On the Edge of Spiritual Revival? Charismatic Renewal in Wales

At the first meeting of the National Advisory Council of the Fountain Trust in June 1969, those who met bemoaned the fact that despite widespread evidence of spiritual renewal throughout England, they had heard ‘of little going on in Wales.’ Four years later at a meeting of the same body, Don Double, from St Austell in Cornwall, reported that there were at last ‘the beginnings of openings’ in Wales; if only somebody would move into south Wales, he suggested, the doors were wide open. By March 1976 a Fountain Trust sponsored gathering had met in Wales for the first time. ‘People were feeling dry and looking for living water’, it was reported, and ‘there were signs of great interest and openness across a wide spectrum of channels.’ Over the years that followed, through a number of initiatives, the profile of charismatic renewal was raised throughout Wales, leading Michael Harper to write confidently by 1979 that ‘Wales is on the edge of spiritual revival’. It was a remarkable turnaround, not least from such inauspicious beginnings. This chapter explores the various streams that converged to create a distinctively Welsh expression of the charismatic renewal. It limits itself to the period roughly between the early 1970s and the mid 1980s, and concentrates mainly on the established denominations, including the Roman Catholics. In Wales the emphasis remained, at least during this period, on the renewal and reinvigoration of the older denominations, rather than the establishment of new Restorationist-style churches and networks. Although the impetus for charismatic renewal often came from outside Wales itself, and many of the most significant influences were neither Welsh in origin or cultural and spiritual outlook, this chapter argues that charismatic renewal, despite its hesitant beginnings, quickly took hold. It imbued many Welsh evangelicals with a new confidence, and a new determination to address head on the defeatist acceptance of inevitable decline and marginalisation that had taken hold of the late twentieth-century Welsh evangelical community, both in its nonconformist and Anglican guises.