there weren't very many people there. When I was reading what Evan Roberts wrote about his expectations of the revival, he starts off by saying, I was very disappointed with his state of Christianity in Wales.

And I was like, this doesn't hang on, this isn't the story I was told about. This isn't very positive, Evan Roberts. I'm quite happy with Christianity. It's me that's the problem. But during these revival meetings, he was quite a bit kind of five-year-old boy.

understanding how to play with anyone else. When people were singing, he sometimes said, stop singing, we need to pray instead. He doesn't quite get the flow of things. And then when people start talking, he's like, no, no, you can't be talking. You're interrupting the flow of the spirit, which for him just meant prayer. So he had one spiritual language which seemed to be prayer. He would say, I feel like the meeting feels like the spirit is going out of the meeting and things are, the meeting's on the way down. He used to say, it sounds very performance-based.

And when I read that, I was like, yeah, this guy is, as you say, he's a stage actor. He's trying to manufacture some kind of stage persona, some kind of performance here. And that's not very good.

And what struck me immediately when I learned that about him, was it linked to an element in winning brand names, developments where you repeatedly used the phrase, you know, the wax figures. You go into these churches and everyone's just sat there. And eventually, the winning brand of movement was all jumping up and down and speaking of tongues, I don't know, Pogo sticks. Everyone's got purple hair. But then that solidifies it, it turns to stone. And everyone's just sat there listening to someone speaking. And there was an element of Evan Roberts, I think, that wanted an

outpouring of the spirit. But when the spirit starts saying, now we're going to sing, now we're going to talk. That wasn't good enough for Evan Roberts. And that makes me wonder that Penta Costa, those who call themselves Penta Costa Charismatics, they actually have a rather liturgical small box that they want the Holy Spirit to fit into during these revival meetings. Whereas, suppose my form of low church anglicanism would say, yeah, if you want to jump on the Pogo stick, stand at the back, do some painting, speaking tongues may be a little bit, you know, it's all

a bit of this bit of, it's a bit of a buffet really. But for Evan Roberts, he had one thing on the menu and it was prayer, I think, not a bad thing. But if you're someone who wants the spirit to move, why limit him so much and say he can't do other things? And that becomes quite characteristic of the Charismatics later on. But instead of being open to stuff, it becomes quite limited just to who can speak for God. You know, Mike Bickel's famous phrase, 85 percent of all these prophecies made up. You're the Charismatic. You're supposed to believe in these things. Joseph

Smith did the same thing. When things got too much out of hand, he said, no, no, the prophet can dictate what direction the spirit's going to move in. It doesn't sound very biblical at all.

There was one phrase that really jumped out between the letters that Evan Roberts was sending to and from him and Los Angeles, where he said that the alter has been set. We're waiting for the fire. That's Elijah. And you know, the immediately, my mind is thinking, you know, that the Elijah generation, Joel's army, all this stuff brings the springs to mind. And then he's saying that in these days, in these later days, we are experiencing...

experiencing the rain, the spirit falling like rain in Wales. Oh no, we've got the phrase, they have a matter rain. And then Frank Barclamins, I'm using that exact phrase. He says, this is the matter rain.

And I was like, it's all come here from Wales. And then I was really panicking from it, thinking, hang on a second, I was expecting on the next page about Evan Roberts. All of the scandals come up, all the splits, it's not quite that bad.

But it is a lot of source material for people who then go on to the revival. So to begin to link it towards what we'll be talking about in the next episode, halfway through here, you've got a guy who actually travels two Wales from Los Angeles, who is Joseph Smale.

Joseph Smale, Joseph Smale. So he's been converse in LA, when he comes to Wales in the early 1905, by which time Evan Roberts, like any true Y-Wat, but he's burned out. He's converlessing his sister's house, because when Evan Roberts went through his conversion, as he would call it, his family were like, I'm not sure if this is very good for you Evan.

You don't seem very well. You're just going in seven days a week and doing your prayer stuff all the time, inevitably he ends up burning out, which I've seen happen a lot in my church, with Y-Watmas who sent me their prayer letters, saying we're going all in for God.

