A Life of Intercession - Rees Howells

Brynamman and a Working-Class Home

Rees Howells was born on October 10, 1879, in Brynamman, Carmarthenshire, in South Wales.

He was the sixth child of Thomas and Margaret Howells.

The household was working class.

His father worked in industry, and Rees left elementary school at twelve to begin work in a local tinplate mill.

Education continued through night classes rather than through a long formal school career.

The mining and industrial communities of South Wales formed the social world of his youth.

So did Welsh Nonconformity.

Chapel life was woven deeply into many communities, and Howells later remembered the Christian influence of his grandparents, who had been affected by the 1859 Welsh revival.

He grew up around religion.

The deeper spiritual crisis for which he later became known came after he had crossed the Atlantic.

America and Maurice Reuben

In 1901 Howells emigrated to the United States.

Like many Welsh workers, he went in search of better economic opportunity.

He worked in industrial employment in Pennsylvania, including tinplate mills around Pittsburgh and Connellsville.

In America he encountered Maurice Reuben, a Jewish Christian evangelist.

Reuben’s testimony affected him deeply.

The story came to Howells as that of a man who had accepted Jesus as Messiah at great personal cost.

Howells was forced to ask what his own Christianity had cost him.

Later biographical accounts also describe a period of serious illness in America that sharpened his confrontation with death and surrender.

Many of the inward details of this period come through Norman Grubb’s Rees Howells, Intercessor, which was written from Howells’s testimony and from people close to him.

The broad change is clear.

Howells returned to Wales no longer interested only in improving his material circumstances.

Return to Wales

Howells came back to Brynamman in 1904.

He worked for a time as a miner.

Wales was entering one of the most remarkable periods in its modern religious history.

The revival associated especially with Evan Roberts spread rapidly through chapels and communities during 1904 and 1905.

Prayer meetings lengthened.

People testified publicly.

Confession and conversion became common features of meetings.

Newspaper reports followed the movement.

Howells was drawn into this atmosphere.

The revival did not originate with him.

He was one of the many young Christians formed by it.

That distinction matters because later accounts sometimes place every subsequent feature of his ministry directly under the name of the Welsh Revival.

The revival was larger than any one person.

For Howells, it became a school.

The Welsh Revival

Howells participated in meetings and became concerned that converts should be strengthened after the first intensity of revival.

He preached.

He worked among people in his district.

The movement also deepened his interest in prayer.

Evan Roberts had emphasized dependence on the Holy Spirit, confession of known sin and obedience to God.

Howells carried similar concerns forward but developed them into a highly particular understanding of intercession.

He came to believe that intercession was more than presenting requests to God.

The intercessor entered into identification with the person or need being carried.

In his later testimony, this sometimes involved extended periods of prayer, self-denial or a conviction that he must obey God in a particular area before he could pray with authority for someone else.

The concept became the defining language of his life.

Learning What He Called Intercession

Norman Grubb’s biography records a series of experiences through which Howells believed the Holy Spirit trained him in intercession.

Some involved individuals.

Some involved sickness.

Some involved financial needs or social situations.

Howells described reaching a point he called the “position of intercession,” after which he believed prayer had moved from pleading toward assurance.

These claims belong to his testimony.

They should not be rewritten as though a historian can independently observe a spiritual transaction between a man and God.

The outcomes can sometimes be documented.

The spiritual interpretation belongs to Howells.

This distinction becomes especially important later, when his prayer life is connected with international events.

Historical accuracy does not require dismissing his conviction.

It requires identifying the kind of evidence being used.

Howells believed God trained him to pray.

Grubb recorded that belief.

His later institutions were built around it.

Elizabeth Jones and the Cost of Calling

Howells married Elizabeth Hannah Jones, known as Lizzie, in December 1910.

They had known one another from childhood.

Elizabeth had herself been affected by the Welsh revival and became a coworker rather than simply a private companion to a public man.

They had a son, Samuel Rees Howells.

When the couple became convinced that they were called to missionary service in Africa, they made a decision that later Christian biographies have often presented as an act of surrender.

Samuel remained in Wales while his parents went overseas.

The decision needs more than devotional admiration.

Leaving a young child in the care of others carried a real family cost.

