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A chapel was built on the site of Carmel Chapel as early as the 1850s but the current building was erected in 1868. For many years the congregation at Carmel was a part of what was in many ways the strongest church in Wales, the Calvinistic Methodists and all the evidence points to it being a very active church in its early years. The Calvinistic Methodists developed out of the Methodist revivals in Wales in the 18th century and can therefore claim a purely Welsh origin.
In 1873 the congregation at Carmel established Penuel English Calvinistic Methodist Chapel, High Street, Ferndale, as a new Presbyterian church in the neighbouring village. In the early Twentieth Century it joined the "Forward Movement" headed by Dr. John Pugh of Cardiff and established in 1891.. This was an organisation set up to bring the good news about Jesus Christ to the non-chapel-going populous areas of Wales. In 1933 the Calvinistic Methodists became known as the Presbyterian Church of Wales, which continues to this day. Since the 1960s the congregation at Carmel has been independent of any denomination. Today we are an independent evangelical congregation of some thirty-five in number. In 2002 we joined the Associating Evangelical Churches of Wales (AECW), which is a grouping of sixty-three reformed evangelical churches throughout the principality. In September of the same year Reverend Owen Griffiths was called to the pastoral ministry at Carmel. Two of the ministers at Carmel in the 19th Century. On the left is Rev. Thomas R. Lloyd who was at Carmel from 1883 to 1886 and on the right is Rev. David J. Evans who was at Carmel from 1891 to 1897. |