Evan Roberts

Evan Roberts went down the pit at eleven and kept his Bible with him at the coalface. For years he woke in the night to pray, and he prayed one thing: that God would bend Wales. In the autumn of 1904 he asked his home chapel at Loughor to let him speak to the young people after the service; seventeen stayed. Within weeks the meetings had no order anyone could plan - singing, confession, prayer that lasted until morning, and no advertised preacher. In under a year something near a hundred thousand people professed conversion. Taverns emptied, football matches were cancelled, and the story ran in newspapers as far as India and Korea. Roberts drove himself past exhaustion, collapsed in 1906, and never returned to public ministry. He spent the last forty-five years of his life largely out of sight, praying for others, and was buried at Moriah where it began.