Religious revival goes sour

Thoughts from a Welsh • arish St Robert's Presbytery Coronation Street Aberkenfig Mid Glamorgan WALES was once known as the land of religious revival. The last great revival in Wales took place between 1904-1906 and is associated with a strange, mystical figure of doubtful sanity, Evan Roberts.
For over 18 months, Wales was galvanised by spontaneous Bible readings, prayer meetings and revivalist passion, with gatherings even taking place in the workplace, often at the mines.
Chapel membership boomed, reaching a peak of 549,000 in 1906. When Evan Roberts observed seven days of silence in March 1905, that silence seemed to resound throughout Wales. The impact of the revival, however, proved to be transient. Indeed leading non-conformist ministers found it to be lamentable.
In less than six years, 30,000 members were to be lost to chapel congregations.
Now it appears that this form of Christianity is the only one which is growing, inside the Anglican communion and even the Catholic church, Call it or them what you like, charismatics, hot gospelers, pentecostals, holy-rollers, they all have one thing in common. Everything is based upon the believer's own experience of "Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour". The Archbishop of Canterbury designate was himself reborn in the spirit in 1972 in Birmingham. In France, charismatic communities, such as the Emmanuel and the Lion of Judah and the Slain Lamb are regarded by some Catholic bishops as the axis of the plan to revitalise the French church.
Of course desperate situations will often lead to desperate methods. Even in Wales, so I am told, the Lions of Judah have set up shop, in Cardigan.
Indeed it would be nice to think that all this represented a spiritual revival, but I fear the reality is much more depressing. The signs of this sort of revival, things like speaking in tongues, waving one's arms about, point to one thing. Feeling good; not in any sense understanding the truth. One thing is quite certain, a Christianity based upon private judgement and belief is a quite different religion to Catholicism.
Fr John Owen