And then it turns out Evan been to church the last year, because they don't want to be fair and sacred about church attendance. So Evan Roberts was a sort of Y-Watmer before his time.

He just ends up burned out. So that's the sort of, that's the tortoise and the hare, a comparison, he went all in for God and then just gets burned out in his late 20s, which is very standard.

So there, I suppose that'd be 0.10. No, so 0.9, getting burned out, that's very charismatic, very characteristic of the charismatic, that they get burned out. So right there March 1905, Joseph Smale comes in on the scene and he starts going around and looking all this stuff that's going on in Wales.

That's the link there. That's where Joseph Smale comes to the Wales, and he's going back to Los Angeles. They were saying that they felt that they woke up and they could, they could remember people's names from these Revive meetings.

And I had instant Paul K memories remembering the names. I really got the prayer cards. But what happened was after the Welsh Revival ended, these preachers, they said, we lost the ability. I thought, I haven't heard that before.

I haven't heard charismatic Pentecostal say, hey, it's gone, we had it, it's gone now. I thought it was very humble, that's a bit like the Aspire Revival in the US a couple of years ago where they said, no more revival, we're done with that now.

So a lot of these preachers didn't burn out. So they just, well, a candle burns out, it runs out of fuel, it's not necessarily bad, if the candle has any sense of self-awareness. But a lot of these preachers in Wales were doing it independently.

I've got to stress that point, it was happening in North Wales, South Wales. or central Wales, it wasn't Evan Robert's starting his own thing whereas as soon as the street was just LA, the Welsh revival was the whole country and the whole nation I should say.

It wasn't one man, it was happening everywhere. You go to any small village, small town, everyone was, where everyone, a lot of people were singing very independently of either Joseph Jenkins or David Morgan or Evan Roberts.

That's what it's called the Welsh Revival, so if anyone comes away with one point from today, it would be the Welsh Revival is largely good, Evan Roberts was surprisingly unstable. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen McCummery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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There's a reason why I'm skeptical about the Welsh Revival and many of the other revivals. Everybody who knows me knows that when I hear the word Revival, I hear the phrase run screaming run for your lives.

That's how it goes in my head. And there's a reason for that actually. So I escaped the Brannum Cult, which was a high demand, high control group, 2012, I believe it was. This is now 2026, so I'm many, many years past this.

I have experienced many different church situations. We've tried different churches that weren't high demand. And when you're in a non-high demand group, you go to church. It's very calm. It's peaceful. You might hear something that stirs you up or you might not.

And you're okay with the might not. When you're in a high demand group, the might not is Satan trying to take your soul, my brother. And what happens is when I hear that there were people who were in this revival and got burned out, like you said, it matches the pattern.

William Brannum same thing, lettering revival, he got burned out. To the cult, to the Brannum Cult, we would say he got burned out because God was using him so mightily. Now on the other side of this, I think he got burned out because he was in a high demand situation.

And when you read the articles, it sounds very much like he had a mental break. And I've read some of the same things about the watch revival. I don't know if they're true or not I wasn't there. I can't say but they look at the characteristics and they think okay There's a mental break here Does that mean that the people involved who had the mental breaks were swaying people the wrong way because of mental health issues Not necessarily, but it means it was high demand and that's the that's the big point that I want to make here the second point is this

Picture the church situations that I was talking about before and picture Where at church something something does happen that does excite us a little bit Which is out of the ordinary for some of the churches that I've intended. I'll tell you that and Say that something does happen Well, we go home and we tell some other people and they they talk about it in their church We'll say something where to happen in their church. They get a little bit excited about it But they're not in a high demand church It spreads the news begins to spread

It's not going to make the newspapers But when you look at these revivals they all have one thing in common it is so charismatic and so Different than the other churches that it becomes newsworthy and that's the reason why for all of these revivals You can go straight to the newspapers and you can see here's a very charismatic figure He's exciting the crowd and it's newsworthy and If you're in the religious world, you think okay, that's good. That's okay. They're they're doing this But take religion out of it and just look at it like this. What if this were instead a political rally?

