Excert taken from the book ‘Chains of Grace’
Chapter 1 – The Beginning
In the 1920s and 1930s, Neath was a small industrial town in the heart of South Wales. The Neath valley had many coal mines and it was not unusual at the end of a week to see black faced miners coming into town to collect their wages from the office of the local coal owner. It was a town with a long history going back to Roman times and Neath castle and Abbey go back to 1130. There was not much of a spiritual history until Frank and Seth Joshua came to the town in 1882 to establish a gospel work. A remarkable work was done as God mightily used their preaching.
In the 1950s and 1960s, God raised up in the town about a dozen young evangelical preachers who, as well as preaching in their own land, would take the gospel to many parts of the world. I was privileged to be one of those men.
I became a Christian on Saturday May 21, 1955, at the age of seventeen. I spoke in public for the first time the following Friday when I gave my testimony at an open-air meeting in Neath. During that summer I gave my testimony of salvation several times at meetings in my home town of Neath. By the winter I had begun to preach and, looking back now, this was quite ridiculous. I did not know enough as an eighteen-year-old to preach, but people in the church recognized that I had the ‘gift of the gab’ and encouraged me to preach. I have to admit that I did not take much encouraging because from the beginning I loved to preach.
For the first fifteen years of my life, I had been sent to Sunday School, but I had never been taken to church so I was over seventeen before I ever heard a sermon preached. It was meeting up with a lovely young girl in the factory where I worked that first got me to attend a Sunday evening service. Lorna was to become my one and only girlfriend and, in the course of events, my wife. She encouraged me to attend her church, the Green Mission in Neath.
It was there, in September 1954, that I first heard preaching from Pastor Ben Rosser. He was a lay pastor but an excellent Bible expositor and for eight months I listened to him every Sunday evening.
In May 1955, Billy Graham was preaching at Wembley Stadium in London and a special train was going up from South Wales on the Saturday. I agreed to go, not to hear Billy Graham, but to see the famous Wembley Stadium! As a seventeen-year-old, I was sports mad and this was my only reason for going. In fact I can vividly remember saying to Pastor Rosser’s wife, as we went to catch the train, ‘I will never become a Christian.’ Thankfully, God knew better and, on May 21st 1955, I was saved.
From then on I began to attend the Green Mission regularly with Lorna. We went to the Prayer Meeting on Tuesdays, Christian Endeavour on Thursdays and services on Sundays. It was in the Christian Endeavour meeting that I first spoke to children and first preached. I dread to think what I must have preached in those days because, as I have said, I did not know enough to be a preacher. Other churches invited me to preach and I bought a long black overcoat and a black Bible bag so I looked the part, but I should not have been in the pulpit. I should have been listening and learning.
Many years later I came across a verse in Ezra that summed up the preacher for me—‘For Ezra had devoted himself to the study and observance of the Law of the Lord, and to teaching its decrees and laws in Israel.’ Ezra first learnt the Word, then he lived it and only then did he begin to teach it. This was not done in a few weeks but must have taken years. A teenager preaching should be the rare exception, and certainly not the rule. Often Charles Spurgeon is mentioned in objection to this principle, but I was no Spurgeon, and few people are.
By March 1956, my preaching was forced to take a halt as, like all eighteen-year-olds in those days, I was drafted into the Forces for two years’ National Service. I spent two years in the Royal Air Force. Like most young men, I did not want to go, but now I can see that those two years were a better preparation for the ministry than the three years I was later to spend in theological college. Living with twenty men in a barracks really threw me in at the deep end. In those early days I was the only Christian and it was a case of either ‘sink’ or ‘swim’! Later on I met some fine believers and learnt greatly from them.
I was demobilized in March 1958 and married Lorna the same week. I started preaching again and was quite happy in the role of lay preacher. I was not happy in my job as a tool setter but had no thoughts of the ministry. Then our first baby was born in April 1959. She had spina bifida and only lived nine days. Apparently there was more spina bifida in South Wales than anywhere else in the world.
My first experience of the death of a person was at the age of fifteen, when my father died. I will never forget that Friday in October 1952. It was the most happy and the most sad day of my life up to that point. My father was keen on sport and always encouraged me to play. So when that day in school I was told I had been picked to play rugby for Neath schoolboys the next day against Cardiff, I was overjoyed. I was given the famous Neath black jersey and could not get home quick enough to show my father. He was ill in bed, and I had no idea how ill he was, but by the time I arrived home he was dead. Shock, anger and numbness were emotions that seemed to explode in my mind all at the same time. I was not a Christian and had no God to turn to. Death was so cruel, pointless and final.
When death came a second time into my life I was a believer but it still hurt. Both Lorna and I were devastated, but quite independently God spoke to both of us in this great time of sorrow calling me into the ministry. The call was unmistakable and in September 1960 I entered Memorial Congregational College in Swansea to train for the Christian ministry.
It was a typical denominational college, liberal in theology and taking the University of Wales course in theology. We learnt very little biblical theology, but there I developed a love for church history under the lectures of Dr Pennar-Davies. Of the thirty students, about six were evangelicals and together we learnt our theology from the emerging books published by the Banner of Truth and from the writings of Dr. Lloyd-Jones.
Those were the days when you could buy Puritan books very cheaply in the second-hand book shops in Neath and Swansea. I remember buying ten volumes of Matthew Henry’s New Testament in mint condition for a shilling (5p) each, Calvin’s Institutes at 5 shillings (25p) for two volumes. It was these treasures that began to give substance to my preaching.
In the last term of college, the minds of all the students began to turn to which church may call them as pastor. This was particularly a problem for evangelicals. The evangelical students were very popular in the Congregational churches of South Wales. This was because they could at least preach with vigour and enthusiasm unlike most of the other students, but listening to their message every Sunday was another thing. The Moderator of the denomination told me that because I was an evangelical I would never get a church in Wales. I asked him about Ebenezer, Pontnewydd in Cwmbran where a well known evangelical, Derek Swann, had just finished after seven years as pastor. He told me that he had spoken to this church and that they had enough of evangelicals and would never call another one. This was not true. He had spoken to only one man in the church who had vigorously opposed Derek Swann’s ministry all along. When this church began to show an interest in calling me, I told them what the moderator had said and they were amazed. Derek’s ministry had been greatly appreciated by them. This was the church that called me and in the summer of 1963 I started as pastor at Cwmbran.