7. Christmas Evans (1766–1838)
Johanna Evans gave birth to a son on December 25, 1766; she and her husband, Samuel, decided to name him Christmas. Their humble home was in Llandyssul, Cardiganshire, Wales, a land of wild scenery and fiery preaching. Little did they know that their boy would grow up to become one of the greatest pulpit masters Wales would ever produce.
Samuel died while Christmas was a child, so his mother sent him to the farm of her brother, James Lewis. Christmas remained there for six miserable years. Lewis was a cruel man and a drunkard. Christmas received no education—at seventeen he could neither read nor write—and no moral or religious training. He was repeatedly involved in fights; only the providence of God kept him from being killed. Once he was stabbed, and once he nearly drowned. In one of these brawls he lost his right eye; for the remainder of his life he had to daub the empty socket with laudanum to ease the pain.
When Christmas was seventeen, he left the farm and went to work for a Presbyterian minister. He was caught up in a revival in the church and was soundly converted. Within a short time he learned to read and write, and he even began to minister in a small way. In those days it was customary to hold cottage meetings for the poorer people, and Evans used to occasionally preach or pray. He later admitted that he memorized sermons and prayers that he found in books.
As he studied his Bible, his religious convictions changed, and in 1786 he joined the Baptist church. So effective was his ministry of the Word that the church ordained him in 1790 and sent him to an area where the work was small and struggling. He took his bride to Lleyn, trusted God, and saw a time of rich blessing.
The preaching tradition in Wales is a very strong one. In those days, huge crowds of people attended preaching festivals to hear men declare the Word of God. These annual gatherings would draw as many as twenty-five thousand people into the natural amphitheaters. The Welsh people have poetry, song, and preaching in their blood. And the more dramatic and imaginative the preaching, the better they like it.
Christmas Evans first came into prominence at a Baptist Association preaching festival. The crowd was waiting for two of their spellbinding preachers to show up when someone suggested that it would be a good thing to warm up the crowd so they would be ready. One of the ministers suggested, “Why not ask the one-eyed lad from the North? I hear he preaches quite wonderfully.” Christmas Evans instantly agreed to preach and took Colossians 1:21 as his text.
One of the traditions of Welsh preaching is “catching the hwyl.” I once discussed this subject with the late Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, himself a Welshman and a master preacher. He explained that the Welsh word hwyl means “the canvas of a ship.” In preaching it refers to “catching the wind of the Spirit” and being carried along with great spiritual power. Often the preacher would move the crowds by raising his voice to a high-pitched falsetto—“oratory on fire”—as he was caught up in the power and unction of the Spirit.
Christmas Evans caught the hwyl that day. The people began to move closer to the preacher, amazed that the tall, bony, ill-dressed farm youth had such power with words and over people. He was the talk of the festival, the newest preaching sensation in Wales.
In 1792 Evans and his wife moved to the Island of Anglesea (or Anglesey) in northwest Wales; there he ministered for twenty years. When he arrived there were ten small Baptist societies meeting, some of them torn apart by controversy. Evans rode his horse from meeting to meeting and eventually developed twenty preaching places where people eagerly assembled to hear him. Within a few years, he saw more than six hundred people trust Christ and enter the family of God.
Twice in his long life, Christmas Evans made a special covenant with God. The first time was on April 10, 1802. It was a solemn covenant of dedication, with thirteen paragraphs spelling out his personal commitment to Jesus Christ. He signed each paragraph “Amen. C.E.” It is touching to read this covenant and to realize that God honored his faith and dedication.
Christmas Evans was a self-taught man. He taught himself Hebrew and Greek, and he read the meaty works of men like John Owen and John Gill. Though he had but one eye, he was a constant reader, either in his simple home or while riding to a preaching appointment. He often preached daily and twice on Sunday, and while he was riding, he meditated and wrote his eloquent sermons.
Mrs. Evans died in 1823, and in 1826 Christmas Evans remarried, resigned from the Anglesea ministry, and accepted a small Baptist church in Tonyvelin, Caerphilly. Unfortunately, the jealousy of younger ministers and the barbs of theological controversy were damaging to the work in Anglesea, and Evans felt it was time to move. These problems are reflected in the second covenant that Evans made with the Lord on April 24, 1829.
As he was returning home from a preaching mission, a spirit of prayer came upon him, and he stopped to commune with God, weep, and pray. He wrote fifteen requests of God and signed each one “Amen. C.E.” Here are a few quotations:
Grant Thy blessing upon bitter things, do brighten and quicken me, more and more, and do not depress and make me more lifeless.
