Rees Howells

Rees Howells was a Welsh coal miner caught up in the 1904 revival who came to believe intercession is not saying prayers but a costly identification — taking on a person's or a nation's need until the answer comes. By his own account and his biographer Norman Grubb's, he and his wife learned this in obediences that cost them comfort, reputation, and for a season even the raising of their son.

After mission years in Africa amid revival among the stations, he founded the Bible College of Wales at Swansea in 1924, funded — like Müller's orphanages, whose story had marked him — by prayer alone. Through World War II he led the college in daily, sometimes all-night intercession keyed to the war's turning points; the college's prayer diary against those dates forms the spine of Grubb's book, which has taught intercession to generations since.