This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Evan Roberts was twenty six, a former coal miner training for ministry, and he had no organization behind him when the Welsh Revival began in late 1904. What he had were meetings that ran for hours without a formal sermon, filled instead with spontaneous prayer, singing and people standing to confess their own failings in front of the whole chapel. Within months, reports of well over 100,000 conversions were circulating across a country whose entire population at the time was under two million.
The social claims that traveled alongside the religious ones are what made the revival famous even outside church circles. Mine owners and local newspapers reported drops in drunkenness and profanity in the mining valleys the revival moved through, stories that spread internationally and made Wales, briefly, a byword for what a revival could visibly change in a community. Later historians treat those specific claims cautiously, since nobody kept the kind of records that would let the numbers be checked, but the reports themselves are part of why the revival's reputation outran its borders so quickly.
That reputation reached further than Wales. Missionaries and religious newspapers carried word of what had happened there to audiences well beyond Britain, and historians of Pentecostalism widely count the Welsh Revival among the influences reaching the meetings that began at Azusa Street in Los Angeles less than two years later, a movement that would go on to shape global Christianity far past anything the original Welsh chapels could have anticipated.