Griffith Jones
1683 - 1761
All who thank God for the 18th
century revival long to see its flames leap across two centuries and set ablaze
today's frozen church and wooden-hearted society. Hoping to gain information and
inspiration from our foreparents' awakening in Britain, we immerse ourselves in
the work and works of the "three-fold cord not quickly broken"
(Ecclesiastes 4:12); namely, John and Charles Wesley, together with George
Whitefield. Few of us, however, are aware of Griffith Jones, the "morning
star" of the revival, a man whose name is fragrant in Wales to this day.
In 1649 Oliver Cromwell, Parliamentary leader
during the "Interregnum" (the brief period following the English Civil
War when Puritan rule replaced royalty), insisted that Wales be given 150
ministers as well as one schoolteacher in every market town. Cromwell wanted to
relieve the many-faceted darkness that had kept the Welsh people iniquitous and
ignorant in equal measure. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, however,
Charles II (the royal family's all-time "playboy") immediately
suspended the nascent work in Wales, pleased to see the darkness reclaim the
people.
Light was to come forth, none the less, from
that "morning star" which didn't merely scintillate but rather burned
brightly as a flare, providing illumination beyond anyone's capacity to foresee
it. Twenty years before the Wesleys and Whitefield were even "lit",
Jones was doing what the three Englishmen would subsequently render notorious: a
forthright declaration of the gospel, without fear or favour, to the neglected
poor and the smirking rich; a compassion for those either alienated from the
church or unaware of its mission; outdoor preaching that reached men and women
who were otherwise never going to hear the word of life; alleviation of shocking
material distresses and deprivations; and, most ominously, persecution from
ecclesiastical authorities.
Jones was born into a Dissenting church family
that early acquainted him with "the whole counsel of God." (Acts
20:27) Overwhelmed one day by means of a vision (unusual in that visions are
more typically found among Roman Catholics), Jones had seared upon his heart the
immensity of God's mercy, humankind's helpless enthrallment to systemic
sinnership, and the final fixity both eternal blessedness and ultimate loss. An
unmistakable, undeniable vocation to the ministry accompanied the vision. Jones
set about preparing himself for this work. With preparation ended, he moved from
the Dissenting denomination of his upbringing to the Anglican Church. (No one
knows why, as no one knows why John Wesley's mother, Susanna Annesley, made the
same move when only a young teenager.) Upon ordination in 1709 Jones began
travelling beyond his parish into the mountain villages of south Wales. And just
as quickly an ecclesiastical indicted and tried him on charges that he had
neglected his own parish and was encroaching, uninvited, upon the precincts of
other Anglican clergy, even preaching outside church buildings. The trial
disclosed something entirely different. He preached in other parishes only when
the incumbent invited him to, and he preached outdoors only when sanctuaries
couldn't contain the thousands who hungered for the bread of life. Now
exonerated, and having turned the tables on his accusers, Jones laid before the
presiding bishop incontrovertible evidence of cavalierly negligent clergy and
spiritually destitute people whose total existence (not merely their
"religious life") was dissolute and desolate.
In 1716 Jones was installed as rector of the
parish of Lladowror, where he ministered until his death 45 years later. As is
always the case when the whole Christ wholly possesses the preacher, Jones
scrabbled unashamedly to provide his people with food, clothing and medicine.
In the course of conducting his wintertime
catechism class in the rectory Jones noticed that far too many of his people
couldn't read. He begged money to provide salaries for schoolteachers, trained
them himself (they had to be godly but they didn't have to be Anglicans), and
then had them itinerate as Methodist ministers were to do so very effectively
two decades later. The teachers of these "Charity Schools" remained in
a village for three months at a time, instructing young and old alike
intensively, only then to move on to another village but of course to return in
order to move students ahead to the next level. The students weren't children
alone. Adults up to age 70 flooded the schools, soon to be freed gloriously as
only the ability to read frees the illiterate. For the first time in the history
of Wales servants, labourers and farm workers had access to books. The result
was startling, as Wales became the first territory in Europe to have a literate
peasantry.
Jones had early seen the pointlessness and
futility of having the Welsh people forced to learn in English when they had no
opportunity to speak the language with others who knew it well. People with
next-to-no English can't help those with no English to learn it. For this reason
Jones resolutely maintained that Welsh had to be the lingua franca, and
to this end translated thirty books himself from English to Welsh, these books
being the chief texts of his "Charity School" curriculum. Within 30
years 4,000 schools had been set up and 250,000 people enabled to read.
Jones maintained that not only did the gospel
address the whole person, thus rendering education an essential aspect of
Christian mission; education was essential for the fullest reception of the
gospel. In other words, education was as much the condition of evangelism as its
fruit, and therefore as much needed for people's salvation as for their
edification. Not surprisingly, he distributed over 30,000 bibles throughout the
land.
To this day Jones is deemed one of the makers
of modern Wales, and the single most significant factor in the purity and
preservation of the Welsh tongue.
Still, if he were able to speak to us now
concerning his greatest Kingdom-usefulness he would undoubtedly point not to
anything mentioned so far but rather to his three "sons in the
gospel": Daniel Rowland, Howell Harris and Howell Davies. It was these men
who, only a few years later, would ignite Wales at the same time as "the
threefold cord" torched England. Their "Calvinist Methodist
Church" -- Calvinist in theology yet Methodist in ethos and expression --
would typify the marvellous diversity of the 18th century revival, a
reflection, of course, of the diversity of the kingdom itself.
Victor
Shepherd
March 2000
