The Khasi Hills Revival of 1905

The church at Mawphlang decided early in 1903 to meet every Monday night to pray for an outpouring on the Hills. Williams counted over eighty converts from those meetings. Mrs. Roberts of Cherrapunji says that many others had grown listless, “at ease in Zion”.

The mission's paper, Nongialam Khristan, carried the reports from Wales month by month. In the new year after the news Mawphlang went to prayer every night. The Assembly at Cherra that February brought high hopes. Mrs. Roberts writes that “the thing which was so much looked for was not experienced at that time”.

The pastor of the churches of Ranthong says, in Dyer, that they prayed daily for ten days before the Presbytery at Pariong. At the close of the third service on the Sunday, before the Benediction, a man named U Ruton began to pray from the midst of the congregation.

Williams writes that some cried aloud for mercy, some men fainted and nearly all wept. Then someone began the Welsh hymn “Dyma gariad fel y moroedd,” and they sang it over and over “until some were nearly dancing from emotion”. Men who had spoken against the excitement had to be held up by their friends.

An evangelist of Nongsawlia carried the account home from Pariong. On the communion Sunday a girl named Ka Simal rose at the five o'clock meeting, and as she prayed she wept. A letter of that week says “Then all the people began to cry for pardon”. It says that some sang one hymn and some another, “no order, yet all order”.

Confession brought restitution. One woman went to a shopkeeper about a debt long since crossed out and paid a first instalment. A man at Nongbah took his family out of the chapel, saying “Come out of this place lest this madness affect you”. Mrs. Roberts says he wandered about the next day like one insane.

J. Pengwern Jones, a Welsh missionary at Sylhet, reached Cherra on 28 June. He found a second wave three months after the first, “a fulness of joy,” with people dancing in the chapel. At the Presbytery in Shillong that August, which ran from Saturday to Thursday, 450 new members on probation were reported.

The next year's Assembly went to Mairang, a village of about forty houses, at the plea of its Rajah, who was a deacon. He admitted afterwards that he had expected about 2,000. Girls in a trance first sang the new “Heavenly Songs,” and they were noted down at the time.

Thomas Jones reached Cherrapunji on 22 June 1841 and opened his first three schools early the next year. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography records that he married again without his committee's approval and could not get on with his colleagues. He resigned in 1847 to farm.

The census counted 1,895 Native Christians in the district in 1881 and 17,125 in 1901. The Census of 1911 prints 17,321 for 1901 under all Christians. B. C. Allen, a civil servant, wrote in 1906 that by the missionaries' own returns their following was about 23,000. He counted twenty-one missionaries at nine stations.

Dyer gives over five thousand brought in during the first twelve months. The same missionary wrote in February 1907 of between 7,000 and 8,000 in two years. Morris, from the mission's returns, gives 4,568 enquirers on probation in the first year.

The same returns show communicants rising from 6,180 in 1904 to 9,013 in 1907. Most of the new names therefore stood on probation or among the adherents. The total in the churches rose by 4,183 in the first year and by 580 in the third.

W. B. Boggs, an American Baptist, repeated the higher figure and also wrote that “for the most part the revival has been confined to professed Christians”. The Census of 1921 counted 41,122 Christians in the district, and it says that the rise among Presbyterians fell short of what many had expected.