Speaker goops comes out. He's on fire. He's charismatic. He gets the crowd all excited He gets them worked up and they have to maintain that level of worked up But then suddenly you realize I don't necessarily agree with his politics What do you do? You're in the crowd everybody's worked up. You're all part of this and I look at this much the same way there, but the difference is because it spreads so vastly like you said This is this is most of Wales right the Welsh revival Well because of that you had a wide variety of people with a wide variety of issues and the ones that get reported are like

Evan Roberts. He becomes immortalized He's not even the guy who started it but he can he becomes the face of it, right? He's the face of this, but he's not the only one. There are other charismatic people or otherwise It would never have spread like this because he can't be in all cities at once So what actually gets reported is Evan Roberts But when you look at the vascale of the revival you had to have had good bad good evil you had to have all of these different categories of people What happens over time is we we have

In our minds Turned it into a legend because of what we have access to know about the revival and Like I've done with the Pentecostal revival and some of the others There's a lot of things that people don't know until you really dig into it one day I plan to dig really deep into it, but it's At this point in time, I'm just, I have skepticism.

Yeah, and you're absolutely right to, it's a good yardstick, especially the burning out, because that's just not really something I see from the profits in the Bible, and certainly the apostles as well. I think I would like to paint a picture of what was happening in Wales compared to Evan Roberts.

I think you had a lot of people just going to work. Maybe going to a prayer meeting on the Tuesday evening, and then going to church every Sunday, and they're just getting on with their jobs, and they were getting a good sort of two out of seven.

But Evan Roberts' diary, I read it, and he was exhausting. It was seven days a week, and I'm no wonder he burned out. And thankfully, I think I would hesitate to bring God into these conversations, but maybe it was some kind of mercy of God that he didn't allow Evan Roberts to create his own movement of, we'll do this seven days a week, and we'll all get exhausted.

All along, I'm sleeping together, probably it'll start a political movement, which either will run out of money or something. You know, to pick your quest, but instead, Evan Roberts just burns out. And what happens to him later on, is one detail jumped out at me.

His dad tried to track him down through many different countries, and then Evan Roberts wouldn't open the door to his own father. That was tough for me to read. You know, I've lived in different countries, I wouldn't do that to my dad.

It doesn't sound like a man who's got the fruits of the spirit so much there. And a slight sidetracked for anyone who's a bit confused as to where we're talking about, what Wales is a principality in Britain?

I'm sure you could put an amusing picture up here of how it all relates to it. But what I haven't stressed is that almost all of this was happening in the Welsh language, which I think is important in a way, because they weren't using loaded language in Latin or English, which happens in Norway, where the otherwise sensible Norwegians are just distracted by saying everything in English.

But the Welsh, all of this, all of this is translated into English. So, when Evan Roberts has been here, God, he's saying, Pligvy or Aglueth? Aglueth is Welsh for God. And I think that had a bit of an effect on Wales, that it was very insulated.

They weren't being affected by other people so much. I mean, no one in Birmingham understood what they were doing, let alone London. And so when the newspapers came, they often needed translations. Or when the locals started speaking English, the language they had was kind of toned down quite a lot from the more flurry Welsh that they were more fluent in.

And so that's what's unique to this revival in the English-speaking world, is that what happened in the English-speaking world, happened in the Welsh-speaking world. And so it's a revival on its own terms in that sense.

And what you're saying about the high control groups is very important here for Wales because it happened over such a short period of time that a lot of people when they look back on these revivals they're quite disappointed that it was so short but I think that's actually a strength much like Asbury happened two years ago that was only for a few weeks and let's put a stop to it but the Welsh revival didn't have enough time or the right figure for it to coalesce into political movement. Thankfully it didn't nothing politically happened and the revivalists and the Christians at the time comment on this and they say how is it the

case that the only two people that you can choose from in Wales are the conservatives who are Anglicans or the Liberals who were sort of low church but the entire independent churches of Wales they were Methodist they didn't start their own political movement the Labour Party movement really started in Scotland not so much in Wales it was affected by the Welsh revival but the British political system doesn't have the electoral flexibility to produce great leaders because you need to be voted in by your local constituency which can only be a few thousand people so you can't vote for a national prime minister so in that sense the British revival system

