10 - Evangelical Resurgence in the Church in Wales in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Summary

In 1968 Glyn Simon, the Anglo-Catholic bishop of Llandaff and soon to be appointed archbishop of Wales, was reported to have confessed in private conversation that ‘we need earnest evangelicals in this diocese’. His comments contrasted sharply with the much lower view of evangelicals which he seems to have held just a short time earlier, when he protested that although he was ‘very glad that there was one evangelical church in Cardiff ... he did not wish for more’. His fluid and evolving opinion of evangelicals is an indication that the profile of evangelicals within the Church in Wales, which since disestablishment in 1920 had been at an all-time low, largely because there were so few of them, was on the rise. Evangelicals, it has tended to be assumed, gradually moved from a conflictual relationship with the wider Church of which they were part, to one in which they were prepared to recognise the validity of other traditions, live peaceably alongside them and seek to influence the Church at every level. It was a new approach which reached its apotheosis at the Keele Congress in 1967. Despite being part of the Church of England until its disestablishment in 1920, and sometimes being overshadowed by the province of which it had been a part for so long, the Church in Wales developed along very different lines, having its own particular theological, cultural and political peculiarities. This chapter charts the fortunes of evangelicals in the Church in Wales, who in the immediate aftermath of disestablishment were invisible, if not non-existent. Concentrating on the formation and early growth of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Church in Wales (EFCW) in 1967, it argues that Welsh Anglican evangelicals struggled to carve out a distinctive identity for themselves in a Church that prided itself on its lack of parties and its relatively monochrome catholic churchmanship.

Evangelical fortunes in the disestablished Church in Wales

The high point of evangelical influence within the Anglican Church in Wales had undoubtedly been reached during the second half of the nineteenth century.