Journal: Puritan Reformed Journal
Volume: PRJ 02:1 (Jan 2010)
Article: Interview With Geoff Thomas
Author: Anonymous

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PRJ 2:1 (January 2010) p. 313

Interview With Geoff Thomas

Geoffrey Thomas is Pastor of Alfred Place Baptist Church, Aberystwyth, Wales, where he has served the Lord for forty-five years. He also serves as an adjunct professor at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. His preaching and written ministry are deeply appreciated by many of God’s people around the world. In this slightly abridged interview conducted by Men for Ministry, he reflects on the life and work of the preacher.1

Please Tell Us About Your Background And Your Own Calling To Serve God Through Preaching His Word.

I was born in 1938, in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. My Baptist mother had been influenced by her mother’s brother who had been converted in the Welsh revival of 1904, and some time during the first World War through the meetings her uncle led she gave her heart to the Lord Jesus. She maintained a sweet love for the Savior all her life, accompanying all her chores with hymn-singing. She was tender, modest, self-effacing to a degree, wonderfully kind, and loving. I am like a mouse before an elephant when measured by her graces. My Congregational father (a station-master) came from one of the most dynamic Congregational churches in the world a century ago, Bethania, Dowlais. A thousand strong congregation, its membership then was overwhelmingly evangelical but its ministers steadily and secretly moved into humanism in the old familiar way, becoming Arminian, bolstering man’s free will as the pivot for every step in religion, abandoning the Old Testament in huge chunks, and soon after such a momentous step of defiance of Jesus’ convictions, they turned against

PRJ 2:1 (January 2010) p. 314

the apostle Paul in the New Testament. So they gave up Jesus’ view of Scripture and Jesus’ greatest spokesman and they imagined they could still be loyal to this living person and not grieve Him deeply. The brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God became for them the message of the Christian religion. My father’s sister married a Congregational minister, a follower of Fosdick, and my father’s twin brother became a minister. He did not preach on the apostle Paul for years.

I went with my mother to church (the lamb follows the ewe) and, in 1951, we moved to Hengoed where the Tabernacle Baptist Church had been erected a hundred yards from our house almost fifty years earlier. It had started as a split away from the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church across the other side of the valley in Maesycwmmer when the 1904 revival affected that church and bifurcated the congregation. It was made impossible for those who had “entered into the blessing” to remain in the church and so they resigned and set up Tabernacle half a...

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