doesn't open itself very easily to a new political movement apart from in Northern Ireland there everything you're saying about the political movement and revivals is true that does happen in the 1960s but here in Wales it's all together are the different in that site in that sense what you're saying about revivals that you bulk at the term I do as well it was one of my one of my strange fears growing up in our small low church church of England that the preach would suddenly start jumping around and say we all need to go into the street and

evangelise and revival is coming down but I was always thinking well I mean when do you when does the previous revival when is that deemed too long ago and you need the next one to come up and I was talking to my dad about this shout out if he's listening and he commented about the Cambridge 5 or the Cambridge 7 some people were doing revival as well and they said after we prayed a lot we felt that we received an answer from the Lord you know to have a revival and that that sense of discontent with the state of the church you're in and as you say if you're

in a good church there's a low control church that you show up you have communion I hope and you listen to sermon sing a few songs and you go home you know you know some of the people in the church you might go out to their houses that's the sign of a good church and what's like before about having the budgetary meetings they're really boring that's a good show she can be at. And for me, I don't want to revive anything about that church. I think it's good enough as it is. You know, you're not going to go up to a random person in the street

who's plotting along and start giving them CPR and trying to revive you. This is what I'm not dead. So a lot of these churches don't need reviving. So I think as a Christian term, I don't actually, although I've called the Welsh Revival Positive, I don't think the word revival is good because it implies that what you're in now is dead, whereas if you think that Jesus is the head of the church, surely that means the church is alive. Otherwise, you just end up thinking it needs to be revived and the church is wrong. And that leads to William Brandham saying,

come out of her, my people, because if the church is wrong, you need to leave it. But actually, that is what's different about the Welsh Revival, use the word Revival, is that no denominations come out of the Welsh Revival. Joseph Jenkins goes back to his Methodist Calvinist chapel. All of these small chapels in Wales, they ended up in a denomination that was rather unrelated to it. It was Presbyterian, but that's another story and quite boring. But they didn't, that they all kind of conglomerated more than split. So Joseph Jenkins doesn't start his own church. Evan Roberts doesn't. Neither does David Morgan. After the Revival ends, Joseph Jenkins

just goes back to preaching every Sunday. And I've got a huge amount of respect for that. And Evan Roberts fades from church history. So who did he sleep with? Where's the money? Where's the bit of movement? He just fades. And I've got a huge amount of respect for that. Whatever happened in 1905, he just closes that chapter of his life without needing to try and reclaim the mantle.

All these sort of feds of gostos. He just goes back to the Shire, as Samwise does after his after his trip abroad. I know people like the Narnia references as well. So in the in Seas Lewis book, the Narnia, the children always appear when something's going wrong. And one of the kings says to the children, well, look, that they've got a different timeline. There's like 10 times sped up. He said, look, for hundreds of years, we don't have any children coming here to sort everything out. We're just plodding along, just going to work and eating and having a good time.

That's Christianity right there. You don't need to revise all the time. Just plod along, going to work, you know, just wonder if you're going to get a pay rise. And so that's what happens in Narnia. They don't need the children all the time. And so in a moderately, a moderately sensible church, you know, lower the threshold, you don't need to be jumping around. You don't need a revival. You need a reminder much more than you need a revival, I would say. It would be my width of the podcast.

And that's what happens in Wales afterwards. Everyone just kind of goes back to normal life. And that was the last to revive in Wales. There hasn't been one since 1905 in that way. So thankfully, nothing political.

Everyone just goes back to work afterwards, which is very much what I want to do. I work, when I'm doing this research, a lot of it is me just listening to stuff myself and trying to regurgitate it.

Because I'm streaming, I'm knowing the law, and I've got a real life. Not to say that office work isn't real. But if you work Monday to Friday, it just means you're stuck in the real world and you're thinking about stuff in a much more healthy way.

I wouldn't want to do this seven days a week. Or be a full-time Christian as they say in Y-Wam. So to round off that bit, I would say, Evan Roberts was, he was a Y-Wam without knowing.

He was Y-Wam adjacent, in a sense. He ends up burning out, which isn't good for him, but it's good for us. And that point, when he's at the end of his own revival and the Welsh revival is on the way down, he's on the way down.

