The love song of the revival...

Here is love, vast as the ocean...

The Welsh Revival

"Roy Jenkins tells the story of how a hundred thousand people in Wales made a new commitment to Jesus Christ in a single year a century ago.

Just after eleven o'clock on a Wednesday evening a hundred years ago, a solo voice rang out with the hymn "Here is love vast as the ocean". Maybe a thousand people were in Ebenezer Baptist Church, Abertillery at the time, leaning over the galleries, packing every pew and squeezing into every spare corner. They'd been here for more than four hours, in a service of intense emotion.

Meetings like it were taking place across Wales night after night, with fervent prayer and passionate singing - and similar disregard for the clock. They both excited and appalled, left many puzzled and some frightened, but it was reckoned that in little over a year a hundred thousand people had made a new commitment to Jesus Christ.

For a period whole communities changed, as men and women found themselves drawn into a powerful experience of God; and sparks from their awakening were soon to ignite fires in more than a dozen other countries. And the hymn that soloist struck up spontaneously about "love vast as the ocean" was heard so often that it became known as "the love song of the revival."

Alphabet of Praise - Here Is Love

Read more of this article about the Welsh Revival here