Revival Documentaries with Dan Pugh

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder, and today we have a special episode with a friend and a producer named

Dan Pugh of Pugh Productions. And Dan has been involved in two very significant and stirring documentaries, films, in the last few years.

One is called Revival, The Work of God, and this is presented by Jeremy Walker.

And it's a collaboration between Pugh Productions and Reformation Heritage Books.

And so there's the DVD, and it's got a lot of material available, not just an overview of the theology of revival, the historical key incidents in the

Western Hemisphere in the last few centuries that we consider to be genuine revival, but there's just a lot of good extra material there, and you can find that at Reformation Heritage Books.

Also, Welsh Awakenings, The Story of God's Work in Wales, and this is presented by a

Welshman named Jonathan Thomas. And it really is just a beautiful two -hour documentary film, and it also has extra material.

It has three DVDs, and it has a code on the inside. If you purchase this, then you get a streaming code as well, in case you don't use

DVDs, or you can go online and just purchase the streaming code. But Welsh Awakenings, we'll be talking with Dan about these, and the theme of revival, and what's the significance of it.

I hope you find it beneficial. Well, hello,

Dan. It's good to have you on the show, and good to be able to talk about a couple of really significant things you've been involved in in the last few years.

I think that you and I met probably about 10 years ago in your country, in Wales, and then have met in America, and again in North Wales, where you live, in a small

Bible study through some mutual friends. So it's good to get back with you.

I wonder if you could give us a little explanation of two things that you've been working on in the last years with Pew Productions.

The first is revival, the work of God, and the other is

Welsh Awakenings, the story of God's work in Wales. As we were talking before the podcast, there's a lot of similarity there, but there's also a lot of difference.

So why don't you just run us through those works? Sure. Thank you,

John. Thank you for having me on the podcast. It's good to see you and speak to you again. Yes.

So initially what happened was that I pitched in 2020, it was early 2020,

I pitched or we pitched to RHP what is now Welsh Awakenings, but Joel Beakey rightly thought it better to expand the geography of the subject out to the whole of the

West and to look at revival more generally. So what that became was the first film you mentioned,

Revival, the Work of God, presented by Jeremy Walker, and that covers the history and the theology of revival.

So what is revival and then providing some snapshots of God's work in reviving his church and working in both his people within the church and within a nation.

And then there's bonus features that cover more of the theology. As you go through the history in the documentary, we draw out lessons that we can learn for today.

And then COVID hit. And so it was a very soon afterwards, very soon after we greenlit

Revival and all the borders were shut, I couldn't get out of Wales. I had very little work during lockdown.

And so rather than sit at home twiddling my thumbs, I wanted to at least make something worthwhile, even if I didn't get paid, just so long as I could cover the costs, then

I'd have something to, a product available once lockdown finished. And I was trying to think what

I could do within the borders of Wales and this project came back to mind. And so this was really a lockdown project initially.

And then things opened up midway through filming and Jonathan Thomas both writes and presents the film.

Jonathan Thomas is a pastor in Abergavenny in South Wales and he's very well read.

He loves church history and he agreed to write the project and present it.

We set up a Kickstarter and got enough for what we needed. And we travelled across the length and breadth of Wales and I travelled a bit more than that to get some of the aesthetics shots, some of the scenery shots of Wales.

I think I must have travelled every corner of the country to get the shots we needed.

And that was a great privilege, very tiring, but a wonderful privilege, which I'm thankful for. And really, I fell in love with my country in a fresh way doing that.

People have joked that it could work just as well as a tourist board for Wales, which

I suppose could be true. It's a grand vista of Welsh church history. So it's full of grand vistas of the beauty of Wales.

The purpose and nature of Welsh Awakenings is threefold.

First of all, to encourage us by looking at what God has done in the past and can do again.

And I'd say reading about revival and hearing about revival, about God's great works in the past,

His work in Awakenings, really had a great impact upon me as a young Christian.

I was converted when I was 18, 19 years old. And both hearing in the church

I was attending at the time, reading books by people like Adrian Evans, who people who are watching may remember from the first Beholder of God study.

And I believe he did Logic on Fire as well. He wrote about the 1859 revival, the 1904 revival.

Hearing Duncan Campbell's account of the Isle of Lewis revival, which we cover in the revival documentary with Jeremy Walker, really had a...