I don't think it is. It was merging into something more healthy, which is just everyone went back to the normal life. That's when Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith, comes onto the scene. And he's traveling around Wales, soaking it all up.

And so I think the positivity of the Welsh revival, which was, I don't know if it land on a finger, let's say, 85% good, I think that mantle, if we could use charismatic terminology, is misappropriated by Azusa, where something organic that didn't really have a leader, which was everyone doing it, is what Azusa tries to copy.

There was one detail that always jumps out from researching the Welsh revival. And it's such a peculiar story. I mean, clients, I believe it's true that in the mines, everyone's mining coal in South Wales, there's a phrase that's always repeated, the pit ponies, the horses that work down the mines, they were not working very well, because all the men stopped swearing at their pit ponies.

And it's just interesting that that's the one story that's come out of the Welsh revival. It's not willing browners, willing browns, halo, or reading 100 people's addresses, after you've copied the prayer notes, or the bits of chicken coming out, people's mouths.

That's the brand of going up with. I mean, you believe that. But the one thing that everyone talks about, the Welsh revival, is the ponies, the horses, whether or it's true. It's just a very peculiar detail to remember, which is the biggest contrast between this and charismatic silliness.

You talk about everybody who went back to doing what they were doing. Interestingly, you have made the point that I was trying to build up, too. And you made it for me. I didn't even have to do it.

That is one of the most interesting things about this revival is exactly what you said. And for this reason, instead of going to Star Trek or Narnia, I'm going to go straight back to the Old Testament instead.

Oh, the Bible. Very, very rapid if you jump to the Bible. Let's go back to the Bible. And just simply, you know, not even theologically, let's talk historically. If you read the Bible, you find cases where Israel goes into idolatry, they start human sacrifice, all of these things.

It's just awful what they get into. And you don't find some charismatic figure stand up and draw a crowd and say, God has sent a revival. Instead, you get a prophet that says, you need a revival.

And the biblical term for revival is a renewal. You're renewing your faith and devotion to Yahweh, to God. That's what the Old Testament has as a revival, same in the New Testament. You're renewing yourself to God.

And God, it's not something that God sends. It's actually something that you do because you were off the mark, you were in the wrong place. That's probably my biggest argument against the Welsh Revival.

Everybody, they were doing something that wasn't that bad. Like you said, there weren't a lot of reports. We don't know what happened in the broad scope of the revival, but there weren't a lot of reports of wrongdoing.

I'll just say it like that and somebody might have history that corrects me. Well, what you see is people were living their Christian lives, suddenly it got high demand and burnt people out and then they went back to the thing that they did before.

Now in Israel's case, they were doing awful things when they did actually have a revival, which it isn't at all framed in the way that they frame it in these modern revivals. They came back to God and then a good thing happened and they continued the change.

So you see, there is a revival. It's not the same. Then there's a change and there's a pattern. You can follow that pattern all through the book of kings. You read another judge rises, they fall to idolatry.

There's a revival, suddenly the course is corrected. So A, if the grand general of revival is looking down, why would he pick this group of people to say, this is the group of people that I'm going to set right.

Oh, wait, they're already right. And after the revival, they're all going to go back to doing exactly what they did before. This is really the biggest thing that I have with this. Think of it like this.

In today's world, I could go, I've got friends who, sadly, some of them get into drugs. I could say, look, you need to change your life. You need to correct your life. You're going to lose your job, you're going to lose your family, you're going to lose your wife, all of these things.

And they might have a revival, maybe not a spiritual revival, but a revival of humanity. I want to get rid of these things. I want to clean my life up. After that revival, which is not something that I'm giving them, they're doing themselves after that, there's a change.

