Before becoming a symbol of the Welsh revival, Howell Harris was just a young schoolteacher in Llangorse, in inland Wales. Born in 1714 in Trefeca, he was searching for a meaning in life that the routine of the classroom could not give him.
In March 1735, he heard a sermon by the vicar of Talgarth on the unworthiness of taking the Lord’s Supper without repentance. The message struck him deeply, and in the weeks that followed, through reading and prayer, he found the assurance of forgiveness he had been seeking.
He tried to follow the traditional path of ordination, but was refused four times by bishops uneasy about his open-air preaching and preaching in private homes. Without clerical office, he became an itinerant lay preacher, traveling across Wales on foot and on horseback.
In 1737 he joined forces with the preacher Daniel Rowland, and together they shaped the Welsh Methodist revival. Harris brought a rare gift for organization, gathering the new converts into small societies of mutual support, keeping the initial enthusiasm from fading away.
Two years later, he began a partnership with the English evangelist George Whitefield, linking the Welsh movement to a Calvinist network that spanned the Atlantic. Both insisted that God’s grace, not human effort, stood at the center of the gospel.
Around 1750, however, his closeness to Sidney Griffith, a married woman who had sought refuge among the Methodists, sparked public scandal. Added to this, his increasingly confused language about the person of Christ, marked by ideas of Moravian origin, drove Rowland and other revival leaders away from him. Harris withdrew from itinerant ministry, wounded and contested by his own companions in the faith.
In 1752 he founded at Trefeca a community of shared life, inspired by the Moravians, with himself as its leader. Reconciled with Rowland some years later, he resumed preaching and, in 1768, helped the Countess of Huntingdon open a seminary there to train new preachers.
Harris died in 1773 and was buried in Talgarth, near the place where he had been converted almost four decades earlier. The movement he had helped organize would give rise, in 1811, to the Presbyterian Church of Wales.