I think it was just the fact that suddenly the kind of things we read about in the

Bible, about what God did, the great, powerful works He did in His people, both in the

Old Testament and in the New Testament with the early church at Pentecost, really came to life.

This is not just, you know, something that happened in biblical times. This happened in history.

This happened, you know, in the case of the Isle of Lewis revival. This happened in 1949.

This was very recent. And so it struck me that this is something that God does throughout history.

He comes and He grants greater measures of the

Spirit. He revives His church. He pours forth His Spirit so that they are filled with love and joy and grace and fear and holy awe of God.

There's a sense of the presence of God and what effect that has, that He is glorified more in the church, in our lives.

Because we are revived, we can live lives the way that we have been redeemed to be.

In a way, that is closer to what He wants us to be, because it's not anything to do with us.

So often, great prayer precedes revival, a sense that we are utterly destitute without His, Him, as a church, as in we cannot do anything without Him and all our works and things.

And so a revival is a heightening of the ordinary work of God in the church.

So that's the first thing, is that by looking back, we're not just looking back and thinking, well, that was wonderful.

You know, ah, those are the days. Things are never going to be the same again. Or oh, if they could be just the same as they were then with exactly the same, you know, formula or whatever.

But it's looking back and saying, wow, God is the same yesterday, today and forever. Secondly, it provides a big picture overview of God's work in Wales.

It struck me when, for example, reading Avon Evans' books and while making the film, how each generation references the previous generation.

And I mean by that, that there's a kind of passing of the baton and a thread which links through the whole story.

So, for example, if I was reading a book on the 1859 revival, the people there, as they were distressed over the state of the church and its decline and just the apathy and the almost barrenness in society and in the church of God's spirit, they would reference and read the works of Thomas Charles, who was an influential leader in the early 19th century.

The men in the churches in Thomas Charles's day would reference back to the works of the fathers of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism in the early 18th century, people like Daniel Rowland, Howell Harris and William Williams, 1904 revival.

Again, they're looking back at the 1859 revival. It's all linked. And so that struck me, you know, that this is not just smattering, you know, smatterings of history that happened in isolation.

There is a thread that goes through that. And so to, you know, I wanted to know what the big picture was and I didn't know where to look.

There are general histories of church history in Wales, books that you can buy, but not a film that I was aware of.

So I thought I'd make one and focusing particularly on the 18th to 20th century, because 18th century is really when what we think of as Welsh Christianity in the sense of the

Welsh Calvinistic Methodists and the revivals began. Of course, God was at work before them throughout

Welsh history, but it wasn't, it didn't have an effect in the sense that it took hold of the whole nation in the way that it did in the 18th century.

And then thirdly and finally, it examines my intention, and I hope we've succeeded in this, is to examine the factors, both spiritual and theological, but also external and practical within society that contributed to the rise and decline of Wales as a

Christian nation. And I mean Christian nation in the sense, you know, the fullest sense that you could say that.

I mean, in one sense, there is no fully Christian nation. The only Christian nation in one sense will be heaven in the new earth.

But, you know, in terms of just Christianity saturating the nation and affecting every area of the culture,

Wales is one of those truly Christian nations. And so it looks at the rise, but also the decline.

You have the rise in the 18th century, it kind of plateaus in the 19th century and then begins to decline in the 20th century.

Well, why? Why did both those things happen? And so that's what we seek to answer.

Now, whereas revival examines the history and theology of revival itself, in order to differentiate from that,

Welsh Awakenings is intended to be more of a case study. Of a nation, you know,

OK, we've seen revival. We've seen, you know, what it looks like and what it is in revival, the work of God.

But now how does that look when you follow the trajectory of a nation? You know, when revivals punctuate and they come in and God does something mighty in the nation and then there's the troughs and then

God does this again. It's important to mention as well that Wales was known as the land of revivals.

I think, I believe between 1862 and no, sorry, 1762 and 1862, there were 15 major revivals that happened in Wales and it worked out roughly as certainly once the 19th century began as one every 10 years.

So the people expected that God would work mightily in the nation. So we see that play out across history.

And then we start to see some negative things coming in, both from the world and from within the church that begin to, you know, we can see what happens there as the trajectory begins to go like that.

So, yeah, so in a word or two or three, those are the two films.

When you think about how this Welsh Awakenings tracing the work of God through the nation of Wales, the principality is a small and somewhat isolated because of your geography even and the language, you know, it's quite isolated for a modern country.

