Local & NationalRevivals

God working in Merseyside & Chester

God has blessed Merseyside in many ways, particularly during the period 1840-1940, so much so that it has been said by some that Liverpool is the third most evangelical city in the UK, behind Belfast and Glasgow. Travelling around Merseyside this certainly becomes evident when we see so many evangelical churches in existence. Sadly many of these are struggling in these days, and many people are discouraged, so I do believe that it is now a good time to reflect on what God has done in the past, and also to consider what it was that the past generations of Christians had that we perhaps have lost sight of today.

It is true to say that Merseyside hasn't generally experience the sort of spontaneous and rapid revivals that took place, such as in the 1859 Ulster Revival, the 1904 Welsh Revival, or the 1949 Hebrides Revival (although there were a number of exceptions to this), but that is not to say that what God has done in Merseyside is in any way inferior to what he did in those places. For example in the 1859 Revival God visited the whole of the UK with a wonderful revival, which affected virtually the whole of the country. In Ulster this was indeed very dramatic with a large percentage of the population brought to Christ within that year. This was followed in a similar way in Wales and Scotland, but in most of England it was much slower and far less dramatic, but the end result was just the same, with some 600,000 brought to Christ in England during the period 1859-1864. In London and most of England (including Liverpool and Manchester) it was more of a revival of preaching, preceded by a large-scale prayer movement that lasted some two years, with God raising up a vast army of evangelists, who preached the gospel throughout the land so powerfully. I have written about some of these evangelists in the section on the 1859 Reviva. The Edward Jeffreys' crusades of 1934 in Liverpool were also truly remarkable with many thousands of converts and some amazing miracles, and the people that I have interviewed who were there have remarked that what they experienced really was a 'revival' atmosphere.

It is my conviction that we have much to learn from our local Christian history, and for us to think of the past as irrelevant is both a mistake and inadvisable. Hegel once famously said that "experience and history teach us this, that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history." Our ancestors on many occasions faced similar problems to what we face today, and I do believe that it is important that we seek to learn from them how they dealt with their own situation and why God blessed them the way that he did.

I have written several booklets on what God has done in Merseyside and Chester in the past and a summary of these is given in the section market 'booklets' and the full content can be found by visiting my website www.liverpoolrevival.org.uk

The layman's prayer revival of 1857-9

The 1859 Revival was one that affected virtually the whole of the UK, and in terms of the actual numbers converted ¹ was probably the greatest revival we have ever had in this country. The amazing thing is that whilst most people will be fully aware of the Methodist Revival, the 1904 Welsh Revival, and the 1949 Hebrides Revival, very few people will be even aware that there was such a revival in this country at that time. I think that it is sometimes referred to as "the forgotten revival." It is also sometimes referred to as "the layman’s revival." Please visit my website about this great revival and the people that God used during it www.1859.org.uk