The Principality of Wales is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and, like its Scottish and Northern Irish counterparts, has people who are fiercely nationalistic in outlook.

Since the 1700s when the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Fathers were at their spiritual height, this western region of the United Kingdom has been visited in revival by the Lord. These visitations dispelled the spiritual darkness that then existed. The ministries of men like Daniel Rowland, Howell Harris, William Williams, Evan Roberts, and not least John Jones of Talsarn, were notable in this great work. By the turn of the twentieth century, Wales was plunged again into spiritual darkness and religious formality, despite the many churches and chapels that lay scattered around the country.

The early 1900s saw the land blessed again by God, but, as with all revivals of vital religion, this one, too, cooled down resulting in the take-over of the churches by what has been described as a ‘left-over pseudo evangelicalism.’ All the outward trappings of evangelicalism were there, but not the life. Like the church at Sardis in the 90s AD, the church in this land had a name for being alive but was dead.

The Lloyd-Jones family belonged to the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church in Llangeitho. The Connexion can trace its beginnings to the mid-1700s, when the Christian churches in Britain were divided into two main groupings – the Arminians under John Wesley (1703-1791) were the Methodists, and the Calvinists under George Whitefield (1714-1770) were the Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists. Both these groups faced their own particular problems. The Methodists emphasised the free will of men and ignored the need for depraved men to be sovereignly regenerated by the effectual call of God. The Calvinists were also facing challenges; while they emphasised the sovereignty of God in salvation, they degenerated into hyper-Calvinism in which there was no longer any Gospel for a lost mankind. They denied the free offer of salvation to all men through Christ the Saviour of the world, and with that they sidelined the need for evangelism and missions.

The minister of the church at Llangeitho encouraged the three Lloyd-Jones’ boys to join the church as members in 1914. This denomination had grown cold spiritually, and during Martyn’s boyhood and adolescence, much of the life of the revivals of 1904/5 had become but a faint memory. The religion in which they were nurtured was rather lifeless spiritually, and this had its negative effect on the three boys.