Daniel Rowland

Daniel Rowland was an ordinary curate in the Cardiganshire village of Llangeitho, and by his own account a proud one, until a visiting preacher's warning about the judgment left him unable to shake it off. What followed made his tiny parish the center of religious life in Wales for fifty years. People walked for two and three days to reach his monthly communion services, some of them sleeping in fields on the way; the crowds ran to the thousands in a village of a few hundred.

His preaching was famous for its terror and then its tenderness, and the shouting and leaping it sometimes produced earned Welsh Methodists the nickname 'Jumpers.' In 1763 his bishop revoked his license; his congregation simply built him a chapel down the road and he preached there until he died. He worked in harness with Howell Harris — Harris organizing, Rowland preaching — and the movement they made together became the Presbyterian Church of Wales.