They go through a halfway house or whatever. themselves up, and then they can brag, I had this big change at this moment. I know exactly what this revival was within my heart. Yes, it's not a spiritual revival, but the case is exactly the same. I have studied it, maybe not to the extent you have, but I don't find many examples of the change of heart, or more specifically, the reason for the change of heart. And so, when I look at this, the revival for me, it's branding. You see, a charismatic leader, it's mostly fueled, in my opinion, it's mostly fueled by the newspaper's response to seeing

something odd. And they call it, they brand it the revival, so it gets branded the revival, it's a lot of marketing from the newspapers, the newspapers has a heyday with it, and then after it's done, everybody goes back to doing what they were before. So, I struggle to actually call it a revival, and I know I'll get people hate mail for this, but I really do. I struggle to call it a revival. However, there was a change that came in that, as we'll get into in the next podcast, you can see the influence that it had on creating similar things in the United States. Maybe not

maybe not fully because of the Welsh revival, but you see that Welsh revival influence coming into the United States, then you have the Pentecostal revival, and I won't go into too much detail in the next episode, but you've got other influences with the Pentecostal revival, they're having adjacent to all of this. So, again, the point for me is, it's not really a revival.

You are right to question the impact it would have on individuals, because there are a few throwaway comments that are made that a lot of the pubs and things closed during the Welsh revival, but I'm not entirely sure that happened, really. The T-Total movement didn't really it didn't really take root that much in Wales, I think that was just that, an anecdotal.

And there's another guy out there at the moment doing research on a Robert Evans as well, Robert Evans, maybe you can compare, our listeners can compare why I'm saying what he's saying, he's a little bit, he's got a different unit as well, which is that when you've got, he gave a really good example of saying that when you've got three people lined up, you know, let's call them Dave John and Barry, you know, Dave gets the Holy Spirit and he's jumping up and down, he's speaking to us, Barry is quietly bearing his head and just shaking, and you know, and Gary,

whoever it was, the last guy, he's like, I'm sorry, I don't have either of those reactions, and he goes home, he thinks I don't have the spirits, that means you've, the expression that these meetings had are always going to alienate that one person in three, who's, it's not that he's, it's not like being introvert or extrovert, he's just saying, I'm not going to fake something, what I don't have it, because of respect for the Holy Spirit, and I feel and I feel a lot of those types of Christians were disappointed in what was happening Wales at the time. So sorry I'm not bursting into tears. Not an atheist. I'm just

I just don't react that strongly in in in a group of people and those people went home maybe sad and weren't really part of the revive in that sense but then in 1906 they were the people still involved in their churches while Evan Roberts was you know whacked out on the sofa at his sister's house which is what happened he was recuperating a her house for a lot of the time but the the personal holiness that's that's the true mark of conversion and I've got a book that I read in my bookshelf which is by George Orwell every year

which is called homage to Catalonia and he he's a left wing atheist he goes to fight in the Spanish Civil War and he says that it's much easier for the spiritualists the yogis and the Christians to focus on inward spiritual revival than to reform the economic system around them yeah that sounds good Orwell but the problem is when Christians have tried to change the economic and social scene around them it turns into Christian nationalism and politics and he doesn't go well so I'm inclined to say George Orwell that the revival is personal it has to be a revival of your own

life and as you say in the Old Testament the Bible it talks about renewal whereas we talk about revival and it backed my only land early analogy of trying to revive someone who's perfectly alive you can't everyone needs renewal if you need anyone in the street they all need renewal someone who's talking a bit of weight well they become bulimic and they need to put on some more weight everyone needs renewal I need renewal not sure if I need to be revived but we need to be renewed and that's why the Bible talks about the constant renewal

in the Holy Spirit was we have been revived already as Christians we believe that we've died and been resurrected in Christ so in that sense we don't need a revival we do need to be renewed and filled again much like how we need water to be filled with the spirit in that sense so to sort of round this off there's something that struck me with a lot of what's being spoken that elsewhere which is about white privilege and Christian nationalism you know it's a white man's religion you have to remember in Wales these are people not speaking

English the Welsh people were very much downtrodden in the United Kingdom at that time it was not illegal to speak Welsh but you went around in the dunes that triangle in your head if you spoke Welsh in the classroom so these were two groups of people were both white both Christians but they still found a way to discriminate against them so it doesn't really have much to do with skin colour again it's just about cultures not really liking their own people a lot of the times because of perceived difference it was a bit of a side track there but it's just an example of racism

be a lot more tricky than simply people's skin color. A lot of it's to do with being cultural as well. And earlier on I did speaking Welsh. Is that an example of speaking in tongues?