It's not the melting pot that some other countries are. And so it does provide really a unique test case as you're looking at the work of God.

But how do you think that would profit spiritually those that, you know, are not in Wales?

We think of the American scene or the European Christian scene or other countries.

But I'm thinking a lot of America, obviously being an American, but also because of the connection between Wales and America in so many of these revivals, we do see a back and forth influence at times, oftentimes very beneficial, sometimes through Charles Finney, post

Finney theology in the States. We see that also bleeding back into Wales. So if you're speaking to an

American pastor at a conference and he looks at this Welsh Awakenings study and he says to you, well, that's a quaint thing.

You know, that's interesting if you're Welsh. But I need something very practical for my country, my people.

What value do you see for the American or anyone else that's not in Wales? Well, it's a good question.

I mean, first of all, I suppose God is the same across the world and across history.

So and the methods that he uses, although they look differently, perhaps from occasion to occasion, they are the same and he is the same

God. And so we can, by looking at what he has done in Wales or in England or Scotland or America or any other nation where he has been, where his handprints and his footprints are clearly seen, you know, then we can we can hopefully draw lessons from that.

That's my belief and my intention, really, in making this was to make something that was accessible to all, you know, it wasn't just meant to be a holy huddle for the

Welsh. Obviously, the Welsh are going to find it particularly helpful in terms of just understanding how they came to be where they are.

But I think part of it is because, as well, as you say, the

Welsh language barrier means that it is a very ill -known story, perhaps compared to the story of England or Scotland or Wales.

The English language didn't really, I think, become a prevalent, you know, language in Wales till the late 19th century when the common man was speaking it regularly.

So a lot of the influential works that were done in Welsh or in Wales, sorry, were done in the 18th and early 19th century in Welsh.

And so there is that barrier, that language barrier. And Martin Lloyd -Jones went out of his way,

I think, to promote Welsh church history to a wider audience by translating it into English.

His wife, Bethan, translates some of William Williams' works into English because he believed that there was a value there, that this is something that is important, that there is something we can learn, not just in Wales, but across the world from both what happened and some of the men that he raised up.

It's also, you know, it's said that America is a generation behind Britain in its kind of secularization.

That's what I've heard people say that. And so, you know, very early on, I was thinking, you know, this is, you know, this is the story of, as I said, the rise and decline of a

Christian nation. And America is going through, you know, I mean, just generally, I mean, there are certain parallels that we can see there.

And there was one particularly that struck out to me, stood out to me, was when

I, I think it was when I first came with the second visit I made to Mississippi, to you in New Albany and stayed with Matt Robinson, the previous director of Media Grazi, the founder.

And I went to visit his brother. We went to visit his brother and had food with him.

And I was talking to him and he said, you know, if you're anybody, if you want to be anybody in this town, you kind of have to go to church.

I don't know how many churches there are in New Albany, I think about 50 or something. And yeah, that's just what you did.

And that was very true in the late 19th, early 20th century in Wales as the nation became so filled with the work of God and the gospel and became so saturated with the gospel that it bled into everything.

And Christianity became part of the establishment. And that really became its downfall, in a sense, because because it was so much part of the establishment and the culture, then you had a lot of nominal

Christianity and a lot of just surface Christianity. It was just, you know, what you did. And I remember when

I was interviewing one of the gentlemen in the film, Professor Wynne James, he mentioned in passing, really, and I didn't, it didn't make it into the film because it just didn't really fit anywhere.

And the time was, I needed to trim the fat, as it were. But it was a very interesting comment he made that in my, during the 1904 revival, there was a minister called

Nan Place Williams, and he was actually the minister of my father's own church in Bethany in Abernethy.

And he was converted as a minister in the 1904 revival. He was, you know, he was just an unconverted preacher.

And he became a preacher because that's just, it was either that or, you know, he was going to go and become a poet.

You know, that was just, it was just a vocation that people who wanted to make it in society did, they became a preacher. And he, what he said was a lot of people would join the church just because the deacon in the church was a influential and notable employer in the area.

And I just, that, that parallel between the Deep South now,

I don't know how true it is now, that was 10 years ago, so I don't know what's changed, it may have changed since then. But yeah,

I just thought, that's interesting. That's interesting, just, you know, those parallels that we can see.

