Praying for Carmarthenshire – Memories, Hopes, and Plans

Heulwen Davies

My grandfather is 97 this month, and he still recalls the days when the chapels were full. As a boy, he saw the aisles packed with people sitting on the floor, gathered on the front porch and even up the stairs. Fire regs were evidently not a concern when God was in the room! He recalls the singing, the Gymanfa Ganu, and almost wistfully tells us how people were… happier. We know from revival stories that as the chapels filled, the pubs emptied; the Judges donned white gloves with no crimes to judge, and even years after, Tad-cu recalls a felt difference in society as a result of the prevalence of the Gospel. As I look at my town today, I would not describe its people in this way.

And yet we live in this land, rich with legacy, strewn with chapels like a graveyard marking glory-gone-by. Tad-cu has seen decline all his life, but in Chapel on Sunday, he still sings his hymns, sits under the Word and believes for better days. And we stand with him in faith, believing for the tide to turn, for decline to be put into reverse and for a glory which seems to have departed to be returned to Wales, to Sir Gar and to Llanelli, where we live. His prayers, and those of a faithful remnant, have been sown in tears for decades: I believe for days of Harvest in Jesus’s name.

Llanelli is a town of two halves: wealthy and broken in seemingly equal measure. Come visit our coastline, eat a Joe’s Ice Cream or play golf at our award-winning course (or so I’m told), and you will see beauty and wealth. Come stroll through our town centre or head down Station Road and you’ll see an area whose crime, poverty and drug statistics are pretty bleak on a national scale. And yet both halves are in desperate need of the gospel. In a town where the majority of its population once attended church on a Sunday, a meagre amount now do. Pews sit empty, songs are left unsung, and Bibles are left unread as the secularisation of the sacred seems to have swept across our land.

But God is in the business of making dry bones live.

Pray for the wealthy and the comfortable: that for those who don’t seem to need anything, that God would open their eyes and soften their hearts that they might recognise a need far deeper than they have acknowledged. Pray also for the poor and the suffering. For Llanelli in particular, drug use is rampant; people are bound by addiction and broken by poverty, neglect and hurt. The Care system is overburdened, food banks are in increasing demand and people are hurting. Pray for those most affected by adverse experiences, that they would find hope and healing in the only one who can mend their deepest hurts.

Pray for our churches to be filled, for revelation and love for the Word to be birthed anew, for this land of bard and song to once more sing to the one who gave us lungs to praise him. Pray for funding for fledgling churches and protection where the enemy wants to derail, deceive and destroy. And pray for the bright spots where God is at work. This year we were promised £750,000 to restore a derelict chapel in an area of town rife with suffering: we look at Siloah Chapel and say yes, these bones can live. We look more broadly at our town, county and country and echo Ezekiel 37 and say: ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life..’

God is not done with Sir Gar, and neither are we, so pray that we would not grow weary in doing good.

Tad-cu never gave up. In Jesus’ name, neither will we.

For an interview we did with my grandfather, Alwyn Jones, a few years ago, see:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cz8_4UBNN0M/?igsh=MWdlOGlxcWdtdDF6cA==

Cariad Mawr,
Heulwen Davies, 21st Century Church and Heirs. Wales