The missionary era contained many such separations.

Parents often believed obedience to a call required them.

Children lived the consequences.

Samuel later became deeply involved in the ministry his parents founded and succeeded his father at the Bible College.

That later continuity does not make the original separation costless.

The record should allow both conviction and cost to remain visible.

Training for Mission

The Howellses received missionary preparation in Britain.

Rees had also entered theological training at Carmarthen with the possibility of Congregational ministry.

The direction changed when overseas missionary opportunity opened.

They joined the South Africa General Mission.

The organization had been established in the late nineteenth century and was associated in its early leadership with Andrew Murray.

In 1915 Rees and Elizabeth travelled to southern Africa.

They were assigned to the Rusitu mission station in Gazaland near the border of Portuguese East Africa.

The location is in the region of present-day eastern Zimbabwe near Mozambique.

They joined missionaries who had already spent years building work there.

That final fact is essential to understanding what followed.

The Howellses did not arrive on untouched ground.

Others had planted, learned languages, suffered disease and established a mission before them.

Rusitu

The Rusitu station had a history before Rees Howells.

Missionaries including John Edgar Hatch and others had served there.

African Christians were already present.

Translation and evangelistic work had been carried out.

Some earlier missionaries had died.

When later revival came, it grew from ground many people had prepared.

Howells preached through interpretation.

He told hearers about revival in Wales.

Accounts say that because the local language did not carry a direct equivalent for the way he was using “revival,” he spoke about Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

Prayer meetings began.

Within weeks the spiritual atmosphere of the station changed dramatically.

Revival in Gazaland

Contemporary South Africa General Mission material, later quoted by Grubb, records an intense revival movement beginning around Rusitu in 1915.

People confessed sins.

Meetings extended for long periods.

African Christians prayed and testified.

The movement spread beyond one station.

This episode is stronger historically than many private stories from Howells’s life because mission sources beyond his own later biography described the revival.

Even here, causation should be handled carefully.

It would be unfair to say Rees Howells arrived and produced revival.

Missionaries had worked there for years.

African Christians themselves carried the movement.

Elizabeth Howells participated.

Other stations were involved.

Howells became an important catalyst and preacher within something larger than himself.

Later he and Elizabeth travelled widely through mission stations as the revival spread.

They remained in southern Africa until 1920.

Return to Wales

The Howellses returned to Wales at the end of 1920.

Rees preached about mission and revival.

A visit to the United States in 1922 exposed him more closely to institutions training Christian workers.

The Moody Bible Institute in Chicago became an especially important model.

Howells began thinking about a Bible college in Wales that would train people for missionary service and place prayer at the centre of institutional life.

He did not possess the capital normally required for such a project.

This became another setting in which his theology of faith and prayer entered practical administration.

The Bible College of Wales

The Bible College of Wales opened in Swansea in 1924.

Its first property was the Glynderwen estate.

The college combined biblical instruction, missionary preparation and a strong corporate prayer life.

Howells believed students should learn dependence upon God in practice, not only study it as doctrine.

The institution expanded.

Additional properties were acquired, including Derwen Fawr.

Facilities were developed for students and for other ministry purposes.

The scale of the acquisitions became part of the Howells story because he repeatedly interpreted financial provision as an answer to prayer.

The college’s own historical record preserves this understanding.

It also preserves a more ordinary fact.

Buildings had to be bought.

Money had to be received.

Staff had to teach.

Students had to be fed.

Faith operated inside administration.

Faith, Property and Institutional Growth

Popular biographies sometimes make Howells’s property acquisitions sound almost effortless.

They were not.

The college grew through donations, relationships, fundraising understood within a faith-mission framework and repeated financial decisions.

Howells did not regard dependence upon God as an alternative to making plans.

He located the plans beneath prayer.

The estates gave the college room to expand its work.

A hospital and facilities for missionaries’ children were among the projects associated with the wider vision.

Howells also thought internationally.

He wanted people trained in Wales to serve beyond Wales.

The institution became a base from which missionary concern, prayer and teaching could move outward.

Prayer as Identification

Howells’s most distinctive teaching concerned identification in intercession.

He believed an intercessor could not stand at a safe emotional distance from the need.

Prayer might require personal obedience in the area being prayed about.