Now that's of course, that's Wales 100 years ago or more. So with bearing that in mind, you know, just the fact that we are kind of ahead of you in terms of secularisation,

I thought maybe there are parallels, maybe there are lessons that people in America and worldwide can learn here as they see something particularly, as you say, unique in, you know, when

God really gets a hold of a nation, what can that look like? You know, what can God, God can do the same for us?

But also what are the things to avoid and look out for?

So I think those are some of the things I would say. Yes, so timeless principles, as you mentioned, of the normal work of God raised to an extraordinary pitch, an extraordinary degree of the noticeable activity of our

God. You mentioned that each generation tended to look back, and I was thinking of, you know, many of the 18th century men who were at the spearhead of that evangelical revival, you know, that really the, as you mentioned, while there were many wonderful, isolated, bright spots in Welsh history in the church, the early 18th century is really where we see large portions of the nation being impacted, large sections of the nation hearing the gospel with an extraordinary result.

But I remember doing research in Wales and English church history at that time, and how many of the

Calvinistic Methodist Wales or England, these, so these revival men who were of a reformed perspective, following on the heels a lot of Puritan thinking, how many of them wrote little

Christian histories like John Newton, and there were many others, to attempt to demonstrate that the work that people were seeing in their day was not novel, but rather was, like you mentioned, the troughs and the pinnacles.

It was a resurfacing of a work that the Lord had done many times.

Jonathan Edwards, you know, writes on that over here in the

Colonies, and he dies before it's published, but he deals with the history of redemption, and he considers revivals or seasons of extraordinary grace to be at the heart of how

God moved his kingdom forward. And so it wasn't novel or unique. It wasn't

Welsh. It wasn't just this period of history. It's not just this group of people.

And, you know, the Welsh, Americans don't probably know, but in the UK, the Welsh get treated as the people who are more easily stirred in their passions.

You know, you have the kind of stoic Englishman and the exploitable Welshman. And, you know, so the attitude can be, well, revival was a

Welsh thing because of their natural temperament. They're poetic. They're passionate. But we English are not quite so.

And so, you know, that's a that's a very it's an erroneous view of how

God worked in these centuries that where many nations, many continents were impacted by the same truths in the same ways.

So, yes, applicable across the board. Certainly great realities for the people of God to be reminded of.

Let me ask before we let you go. What was two little questions. What perhaps what was your favorite thing about filming

Welsh Awakenings and what did you find most difficult? Oh, well,

I think certainly seeing that, first of all, it just fills you with awe and faith, you know, in God, that what he can do, seeing the great story of God's work is certainly one of the most the things

I've enjoyed the most about it is seeing that and what he can do, seeing how he's worked in my country, you know, as well.

So that is a personal element there. There are personal connections for myself within the film, my grandfather on my mother's side,

William Roberts, he appears towards the end of the film to speak about ministers like himself who came out of the

Presbyterian Church across Wales in the 1960s and 70s because of theological error in the in the church.

And so he appears at the end. And then on my father's side, his home church, as I mentioned, is Bethany Chapel in Amerford, which we visit in the film.

It's one of the key places in the 1904 revival. And so just to go there and to kind of actually it's sad it's just announced that it was closing.

It's declined. Part of that, again, I think is the language that there aren't as many Welsh speaking

Christians in as compared to English speaking Christians, because there are two churches in Amerford that are

English speaking. But this is closing. And so I'm glad we got in just in time to kind of immortalise it as it were on screen.

The difficulties. Well, I think trying to do this justice in two hours is tricky.

That's where Jonathan Thomas's excellent script comes in. He's done a phenomenal job of somehow condensing all these books.

I mean, I wouldn't know where to start. I just, I mean, it's so much. And he's managed to condense it into a very clear and helpful summary of the story.

And so that and then we'd come in to edit that. It was very hard just to, you know, what to cut out, what to keep in.

Because all of it, you know, you end up with five hours of really good stuff. All of this is, you know, look at it and think all of this is usable.

All of this is great. But you've got to get it down to two hours. That's painful. That's also why, I mean, I will just mention briefly.

So I've got my copy here and the stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor gets put into, so there's 18 bonus featurettes where we put in things that we couldn't cover, things that, expanding on things perhaps that we did cover that we didn't spend enough time on, perhaps as I'd like.

There's also some archive Welsh hymn singing in Welsh from Bethany Chapel in Amlerford.