Right. Because Welsh is a foreign language. It's different to English is Hungarian, which always strikes me listening to it all. But for people to want to think the soundtrack to it, someone emailed me personally put me in contact with.

I told her the hymn of the Welsh Revival is a great listen. And what struck me from that hymn was, I did a textual analysis of it. How much does it talk about me?

God's going to break down my barriers. He's going to release the outpouring on me. Here is Love Vast as the ocean talks about God and what he does for us. So I think that's character.

It wasn't written during the Royal Survivor. It was written 100 years before. Again, it didn't start with the Royal Survivor. But that song is very much Christ-focused for us, for us, rather than what can I do now that I've got this thing.

It's about what couldn't God do for me. So if anyone listening, let that hymn be the soundtrack of what you might call the Welsh Revival. And let that speak to you. And I'd advise trying to find the Welsh version as well.

And listen to it in English. It's really inspired me. That's for the two weeks of my research. I've had that song in the back of my mind. And compare that to what's come out of Bethel.

Compare that to what comes out of Hillsong. And you'll see a clear difference, really. Just from that song's theology. So taking us into the teaser for the next episode, there's two names to pay attention to.

So we're going to be talking a lot about Joseph Smiel. He, Joseph Smiel, sorry. He comes from LA, goes to Wales. So we're ending on the cliffhanger here. He's traveling around Wales, soaking up for your no eating.

Isn't use that phrase. But that's what they were calling it now. And you've got another guy called Frank Barterman. And when I emailed you, I even put a question like, say, who's he? I didn't know this.

But he features largely later on. Frank Barterman doesn't travel to Wales, but he's writing to Evan Roberts, three letters or so. And I'm inclined to believe now that our focus on Evan Roberts actually comes from Azusa Street, because they've sort of, in a way, ended up writing history, you know, the history is written by the victors, or at least the people who wrote about it the most.

So Evan Roberts, being the main guy of the Welsh revival and also being the most unstable man, is quite telling that that's the one that Azusa Street chooses to focus in on. They don't talk to Joseph Jenkins.

Azusa Street might have gone in a very different way if they'd spoken to Joseph Jenkins. So there's two names of what we're going to be talking about next time, Joseph Smail and Frank Barterman.

And Frank Barterman. Utliment, teaser, actually coins the term laterane. So I think I'll end it by saying something positive because as people know who know me, I like to have a conversation where I have somebody else who has the opposite opinion who doesn't want to argue with me.

That's my favorite type of conversation because I've learned a lot of things. Well, this is one of those cases. I'm very skeptical and you're very not. But I will say this, there's one thing, one aspect about this revival that is quite different from some of the subsequent revivals that are in my research.

And that's exactly what you said. Everybody went back to doing what they were doing but think about what they were doing. You had a broad inter-denominational revival. You had people who were of different faith, congregational faith to Baptist, et cetera.

These people all joined together. There was no, at least I haven't read anything of people fighting their divisions or anything like this. They all just got together, rejoiced, celebrated, and then they went back to doing what they're doing.

And you questioned, well, was that a revival? But think of the other ones. Many of the other ones will form a denomination and you can go almost revival by revival and you can see this group emerged because of this revival.

And when the revival is happening, everybody's welcome. You're welcome to come join our revival, join us, join us. And then later it's, now you can't go back to where you went. If you do, you're selling your soul to Satan.

And I mean, think about the Azusa Street Revival in 1906. It breaks out, I think it was. And then what year was that? 1913, I think, the new issue arises whenever they start to say, well, you guys are Trinitarian.

That's the false doctrine of Satan. And so they suck everybody in, they get them hooked, and then they tell them they can't go back to where they came from. And for me, that is the opposite of a revival.

That's actually destructive. However, I'm not gonna brand all of Pentecostalism destructive because of this. It's confusion. I'll say it that way and I'll leave it with that. Thank you so much for doing this.

Excellent. So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Brandom.org. From more about the dark side of the new epistolic reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR.

Available in Amazon, Kindle, and Audible. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.