Christmas Evans

The man called the John Bunyan of Wales was born on Christmas day at Ysgaerwen, near Cardigan. The parents named the new gift package Christmas Evans (1766-1838). His family was poor and became even poorer when the father died. Young Christmas was nine years old at the time. Before long he was sent to work for his mother’s brother, an unfeeling, uncaring, ungodly drunkard.

The next years witnessed repeated calamities. He was once knifed in a quarrel, almost drowned, once he plummeted from a tree while holding an open knife, and once he was almost killed by a runaway horse.

His uncle’s employ lasted six years, during which time Christmas forfeited an education. At the age of seventeen the illiterate youth left his uncle. Shortly thereafter he heard the gospel preached by David Davies and Evans discovered the Friend, the home, and the decency that he had never known on his uncle’s farm. Of the group of young people that were converted at that time “scarcely one person out of ten could read at all, even in the language of the country. We bought Bibles and candles and were accustomed to meet together in the evening, in the barn of Penyralltfawr; and thus, in about one month, I was able to read the Bible in my mother tongue.”

Soon after he was converted, six erstwhile friends ambushed him at night and pummeled him with sticks and clubs. He lost the sight in one of his eyes. But Christmas held on to his course. Intent on spreading the gospel, he would memorize sermons he had heard and preach them to others. By 1790 he was “ordained” by the Baptists to preach. As he went out heralding the gospel, he was surprised to see others coming to God under his ministry. When he began he confessed, “The very sound of my voice discouraged me.” He also struggled with his own nagging doubts about the reality of his own conversion, but these rolled away as began to believe the very message he preached. Then he received “the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.”

Initially he worked among backward, impoverished congregations in the south of Wales. And no individual among them seemed as impoverished as he was himself. He tramped by foot from place to place, often preaching five times on a Sunday. The dear man did not care about his poverty; he neither attempted to conceal it, or to grumble at it. It was a rough life, but he shared the Apostle’s attitude: “Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content.” Crowds came to hear the tall, shabby, awkward, one-eyed preacher whose own tears helped them wash out  their own tear ducts.

By the second year he wrote, “I now felt a power in the Word, like a hammer breaking the rock, and not like a rush…The work of conversion was progressing so rapidly and with so much energy in those parts, that the ordinance of baptism was administered every month for a year or more, at Kilvowyr, Cardigan, Blaenywaun, Blaenffos, and Ebenezer, to from ten to twenty persons each month. The chapels and adjoining burying grounds were crowded with hearers of a weekday, even in the middle of harvest. I frequently preached in the open air in the evenings, and the rejoicing, singing, and praising would continue until broad light the next morning.”

Once, at a church meeting an offering was to be taken for a building project. There had been a bit of sheep stealing in the vicinity. Knowing the characters he spoke to, Evans cautioned the audience that none who had been involved in sheep stealing should put anything into the offering. The platter passed and the result was a record setting collection.

At twenty-six he went to the island of Anglesea on the Welsh coast with his wife Catherine where they remained for more than thirty years. At this time a curious teaching held sway there called Sandemanianism. It had begun with a Scotsman named John Glas and was championed by his eloquent son-in-law, Robert Sandeman.

The appeal of Sandeman’s doctrine was a strict return to New Testament simplicity. His followers claimed to reject all creeds except the Bible. They believed in a strict separation of church and state, they practiced a regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper (along with foot-washing and greeting one another with a holy kiss) and their preachers were not salaried.

They also held to plurality of elders over each congregation.

Much of this attracted Evans. But the poison was slipped into Sandeman’s ideas about faith. To Glas and Sandeman (both fatalistic Calvinists) faith was a purely intellectual assent to the historical facts of the gospel. When Sandeman read Romans 10:9, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved,” he saw belief with the heart as totally divorced from the will and emotions. He loathed anything emotional.

Of course it is not hard to show Sandeman’s error. Faith with the heart involves a decision of the will that cannot be isolated from our feelings.

Sandeman also taught that repentance always came after true saving faith. This also would not stand, as Mark 1:15, Luke 24:47, Acts 3:19, 5:31, 20:21 and 26:20 all show.

In all, Sandeman’s sterile gospel is almost identical to the so-called easy-believism of our day that makes an intellectual assent almost everything. William Williams, the Welsh hymn writer, battled this false teaching early on. He said Sandeman’s teaching “chills one’s feelings until they despise Heaven’s pure breezes.” Again he complained against this unaccompanied intellectual faith, “Love is the greatest thing…and if that is forgotten nothing can take its place.”

The proof of Williams’ assessment can be seen in the attitude of John Richard Jones, of Ramoth, who was the chief local advocate of Sandeman’s ideas. He was a vigorous orator and a craftsman of bitter wit. He liked to talk about Latin, Greek and Hebrew; he spoke English, but with Welsh he was masterful. Sample this bit of Jones’ sarcasm: “If every Bible in the world were consumed, and every word of Scripture erased from my memory, I need be at no loss how to live a religious life, according to the will of God, for I should simply have to proceed in all respects in a way perfectly contrary to the popular religionists of this age, and then I could not possibly be wrong.” So in this arrogant tone he bullied his hearers into abandoning any Christian fellowship except the Sandemanians. Jones was so narrow, one had to assume that some injustice had embittered him. His dogmatic pronouncements only encouraged elitism.