And so that really, the purpose of that is just to give a flavour to kind of immerse the viewer in a small way and to perhaps, you know, what the

Welsh singing scene, the cultural scene was like for people outside of Wales. It has translations of subtitles in English.

So again, that language barrier, so you can see what they're singing. And it's very, very rich.

The gospel is just sung about in such a wonderful and rich way.

And in one of those videos, Nan Placer -Williams again, 1904 revival, he's leading the service for the radio broadcast.

So that's pretty historically unique, I think. I'm not sure there's another recording of him.

And then the third disc is just behind the scenes vlogs where we, you follow me and Jonathan around as we film that.

And we meet some people, contemporary people, and we talk to them about how things are now.

And also we meet William Williams Pantykellen's great, great, great, great grandson.

He's still, the William Williams family is still at the same farm in Pantykellen today from when he was there.

So that's pretty cool. And then inside the DVD we have here, and this is important, we have a reading list here of 20 books that you can go and delve deeper.

So yeah, the Welsh Awakenings is designed to be an overview of the work.

And so this really helps you to go and learn more. So they've been separated out by chapter.

And so there's some here, there's Banner of Truth books here. Some of them are in Welsh publishing houses, so they might be harder to get hold of.

But hopefully you can. But yeah, I mean, there's books like, there's biographies and people like Thomas Charles and the

Iain Murray biography of Martin Lloyd -Jones. And Bethan Lloyd -Jones' translation of William Williams' book,

The Experience Meeting, talking about the Welsh societies. And then there's also stories about the revivals by people like Egan Evans, Errol Davis, and others.

So yeah, there's a lot there to get stuck into. And to find out more about some of the stories of what

God has done that captured my attention back when

I was reading them. And also delve a little deeper into the stories of some of the leaders that we look at.

So yeah. And each of the DVDs comes with a code for streaming as well, correct?

Yes, in each of the DVD sets. Right. Yes. There's a code. Yeah. So much the same as revival.

So that's, yeah. So both revival and Welsh Awakenings have a code. So you don't have to buy the DVD. You can buy online.

So revival has a bespoke website called revival .movie. If you go on there, you can buy it to stream or you can use the code in the

DVD to access the content online. Actually with the revival, there's a lot more content online than on the

DVD set because there's so much. There's a whole conference that we couldn't fit on the

DVD set. With Welsh Awakenings, it takes you to, you go to my Vimeo page, Pew Productions Vimeo page, and you can access all the content there, all three discs.

So the content on the DVD is the same as the content you get on the streaming version.

So yeah. So each code is unique and is in the DVD set. Well, thank you,

Dan, for joining us. And we're very grateful for the way the

Lord stirred your heart to put this together when everything in the world was on lockdown and then the really just stellar job at filming and then matching the beautiful picturesque scenes of Wales with really solid historical biblical content and the work that Jonathan did there.

So we're very glad and we hope the Lord will use it. And if anyone would like to get this, you can go, as Dan mentioned, to his

Vimeo with Pew Productions, or you can purchase it from Media Gratte online.

So we hope that people will do that and benefit from it. And you're in it as well.

Yeah. In Welsh Awakening. Yes. Yes, reason enough to buy it. Yes. Oh, yeah, I saw that.

Yeah, that's terrible. Yeah, I'm not going to buy it now, now that I saw my face on it. Maybe I can buy a truncated version, the reduced version.

The non -American version. The non -John. You're the only non -Welshman in the film.

Yeah, I should have put a Welsh accent on, you know, the valleys. My version.

Yeah, when I was working on the PhD, I learned enough Welsh to kind of do some translation in the early 18th century sources.

And I remember, you know, speaking to friends in Cardiff who were Welsh speakers.

And many of them would be friends that you had met there. And I would say, okay, so how do

I say this word? And especially with the double L, you know, so Llangeto. And they would say it.

And then I'd say, okay, say that again. And so what's this double L? And they would tell me how to do the double L. And I would do it.

And they'd say, no, I do it again. They say, no, you do it. And they do it. And I would do it again.

It didn't matter how close I was to how they did it. Because I was an English speaker, they would say, no, no,

I'm sorry. I feel ashamed sitting here because I've done that recently with an

English friend. It's the same thing. I say, no, you're not quite there. Yeah, yeah. And they say, I said it.

No, no, you can't give in. You have to make the English pay somehow, you know.

Don't let them know the secret. So great to see you, Dan. And we look forward to future things the