Those Welsh kept on being Methodists, a modern word for Puritans, since they deeply valued small-group accountability. But they were Calvinists. Salvation is about God’s grace, and they knew that well.

Take a look at Capel Caryg in Remsen, N.Y. See what it says on the building? “Whitefield Methodist Church.” That was a good try. When they came right out and said, “Calvinistic Methodist Church” (CM), people just laughed.

My father and mother grew up in the CM, where Welsh Calvinists belonged. Whitefield and the Wesleys respected and cared for each other. But John Wesley cast that fateful lot, and it came up, “preach against predestination,” and he did. Those Welsh kept on being Methodists, a modern word for Puritans, since they deeply valued small-group accountability. But they were Calvinists. Salvation is about God’s grace, and they knew that well.

Are Welsh better at religious imagination, even passion? Christmas Evans could preach a sermon from a frustrated Satan’s perspective. They all could make it very vivid, what it was to be without Jesus Christ, and what it was like to be with him. They had untranslatable hwyl*. Could that be why world-wide Revivals started with them?

Theologically they were well beyond Westminster Confession people. Well, between the 1640’s and 1823 you ought to learn something. WCF begins to talk about Union with Christ, but their Confession spells it out. Assurance is where theology and life meet, and their chapter on The Good Conscience” adds so much that had been missing. (Juergen Moltmann picked that up in his “Praedestination und Perseveranz.” Now that’s thorough German scholarship for you.)

They came to America. Their preachers warned against it. If you go to America, they said, you’ll have your own land and get rich and forget the Lord. But they came anyway and didn’t forget, maybe because they didn’t get very rich? They came to Remsen and Cambria, Wisconsin where my mother grew up and to the Welsh Neighborhood in Iowa with its Cambrian Cemetery where my father’s people lie.

But there was a problem. There weren’t that many of them, and much of the time they moved to a place where there just wasn’t a CM church. What should they do? They figured, we’re Methodists aren’t we? And so they joined the Methodist church. That church was already down the slippery slope of liberalism and they just went down with it. By 1920 when they finally joined the Presbyterian Church there were only fifteen thousand of them left. (By 1934 the General Assembly could expel Machen and the rest for not supporting the Boards of the church. But back in 1920 the Welsh had been assured that supporting missions was a matter of “free-will offerings,” and they kept their own board for another 20 years. But that’s another story.)

For me the real story is their mindless, unthinking, dumb way of believing that “Methodism is Methodism” without remembering what they really believed. Why didn’t they find the Presbyterians sooner? Why didn’t they see they could belong in a Dutch or German Reformed church? I suppose it could be hard for passionate Welsh to fit in a buttoned-down Dutch church, but still.

What should that mean for us today? Names are important, but Reality is much more so. The gospel of grace is what’s really important. We know “Presbyterian” churches which are really Unitarian at best. I suppose we regretfully know churches in our denomination where legalism or formalism or traditionalism seems bigger than the gospel, not places where anything is denied, but still barely heard, and where we’d rather not see our grandchildren be.

But what about those churches which have almost everything except our wonderful Presbyterian name? (As far as I can tell, it means “bearded one.” I tried that once and it was just too itchy for me.) There’s not only John Piper in far-off Minneapolis, but the magnificent Southern Baptists in our back yard—or is it front yard? They were starting down that slippery slope, but they turned around! At Redeemer Seminary we have about 40 great students from the Village Church, an Acts 29 Dallas church in the SBC. They learn from us and we learn from them. They haven’t taught us yet their most valuable lesson, how you keep and evangelize people in their 20’s. They know and we want to learn.

An independent seminary is so flexible, and “irregular,” isn’t it? (Presbyterians are blessed with a three-value logic: right, wrong and irregular. But denominations are “irregular” too, aren’t they?)

If there is really more to Reality than the name “Presbyterian,” then I think it’s high time for some serious coffee-drinking with those folks three miles away. Presbytery is important, especially lunch and out in the hall. But your community is, too, and its church of the cleanest city in Arkansas.

There’s a lot more the CM heritage could have for us, but we can at least learn from their horrible example. The church of Jesus Christ is the church of grace, and we should get to know all of it.
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D. Clair Davis, a PCA Teaching Elder, is a former professor of church history at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia and is now teaching at Redeemer Seminary in Dallas, Texas.

Editor’s Note (PEF evangelists take note): *Hwyl: A special characteristic of traditional Welsh revivalist preaching, indicating a surge of intense emotional and spiritual fervor released by chanting. Hwyl is also Welsh for “the sails of a ship,” and a possible derivation is that as a breeze (awel) fills the sails and transports the vessel, so a strong current of emotion lifts the spiritual awareness of the preacher and his congregation.
Traditional Welsh revivalism is comparable with the fervor of Kentucky backwoods preaching. The congregation catches the spirit of the preacher and shouts deeply felt responses of Bendigedig! (Praise the Lord!) or Diolch byth! (Amen!). The hwyl is sometimes induced by chanting the attributes of God in a rhythmic sequence.