A LLOYD-JONES COMMEMORATION

In the National Library on the hill overlooking Aberystwyth there is a small exhibition on display of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of his birth. It has become so popular that it has been extended for another month, and there has been a request from the Evangelical Movement of Wales that it be reopened during August at the time of their two Conferences. I have visited it three times already and will go back again. Several of my own posters and paintings of him have been borrowed by the Library.

On Thursday January 27 a Welsh-speaking meeting was held in Aberystwyth to commemorate God's gift of his servant. It was held in the chapel where Dr Lloyd-Jones last preached in Wales, Zion, the Welsh Congregationalist church in Baker Street, and 120 people turned up from all over Wales, down from the northern island of Anglesey, and up from Carmarthen. The most unexpected people from the town attended. The meeting and the Doctor was discussed on Radio Ceredigion (our local radio station) and on Radio Cymru (our national radio station in Welsh), during the week. The Welsh comedian from Tregaron, Ifan, was there. He was converted under the Doctor's ministry - we recently read his testimony - and has done so well, going on in that incredible world of TV, uncorrupted, clean and funny, and then serious too. It is a traditional country humour and pretty uncommercial. This is the sort of man who does so well speaking at or chairing wedding receptions. Thank God he has no aspirations after preaching, I mean, in trying to combine the both. He is a farmer, and the son of a farmer, and that is his income. But throughout the winter he has a Welsh TV programme and chairs Noson Lawens. His humour is safe, gentle and pointed.

The singing in the service was beautiful, different from our own church fifty yards away because of the older people mostly singing in harmony, and more tenors. We sang the Welsh translations of The God of Abraham Praise and Great God of Wonders. My colleague, Ifan Mason Davies, chaired the meeting, and then my cousin Professor Bobi Jones gave a brief life of the Doctor. I had one of those outbursts of joy seeing Bobi going into the pulpit. It has always been him sitting in the pew listening to me, but here was role reversal, and there he was, without a preacher's voice (I saw the old man in front of me moving his head to get what Bobi was saying as his voice dropped). Bobi is almost seventy and his autobiography is coming out at Easter and that will be a fascinating window on our family and his life. He lived with us for a little while during the war as an evacuee from the bombing of Cardiff. We slept together, and his brother too, and in the morning the bed became a stagecoach from which we shot the Indians who were riding after us. It was a cause of doxology that grace has kept us over half a century, His wife and my sister-in-law sat behind us. I wish all our family could have been there.

Then Dafydd Ifans from the National Library told us of Dr Lloyd-Jones' family links with our county of Cardiganshire and his comments on various places, all hugely enjoyed. He described how it was decided by the family that all the literary remains of the Doctor should be given to the National Library, and how they came at the end of last year. The Library has 150 works of the Doctor, and the translations of his books into many languages. At the moment it is a fact that Dr Lloyd-Jones is more widely and enthusiastically read in Korea than in Wales.
Finally Gareth Davies spoke. He is a retired Calvinistic Methodist preacher (now called Presbyterian), and he was at those post-war student summer conferences in the 1940's in which the Doctor spoke each year on Man, and then the Work of Christ, and then the Sovereignty of God. They were defining occasions for those Welsh students. They went on to become the founders and leaders of the Evangelical Movement of Wales and of the reformation that took place in the Principality in the last century. Gareth preached on Paul's charge to Timothy from 2 Timothy, and he illustrated it with references to the Doctor, noting particularly that providence that took the Doctor back to Sandfields exactly fifty years after he had begun his ministry there, February 6, 1977, to preach on the same text with which he had begun his ministry, "I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified" (I Cor.2:2), which text now adorns his grave in Newcastle Emlyn in the south of our county. Gareth commended to the congregation the new Banner of Truth 32 page booklet which contains that wonderful sermon 'Jesus Christ and Him Crucified.' "Go up the Christian Book Shop tomorrow and purchase a copy."

There was nostalgia in the meeting, not just for the Doctor, but for the decline of preaching as a powerful ministry of the Holy Spirit to the church. There is no one who can draw an anxious congregation to hear a man preach Christ crucified. There was also thankfulness and hope too. So at our 7 a.m. Friday Prayer Meeting the next day, where sixteen people gathered together, one prayed that in the Roman Catholic Church God would raise up a Martin Luther, or in the Congregationalist Church a young Spurgeon might be converted, or in the Calvinistic Methodists a Lloyd-Jones. Why not? Is it not God's delight in glorifying his Son?

GEOFF THOMAS