The Hebrides Revival

The Isle of Lewis in 1949 was not a godless place. It was Gaelic-speaking, Presbyterian to the bone, strict about the Sabbath, and its people knew their Bibles and sang the psalms unaccompanied in a way visitors never forgot. The problem was narrower and worse: the young were gone from the churches. In the parish of Barvas on the west side, the minister, Rev. James Murray Mackay, could look out on a congregation with almost nobody in it under thirty.

Two of his parishioners decided to do something about it in the only way left to them. Peggy Smith was eighty-four and blind; her sister Christine was eighty-two and so crippled with arthritis she could not get to church. They gave two nights a week to prayer in their cottage, from about ten at night until three or four in the morning, and they prayed one verse back to God over and over: "I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground." Peggy told her minister that God had shown her the church would be crowded again and that a strange young man would be preaching in it.

At about the same time seven young men from the parish were meeting in a barn to pray three nights a week, having agreed together that they would keep at it until God moved. Campbell's telling is that this went on for months with nothing, until one night one of them — remembered on the island as Donald Smith — read Psalm 24 aloud and then said that it was humbug to go on praying like this if they themselves were not right with God. As Campbell told it, the young man prayed until he collapsed, and the barn shook. Whatever happened in that building, something changed in the parish from that week.

The sisters asked Mackay to send for a particular evangelist. Duncan Campbell was fifty-one, a Highlander and a Gaelic speaker, a veteran of the First World War who had been converted before it and marked deeply during it, and he worked for the Faith Mission. He was booked elsewhere and said no. His engagement fell through, and he arrived in Barvas in December 1949 — which is when Peggy Smith, who had never met him, is said to have identified him as the man she had seen.

The first meeting in Barvas church was ordinary and ended at about eleven. Campbell's account is that as the congregation was leaving, the building filled again with people nobody had invited, and that a message came that a crowd of around a hundred had gathered at the police station in the village — some of them weeping, some prostrate on the ground, people who had been in bed and had got up because they could not stay there. The meeting went on until four in the morning, and there was another the next night, and another. That is the scene the whole revival is remembered by.

It spread village by village along the west side and then across the island — Barvas, Arnol, Shader, Ness, Carloway, Bernera, and later into Harris — and it ran on and off until about 1952. The character of it was plain almost to the point of severity. No advertising, no organ, no soloists, no appeals; Gaelic psalms sung unaccompanied, long preaching on holiness and judgment, and prayer meetings that went through the night. Campbell insisted that most people were converted away from the meetings altogether — at a loom, on a road, at a peat bank — which is his own estimate and cannot be checked.

Not everyone on the island welcomed it. Some ministers, particularly in the Free Church, were wary of an outsider working across parish lines and suspicious of the physical effects, and a few closed their pulpits to him. There is nothing surprising in that; the same argument ran through every awakening in this book. It does mean the revival was contested at the time by serious Christians and not only by the indifferent.

Here is the honesty the story requires. Nearly all the famous details — the barn, the police station, the house at Arnol said to have shaken, the whole villages gripped at once — come from Campbell's own addresses, given and recorded years later, and he was a preacher telling a story rather than a historian keeping a file. Islanders who lived through it have remembered parts of it differently, some of the drama appears to have grown in the telling, and there were stirrings on Lewis before he ever landed. What is not in dispute is that the churches filled, that the effects lasted, and that it began with people praying.

The fruit was real and it was modest, and the modesty is the point. Nobody claims great crowds or great numbers; Lewis is a small island. Churches on Lewis and Harris were full for years, communion seasons were crowded, an unusual number of the converts went into the ministry or to the mission field, and the parishes touched by it kept a marked seriousness about Scripture and the Sabbath for a generation. Campbell himself spent the rest of his life telling the story and refusing to take credit for it.

He gave the credit where the record puts it. Two old women who could not get to church, praying in the dark twice a week with a verse of Isaiah open in front of them, and seven young men in a barn who eventually stopped asking God to send revival somewhere and asked Him to deal with them. That is the whole mechanism, and it is available to anybody.