Secession, Stagnation and Survival: Evangelical Congregations in Wales, 1990–2022

This chapter looks at the fortunes of almost sixty Welsh evangelical churches loosely affiliated to the Evangelical Movement of Wales between 1990 and 2022. It uses a series of congregational profiles published in The Evangelical Magazine of Wales, and charts some of the ways in which a measure of church growth in the 1970s and 1980s quickly gave way to fragmentation and stagnation. Setting developments in Wales within the context of wider evangelical developments, it shows how the shift towards a more socially committed evangelicalism brought a measure of renewed growth to some congregations in the early twenty-first century, but that this shift also led to a reaction among some and a polarisation that did little to secure the long sustainability of many of the churches profiled.