For five years Evans was drawn along by this high sounding, but arid view of faith. Its influence withered Evens’ soul. The spirit of prayer and sweet enjoyment of Christ was gone. He began to crave close fellowship with God.

Evans said, “I was weary of a cold heart towards Christ, and His sacrifice, and the work of His Spirit, of a cold heart in the pulpit, in secret prayer and in the study. For fifteen years previously I had felt my heart burning within, as if going to Emmaus with Jesus. On a day ever to be remembered by me as I was going from Dolgelley to Machynlleth, and climbing up towards Cader Idris. I felt it was my duty to pray, though my heart was hard enough and my spirit worldly. After I began praying in the name of Jesus, I soon felt as if the shackles were falling off, and  as if the mountains of frost and snow were dissolving and melting within me. I felt my whole mind relieved of some great bondage, and as if it were rising up from the grave of a severe winter. My tears flowed copiously, and I was constrained to cry aloud for the gracious visits of God, by restoring to my soul the joy of His salvation, and that He would visit the Churches in Anglesea…I embraced in my supplications all of the churches, and prayed by name for most of the preachers in the principality. This struggle lasted for three hours. It rose again and again, like one wave after another, or a high flowing tide driven by a strong wind, until my physical power was weakened by weeping and crying. Thus I gave myself up wholly to Christ, body and soul, gifts and labors–all my life–every day, and every hour that remained to me, and all my cares I entrusted into the hands of Christ. The road was mountainous and lonely, so that I was alone, and had no interruption in my wrestlings with God.

“This event caused me to expect the goodness of God to the churches and to myself. Thus the Lord delivered me and the people of Anglesea from being swept away by the evils of Sandemanianism. In the first service I held after this event, I felt as if I had been removed from the cold and sterile region of spiritual frost, into the verdant fields of divine promises. The former striving with God in prayer, and the longing anxiety for the conversion of sinners, which I had experienced at Lleyn, were now restored. I had hold of the promise of God. The result was, when I returned home, the first thing that attracted my attention was, that the Spirit was working in the brethren in Anglesea, inducing in them a spirit of prayer, especially in two of the deacons, who were particularly importunate that God should visit us in mercy, and render the Word of His grace effectual amongst us in the conversion of sinners.”

After this holy session between Dolgelly and Machynelleth, Evans witnessed a remarkable work of God, first on the island of Anglesea and then spreading throughout all Wales. One preaching session in Velin Voel (which lasted three hours) was especially remarkable. In his vivid portrayal of the Demoniac of Gadara, he wondered out loud about the reaction of the people of Gadara, and especially the joy of the demoniac’s family when he arrived sane and saved. The audience wept and laughed alternately. “The place was a perfect Bochim for weeping.” One who heard that message said that the people seemed like the inhabitants of a city which had been shaken by an earthquake, and that in their escape, they rushed into the streets, falling upon the earth screaming, and calling upon God!

Evans’ dependence on the supernatural working of the Spirit of God did not mean that he disparaged learning and preparation. There is one thing worse than pride of learning, and that is pride of ignorance, and Evans of that did not want to be guilty. He became a fair Hebrew student, and then took up the Greek language. His library was slender but well used. He did not disdain books, and enjoyed the old Puritans like John Owen. In a playful mood he was known to shame an arrogant clergymen who disparaged the unlettered evangelist. Evans was all too aware of highly educated preachers whose ministry was lackluster and lukewarm. He prayed, “Grant that I may feel the power of Thy Word before preaching it, as Moses felt the power of his rod before he felt the effects of it on the land and waters of Egypt.”

Evans was “a man the spell of whose name, when he came into a neighborhood, could wake up all the sleepy villages, and bid their inhabitants pour along up by the hills, and down by the valleys, expectant crowds watching his appearance with tears, and sometimes hailing him with shouts.”

His beloved Catherine died childless in 1823. “Somewhat younger than her husband, she supplied many attributes of character, to him most helpful; she was not an enthusiast, but she was a Christian, with real, deep, and devout convictions.” The believers saw that he did not fair well as a widower, and soon persuaded him to marry. His second wife, Mary, served with him in his last and most fruitful years. Laboring to the end, his prayer had been, “Let not my days be longer than my usefulness. Let me not become, at the end of my days, like a piece of lumber in the way of the usefulness of others.”

Material for this article has been gathered from:

Paxton Hood, Christmas Evans, Hodder & Stoughton
D. M. Evans, Life of Christmas Evans
Joseph Cross, Sermons of Christmas Evans, J. Harmstead
Thomas Armitage, History of the Baptists
D. M. Lloyd-Jones, The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors, The Banner of Truth Trust