Someone praying for the poor might have to face his own relation to money.

Someone praying for the sick might be brought into deeper dependence.

Someone praying for a nation might carry the matter over a long period.

This teaching can become unhealthy if applied without discernment.

A person can mistake compulsive religious behaviour for divine guidance.

Leaders can pressure followers to imitate private burdens that were never commanded of them.

Howells’s own practices were sometimes severe.

They should be recorded as his spiritual convictions, not turned automatically into rules for every Christian.

The biblical call to intercession is broader than one man’s method.

The 1930s and Haile Selassie

Howells’s international interests brought unusual visitors into the college’s world.

The Dictionary of Welsh Biography records that Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, spent time at the Penllergaer property in 1939 at Howells’s invitation during the emperor’s exile after Mussolini’s invasion.

The college also considered ways to assist Jewish refugees.

Howells acquired property with the intention that part of it might serve as a school for Jewish refugee children, though the war disrupted the plan.

These activities show that his prayer concerns were not entirely inward or mystical.

International crises produced practical projects.

The approaching war would also push the college’s prayer life into the public history for which it later became famous.

War Years and the College Prayer Meetings

During the Second World War Howells and the Bible College community gave themselves to sustained prayer.

Norman Grubb’s biography records specific wartime prayer meetings in great detail.

Students and staff prayed over military developments, national danger, the evacuation of Dunkirk and other events.

Howells believed the Holy Spirit gave them assurance concerning outcomes.

In 1940 he published God Challenges the Dictators, presenting prophetic convictions about the war and leaders such as Adolf Hitler.

This material has to be handled with precision.

The existence of the prayer meetings is historically well attested.

Howells’s conviction that God answered them is central to his own testimony.

The claim that a particular military outcome occurred because the college prayed is theological interpretation, not a conclusion historical method can independently prove.

Prayer belongs in the record.

So does the boundary of the record.

What Historical Evidence Can and Cannot Say

Rees Howells is one of the figures for whom source discipline matters most.

Much of what Christians know about him comes through Rees Howells, Intercessor by Norman Grubb.

Grubb knew the people and institutions involved and drew upon testimony close to the events.

The book remains indispensable.

It is also a devotional biography.

Its purpose is to teach intercession and celebrate what the author understood God to have done.

It is not a detached critical biography.

Hard chronology can be checked through the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, mission records and Bible College documents.

Private spiritual experiences should be identified as Howells’s testimony.

Revival at Rusitu can be supported by broader mission evidence.

Wartime intercessions can be documented as meetings and convictions.

Claims that prayer caused a national event should remain claims of faith rather than being presented as a measurable historical mechanism.

This approach does not diminish Howells.

It protects the truthfulness of his witness.

Samuel Rees Howells and Succession

Samuel Rees Howells grew into the ministry world from which his parents had once left him for missionary service.

He eventually became closely associated with the Bible College of Wales.

When Rees died, Samuel succeeded him as director.

This succession gave continuity to the college’s emphasis on prayer.

It also closes part of the difficult family circle.

The child separated from his parents during their African mission later carried the institution they founded.

That later partnership should not be used to erase the earlier cost.

It does show that Samuel did not simply reject the spiritual world of his parents.

He made it his own.

Death and Continuing Influence

Rees Howells died on February 13, 1950.

He was seventy.

The Bible College continued under Samuel.

Norman Grubb’s biography, first published soon after Howells’s death, carried his story internationally.

For many Christians, the book became more influential than the college itself.

It introduced a language of intercession in which prayer was costly, sustained and connected with obedience.

Later ministries drew inspiration from the wartime prayer meetings.

Some repeated the stories without the source qualifications needed for historical use.

The enduring value of Howells does not depend upon making every dramatic claim equally certain.

The established life is already substantial.

A Welsh industrial worker went to America seeking opportunity.

He returned during revival.

He became a missionary.

He and Elizabeth served during an African revival whose existence is recorded beyond their own testimony.

He founded a college without beginning with the money normally required.

The college became a centre of prayer and mission.

The man who spent his youth in a tin mill ended his life responsible for an institution training others to go into the world.

His central conviction remained simple.

Prayer was not the preparation for Christian work.

Prayer was part of the work.