Suffer me not to be trodden under the proud feet of members, or deacons, for the sake of Thy goodness.
Help me to wait silently, and patiently upon Thee, for the fulfillment of these things, and not to become enraged, angry, and speak unadvisedly with my lips, like Moses, the servant of the Lord. Sustain my heart from sinking, to wait for fresh strength from Zion.1
God gave him a new experience of faith and power, even though the enemy opposed the preaching of the Word. In 1832, Evans made his final move and became pastor of a dying church at Caernarvon, where thirty members were struggling under the weight of a debt they could not pay.
Evans wrote in his journal: “I have been thinking of the great goodness of the Lord unto me, throughout my unworthy ministry; and now, in my old age, I see the work prospering wonderfully in my hand, so that there is reason to think that I am, in some degree, a blessing to the Church.”
When he had been at the chapel six years, Evans, his wife, and a young pastor set out on a preaching mission to raise funds to pay off the crippling debt. He put a notice in the Welsh Magazine asking his brethren to pray for and support this special endeavor. “This is my last sacrifice for the Redeemer’s cause,” he wrote, and it was. But God prospered the mission and great crowds heard him preach; even when the meeting house was filled, crowds stood outside and listened.
But the undertaking was too difficult for the old preacher. On Sunday, July 15, he preached two sermons in Swansea—in the morning on the Prodigal Son, and in the evening on Romans 1:16. He preached again on Monday on a favorite text, “and beginning at Jerusalem.” When he concluded the message, he said in a quiet voice, “This is my last sermon.” He became ill the next day; and on Friday, July 20, 1838, Christmas Evans was called to Glory. His last words were, “Goodbye! Drive on!”
Christmas Evans often counseled younger pastors, and his philosophy of ministry is worth sharing today. He wrote to one: “Consider, in the first place, the great importance, to a preacher, of a blameless life.” Then he added, “I remember the words of Luther, that reading, prayer, and temptation are necessary to strengthen, and to purify the talents of a minister.”
We expect him to give this advice: “Always have a book to read, instead of indulging in vain conversations. Strive to learn English. . . . Remember this, that you cannot commit some loved sin in private, and perform the work of the ministry in public, with facility and acceptance.”
Evans could preach with power both in English and Welsh, and in both languages his aim was to honor Christ. “The gospel, as a glass [mirror], should be kept clean and clear in the pulpit,” he wrote, “that the hearers may see the glory of Christ and be changed to the same image.”2
When asked about style and delivery, Evans said, “Preach the gospel of the grace of God intelligently, affectionately, and without shame— all the contents of the great box, from predestination to glorification. . . . Let the preacher influence himself; let him reach his own heart, if he would reach the hearts of others; if he would have others feel, he must feel himself.”
Evans liked to compare the ministry of the Word to that of a miner, who takes the ore from the earth, melts it, and puts it into the mold. “The gospel is like a form, or mold, and sinners are to be melted, as it were, and cast into it.” He urged young preachers to be faithful to “the form of sound words” that Paul wrote about (2 Tim. 1:13).
With all of his reputation for pulpit eloquence and evangelistic zeal, Evans should perhaps be remembered most as a man of prayer. He never worried about the theology or philosophy of prayer; he simply prayed, and God answered. He had three stated times for prayer during the day, and he regularly arose at midnight to seek the face of God. He enjoyed the solitude of his long journeys, when he could pray and meditate on the deep things of God. The passion in his preaching arose from the burning in his heart.
From a human point of view, Christmas Evans seemed an unlikely candidate for becoming a spiritual giant. Born and raised in poverty, subjected to brutality, deprived of formal education, lacking in the physical graces that usually attracted others, this child of Wales was certainly a trophy of the grace of God. Deaf to the slanders of his enemies and blind to the obstacles around him, he courageously and sacrificially carried the gospel throughout the land, and many found salvation because of his ministry.
During his long and difficult ministry, he never received a large salary. He could have carved out a religious empire for himself, but he preferred to follow the Lord into the small and difficult places where men needed the bread of life. Instead of embroiling himself in the hairsplitting theological discussions and controversies of the day, he gave himself to the preaching of the gospel and the great truths that undergird that saving message.
In short, Christmas Evans was a man of God who gave himself unsparingly to the work of the ministry. God used him to bring life to dead sinners, to dead churches, and to Christians whose spiritual experience was dead.
“Life is the only cure for death,” he said, “not the prescriptions of duty, not the threats of punishment and damnation, not the arts and refinements of education, but new, spiritual, Divine Life.”3
Perhaps that is the prescription we most need today.